You must have glossed over the part of the article where it states that the hydrogen fuel is not stored as a high-pressure gas:
the company has developed a treatment that turns it into a sold form that's safe to handle but is still useful as a fuel
Details aren't mentioned in the article, but there have been a variety of groups demonstrating various powders and matrices that absorb the gaseous hydrogen and release it later (in response to gentle heating, a drop in vapor pressure, etc.), a so-called hydrogen sponge.
Your ignorance that "helium comes from natural gas" is understandable, because it is a subtle point usually glossed over in most reporting on the subject.
Although abundant in the universe, helium on Earth comes from the radioactive decay of certain elements in bedrock, mainly uranium and thorium. The helium tends to migrate up to the surface and, eventually, wafts away into space. However, the helium can be trapped in certain geologic formations, such as salt domes, which also happen to be the kinds of places that trap natural gas and other fossil fuels. When we drill to get the natural gas, we extract the collected helium as well. Because helium has some value in the marketplace, some natural gas facilities separate out the helium, thereby making it available for use.
It is not the case that helium is created from the natural gas, we just happen to find them together geologically. You might find some helium offgassing from a landfill, but it wouldn't be because of the gas being produced from biologic breakdown. I suspect you wouldn't find very much helium in a landfill; not a commercially valuable amount, anyway.
Although helium is continuously generated in the Earth's crust from radioactive decay, it would be an overstatement to think of it being a renewable resource, just like it is an overstatement to say that (geologic) natural gas is renewable. The production of helium is both slow and widely distributed, so you would have a tough time collecting any useful amount if not for the fact that it can be captured and accumulated in geologic formations over eons. But once those formations are depleted, it'll take millions of years to refill.
One problem in American healthcare is that, despite designs to the contrary, there is little intelligence or justification behind capital equipment purchases. That is, a hospital is going to buy and use an MRI machine whether there is sufficient medical demand for it or not. As you say, such machines are expensive, and so in order to be profitable, they need to be used. At the same time, there is a phenomenon that excess capacity in a system, particularly medical systems, tends to get used whether it is needed or not. Result: more MRI scanners are out there than are strictly needed for diagnostic purposes. But, being out there, they tend to be used to their fullest capacity, which means a lot of unnecessary MRI scans going on, which is a lot of unnecessary medical spending. Hospital planners then look at all of their MRI machines being used 20 hours a day, and their competing hospital down the road installing a new machine, and suddenly decide that they, too, need a new machine.
This is one reason why the U.S. has per capita medical spending several times that of the rest of the developed world.
Separating personal use from professional use is better than mixing them.
Better still is not permitting personal use in the first place. I don't think Delta is doing their pilots any favors by allowing them some personal use on a Surface. (I would say the same about the iPad - it's a company-provided tool for a specific work-related task. Don't muddy the waters by also trying to make it the pilot's personal app-purchasing, media-consuming, time-killing companion.)
Delta certainly isn't doing Delta any favors in allowing personal use, either.
There has been speculation of people developing neutrino-based communication systems for high-speed trading. Because neutrinos pass through matter more-or-less unabsorbed and unimpeded, and travel at more-or-less the speed of light, you can do line-of-sight communication straight through the Earth. So, for instance, a trader in NY can send buy/sell orders to Japan by beaming neutrinos through the Earth and have them arrive faster than orders sent via optical fiber over the surface of the Earth (which is a longer path, and the speed of light in optical fiber is less than c in a vacuum), or via satellite.
When Steve Jobs got up there and announced the first iPhone, he stated that Apple had relatively modest goals. Of the 1 billion cellphones in the world, Apple hoped to get the iPhone to represent just 1% - or ten million units. They completely blew that goal out of the water. Now they can hit that mark in a single product launch weekend.
The earth's magnetic field is almost certainly unrelated. The magnetic field is generated internally due to us having a molten iron core. This atmospheric electrical field comes from the bulk transport, separation, and friction of huge air masses - like the kind that give rise to thunderstorms. There's interplay between the two, especially during a solar storm (e.g., aurorae), but you couldn't freeze the magnetic field by tapping the atmosphere.
As for why we can't tap that, I could only speculate. 120 V/m sounds like a sizable field - strong enough that we ought to be able to feel it. On the other hand, the E-field in an ordinary capacitor is many orders of magnitude greater (10s of volts, perhaps, but separated by just microns). You can get a greater E-field from peeling scotch tape off its roll.
Also bear in mind that an electric field, by itself, is not a store of energy. In order to make use of that field, you need to have charge traverse that field - a flow of electrons. If we think of the atmosphere between stratosphere and ground like a giant capacitor, its stored energy is 1/2 * C * V^2. The V term might be very large (120 kV/km, squared!), but if the C is tiny, then you end up without much energy. And do not conflate power and energy: you can get quite a spark from a discharging capacitor (or a lightning bolt!) - great instantaneous power - but it doesn't last. Unless there's some source to continuously replenish the charge separation, you may not be able to tap much energy. I suspect that the available energy is very diffuse; more diffuse than, say, the kinetic energy of wind that we are able to capture with turbines. You would probably need kilometer-sized antenna arrays to capture much useful power.
While you are correct that maintaining them doesn't, dismantling them does.
Not correct - the plutonium in nuclear weapons is Pu-239, not the Pu-238 that we desire for RTGs. You can't extract useful quantities of Pu-238 from a nuclear weapon. Conversely, you can't use Pu-238 to make a nuclear (fission) weapon. You could make a dirty bomb, I suppose, but that's more due to plutonium being a toxic heavy metal than its radioactivity.
The only connection between Pu-238 and nuclear weapons, in fact, is that weapons production facilities naturally make good production facilities for Pu-238.
And without that nuclear weapons complex, humanity might never have synthesized Pu-238, or been able to separate and manipulate it. Our ability to use Pu-238 is due entirely to our history with nuclear weapons - it's a pretty freakin' tight connection.
(It didn't need to be that way - we could, maybe, have produced Pu-238 as an accidental or intentional byproduct of civilian nuclear power. And it certainly doesn't need to be the future. But that is the history.)
But you really don't need nuclear power sources at all unless you're either far from the sun (beyond the orbit of Mars, usually), have serious power needs that modern solar power isn't sufficient for (the recently landed Curiosity rover on Mars uses an RTG for main power), or need heat to keep systems from getting too cold (the solar powered Mars rovers had small RTGs in them for heating purposes, IIRC).
Or, want to make sure your satellite keeps a low profile by not having large, shiny solar panels on it. This is why many spy satellites were nuclear powered - they were more difficult to track that way.
someone tells you they need $20 a month until they have $600 from you.
It's worse than that, because the $20/month continues even after the $600 has been paid off. After a typical 2-year contract has finished and, presumably, your phone is paid off, it is never the case that your monthly bill is reduced - it continues the same. The "phone payback" portion of your bill isn't called out as a separate line item that you could dispute. This is why non-prorated early termination fees are essentially fraud, too.
The only way for the consumer to get some satisfaction is to either bring their own (fully-paid and unlocked) phone to a carrier, or else upgrade every time they are eligible so as to get the most value out of their contracted monthly payment.
It would ultimately be run from the Executive branch (i.e., the President), who has purview over both DoD and CDC, as well as FEMA, the NIH, the Public Health Corps, etc. The President also has broad powers to respond to domestic emergencies: nationalizing pharma companies to produce vaccines, enforcing quarantines, broadcasting emergency messages, etc.
One would hope that FEMA and the CDC would be providing a lot of the direction, since pandemics, public health, disasters, and emergency relief are their areas of expertise. However, those efforts will need enormous and well-coordinated resources - manpower and equipment - to carry out the response, which only the military can supply. People within the DoD, and elsewhere, need to have a sense of what they may be asked to do. So it makes a lot of sense for the DoD to have plans for how to respond, to anticipate the need.
Then, too, it provides an opportunity to have another set of thinkers - military planners - work through the scenario, then see how their plans and strategies stack up against those of, say, the CDC. For something so serious and multifaceted, I hope that everyone down to the United Association of Janitors has come up with a plan.
Finally, the DoD is responsible for the lives, well-being, and livelihoods of a few million Americans (not just soldiers, but families and civilian workers, too). What happens to America, to some extent, happens to them, too. The brass needs to work through the scenario to understand what they'll need to do in order to continue to operate in such dire circumstances. If the military collapses because of the pandemic, they can't do much to help anyone else, can they?
That would be the ultimate. Unfortunately, it is presently beyond our capabilities to construct a container of appreciable volume (or many, many tiny ones put together) that can withstand a vacuum (i.e., ~10^5 Pa of positive pressure) while still weighing less than the displaced air (about 1.2 kg / m^3 at sea level and room temperature).
The drive is the 2.5" form factor, 5 mm thick. That's slimmer than what shows up in most laptops, but I would wager it is still larger than what is allocated to storage in most tablets. How many tablets use a 2.5" form factor drive, even if it is SSD? In most cases, it's a collection of flash chips soldered directly to the logic board.
Only superior by certain obvious, quantifiable, prima facia metrics: speed, latency, bandwidth, reliability. This is why Les Cottrell is probably wrong about leapfrogging. You need to have high bandwidth, low latency, and reliability (at least on the back haul) in order to have an effective network.
Wired, however, tends to lag on a metric that matters a whole hell of a lot to end users: usability. The fastest wired network is useless by any measure if it isn't where you are when you need it. Unplugging a device, whether handheld or laptop, is a huge improvement in usability. Radio waves can go where wires can't or don't go. Even a slow, intermittent, shared network is better than none at all. And for those reasons, wireless will be a big part of bringing the internet to the rest of the world.
We have liberated ourselves in big ways from the power cord - why should we continue to tie ourselves to the network cable?
(that said: I still prefer wired networks in many applications for the reasons I listed above. Sitting at my desk, I want a dedicated pipe that can transfer gigabytes in a couple of seconds. But I enjoy being able to use the internet while walking around town. When I'm in bed watching Netflix, I don't want to have to string an ethernet cable halfway around the house)
And Elon Musk, not being an idiot, ought to know that relying on a single supplier for the one crucial piece of hardware that Tesla can't make on its own is a strategic liability. One well-placed earthquake could halt Tesla's production line for months, and possibly sink the company in the process. He can't rely on just any ol' supplier - quality matters an awful lot for batteries in this application (just ask Boeing) - but he would do well to figure out where else he can get 18650 cells.
Irrelevant. The world output for flash (and spinning memory) does not tend to be measured in total bytes of storage, but rather in units (i.e., chips or drives) shipped. This makes sense, because in finished goods (i.e., a laptop or cellphone), the number or storage units - hard drive or flash memory chips - tends to stay constant across generations, even though the capacity of that storage increases. A purchasing manager at Apple doesn't say "I need to ship 1 million iPhones next month, how many GB of flash should I order?"; instead, he asks "how many chips do I need?"
A chip fab may be shipping 10x the TB of flash as a few years ago, but the number of chips being shipped follows a more prosaic trends - typically following a learning/experience curve. Not coincidentally, the output of a battery production plant follows similar trends.
There was a time when there was this thing called the iPod, and it had a small magnetic hard drive inside it. iPods were really big business - hundreds of millions were made. iPods practically cornered the market for 1.8" hard drives for a while. The world did not end.
More recently, Apple started producing iPods and, later on, entire freaking phones, tablets, and computers that did away with the spinning magnetic discs in favor of flash memory. Apple sold of lot of those, too, and for a long while has consumed a large fraction of the entire world output of flash memory. Lo and behold: world output increased to match demand.
If anything, these facile comparisons should give Elon Musk an idea: pre-purchase huge swaths of 18650s as a strategic move, just as Apple has done for flash memory and touchscreens over the years. Doing so would ensure the lowest possible price, a consistent supply chain, and make it harder for competitors to enter the market on equal terms.
Super capacitors are awesome, and would dovetail very nicely with Tesla's high-capacity charging stations. But the simple fact is that they are still about an order of magnitude lower in energy density than Li-Ion. Sure, lots of people are looking to improve that, but it is doubtful that Musk is going to (or would even be able to) dump enough R&D money into the field to bring about an automotive "battery" using supercapacitors anytime soon. If he's going to put money into the field at all, it'll probably be to integrate a relatively small amount of supercapacitance into the conventional battery pack to improve the pulse power capability.
People really need to stop pretending that fascism is anything but despotism with a good marketing department
Maybe, but I am one of those people who still feel that words and definitions have actual and specific meanings (like instead of, uh, like, ya know, seriously). To my ears, when I hear someone saying that the constitution was written to protect us from fascism, the author, even if their meaning is understood and has a valid point, still comes off sounding like a dumbass that doesn't know history.
Slashdot Mirror
Details aren't mentioned in the article, but there have been a variety of groups demonstrating various powders and matrices that absorb the gaseous hydrogen and release it later (in response to gentle heating, a drop in vapor pressure, etc.), a so-called hydrogen sponge.
Damn, I wish I had mod points today! What a true statement.
Your ignorance that "helium comes from natural gas" is understandable, because it is a subtle point usually glossed over in most reporting on the subject.
Although abundant in the universe, helium on Earth comes from the radioactive decay of certain elements in bedrock, mainly uranium and thorium. The helium tends to migrate up to the surface and, eventually, wafts away into space. However, the helium can be trapped in certain geologic formations, such as salt domes, which also happen to be the kinds of places that trap natural gas and other fossil fuels. When we drill to get the natural gas, we extract the collected helium as well. Because helium has some value in the marketplace, some natural gas facilities separate out the helium, thereby making it available for use.
It is not the case that helium is created from the natural gas, we just happen to find them together geologically. You might find some helium offgassing from a landfill, but it wouldn't be because of the gas being produced from biologic breakdown. I suspect you wouldn't find very much helium in a landfill; not a commercially valuable amount, anyway.
Although helium is continuously generated in the Earth's crust from radioactive decay, it would be an overstatement to think of it being a renewable resource, just like it is an overstatement to say that (geologic) natural gas is renewable. The production of helium is both slow and widely distributed, so you would have a tough time collecting any useful amount if not for the fact that it can be captured and accumulated in geologic formations over eons. But once those formations are depleted, it'll take millions of years to refill.
One problem in American healthcare is that, despite designs to the contrary, there is little intelligence or justification behind capital equipment purchases. That is, a hospital is going to buy and use an MRI machine whether there is sufficient medical demand for it or not. As you say, such machines are expensive, and so in order to be profitable, they need to be used. At the same time, there is a phenomenon that excess capacity in a system, particularly medical systems, tends to get used whether it is needed or not. Result: more MRI scanners are out there than are strictly needed for diagnostic purposes. But, being out there, they tend to be used to their fullest capacity, which means a lot of unnecessary MRI scans going on, which is a lot of unnecessary medical spending. Hospital planners then look at all of their MRI machines being used 20 hours a day, and their competing hospital down the road installing a new machine, and suddenly decide that they, too, need a new machine.
This is one reason why the U.S. has per capita medical spending several times that of the rest of the developed world.
Better still is not permitting personal use in the first place. I don't think Delta is doing their pilots any favors by allowing them some personal use on a Surface. (I would say the same about the iPad - it's a company-provided tool for a specific work-related task. Don't muddy the waters by also trying to make it the pilot's personal app-purchasing, media-consuming, time-killing companion.)
Delta certainly isn't doing Delta any favors in allowing personal use, either.
There has been speculation of people developing neutrino-based communication systems for high-speed trading. Because neutrinos pass through matter more-or-less unabsorbed and unimpeded, and travel at more-or-less the speed of light, you can do line-of-sight communication straight through the Earth. So, for instance, a trader in NY can send buy/sell orders to Japan by beaming neutrinos through the Earth and have them arrive faster than orders sent via optical fiber over the surface of the Earth (which is a longer path, and the speed of light in optical fiber is less than c in a vacuum), or via satellite.
And what is your plan for combating the inevitable tarnishing and corrosion?
I can't work out in my head how large a database that would have to be. Could you please estimate it in terms of Libraries of Congress.
Wait, is that recursive?
I misspoke: it wasn't 1 billion cellphones in the world, but 1 billion units sold annually.
When Steve Jobs got up there and announced the first iPhone, he stated that Apple had relatively modest goals. Of the 1 billion cellphones in the world, Apple hoped to get the iPhone to represent just 1% - or ten million units. They completely blew that goal out of the water. Now they can hit that mark in a single product launch weekend.
The earth's magnetic field is almost certainly unrelated. The magnetic field is generated internally due to us having a molten iron core. This atmospheric electrical field comes from the bulk transport, separation, and friction of huge air masses - like the kind that give rise to thunderstorms. There's interplay between the two, especially during a solar storm (e.g., aurorae), but you couldn't freeze the magnetic field by tapping the atmosphere.
As for why we can't tap that, I could only speculate. 120 V/m sounds like a sizable field - strong enough that we ought to be able to feel it. On the other hand, the E-field in an ordinary capacitor is many orders of magnitude greater (10s of volts, perhaps, but separated by just microns). You can get a greater E-field from peeling scotch tape off its roll.
Also bear in mind that an electric field, by itself, is not a store of energy. In order to make use of that field, you need to have charge traverse that field - a flow of electrons. If we think of the atmosphere between stratosphere and ground like a giant capacitor, its stored energy is 1/2 * C * V^2. The V term might be very large (120 kV/km, squared!), but if the C is tiny, then you end up without much energy. And do not conflate power and energy: you can get quite a spark from a discharging capacitor (or a lightning bolt!) - great instantaneous power - but it doesn't last. Unless there's some source to continuously replenish the charge separation, you may not be able to tap much energy. I suspect that the available energy is very diffuse; more diffuse than, say, the kinetic energy of wind that we are able to capture with turbines. You would probably need kilometer-sized antenna arrays to capture much useful power.
Not correct - the plutonium in nuclear weapons is Pu-239, not the Pu-238 that we desire for RTGs. You can't extract useful quantities of Pu-238 from a nuclear weapon. Conversely, you can't use Pu-238 to make a nuclear (fission) weapon. You could make a dirty bomb, I suppose, but that's more due to plutonium being a toxic heavy metal than its radioactivity.
And without that nuclear weapons complex, humanity might never have synthesized Pu-238, or been able to separate and manipulate it. Our ability to use Pu-238 is due entirely to our history with nuclear weapons - it's a pretty freakin' tight connection.
(It didn't need to be that way - we could, maybe, have produced Pu-238 as an accidental or intentional byproduct of civilian nuclear power. And it certainly doesn't need to be the future. But that is the history.)
Or, want to make sure your satellite keeps a low profile by not having large, shiny solar panels on it. This is why many spy satellites were nuclear powered - they were more difficult to track that way.
It's worse than that, because the $20/month continues even after the $600 has been paid off. After a typical 2-year contract has finished and, presumably, your phone is paid off, it is never the case that your monthly bill is reduced - it continues the same. The "phone payback" portion of your bill isn't called out as a separate line item that you could dispute. This is why non-prorated early termination fees are essentially fraud, too.
The only way for the consumer to get some satisfaction is to either bring their own (fully-paid and unlocked) phone to a carrier, or else upgrade every time they are eligible so as to get the most value out of their contracted monthly payment.
It would ultimately be run from the Executive branch (i.e., the President), who has purview over both DoD and CDC, as well as FEMA, the NIH, the Public Health Corps, etc. The President also has broad powers to respond to domestic emergencies: nationalizing pharma companies to produce vaccines, enforcing quarantines, broadcasting emergency messages, etc.
One would hope that FEMA and the CDC would be providing a lot of the direction, since pandemics, public health, disasters, and emergency relief are their areas of expertise. However, those efforts will need enormous and well-coordinated resources - manpower and equipment - to carry out the response, which only the military can supply. People within the DoD, and elsewhere, need to have a sense of what they may be asked to do. So it makes a lot of sense for the DoD to have plans for how to respond, to anticipate the need.
Then, too, it provides an opportunity to have another set of thinkers - military planners - work through the scenario, then see how their plans and strategies stack up against those of, say, the CDC. For something so serious and multifaceted, I hope that everyone down to the United Association of Janitors has come up with a plan.
Finally, the DoD is responsible for the lives, well-being, and livelihoods of a few million Americans (not just soldiers, but families and civilian workers, too). What happens to America, to some extent, happens to them, too. The brass needs to work through the scenario to understand what they'll need to do in order to continue to operate in such dire circumstances. If the military collapses because of the pandemic, they can't do much to help anyone else, can they?
That would be the ultimate. Unfortunately, it is presently beyond our capabilities to construct a container of appreciable volume (or many, many tiny ones put together) that can withstand a vacuum (i.e., ~10^5 Pa of positive pressure) while still weighing less than the displaced air (about 1.2 kg / m^3 at sea level and room temperature).
The drive is the 2.5" form factor, 5 mm thick. That's slimmer than what shows up in most laptops, but I would wager it is still larger than what is allocated to storage in most tablets. How many tablets use a 2.5" form factor drive, even if it is SSD? In most cases, it's a collection of flash chips soldered directly to the logic board.
Only superior by certain obvious, quantifiable, prima facia metrics: speed, latency, bandwidth, reliability. This is why Les Cottrell is probably wrong about leapfrogging. You need to have high bandwidth, low latency, and reliability (at least on the back haul) in order to have an effective network.
Wired, however, tends to lag on a metric that matters a whole hell of a lot to end users: usability. The fastest wired network is useless by any measure if it isn't where you are when you need it. Unplugging a device, whether handheld or laptop, is a huge improvement in usability. Radio waves can go where wires can't or don't go. Even a slow, intermittent, shared network is better than none at all. And for those reasons, wireless will be a big part of bringing the internet to the rest of the world.
We have liberated ourselves in big ways from the power cord - why should we continue to tie ourselves to the network cable?
(that said: I still prefer wired networks in many applications for the reasons I listed above. Sitting at my desk, I want a dedicated pipe that can transfer gigabytes in a couple of seconds. But I enjoy being able to use the internet while walking around town. When I'm in bed watching Netflix, I don't want to have to string an ethernet cable halfway around the house)
And Elon Musk, not being an idiot, ought to know that relying on a single supplier for the one crucial piece of hardware that Tesla can't make on its own is a strategic liability. One well-placed earthquake could halt Tesla's production line for months, and possibly sink the company in the process. He can't rely on just any ol' supplier - quality matters an awful lot for batteries in this application (just ask Boeing) - but he would do well to figure out where else he can get 18650 cells.
Irrelevant. The world output for flash (and spinning memory) does not tend to be measured in total bytes of storage, but rather in units (i.e., chips or drives) shipped. This makes sense, because in finished goods (i.e., a laptop or cellphone), the number or storage units - hard drive or flash memory chips - tends to stay constant across generations, even though the capacity of that storage increases. A purchasing manager at Apple doesn't say "I need to ship 1 million iPhones next month, how many GB of flash should I order?"; instead, he asks "how many chips do I need?"
A chip fab may be shipping 10x the TB of flash as a few years ago, but the number of chips being shipped follows a more prosaic trends - typically following a learning/experience curve. Not coincidentally, the output of a battery production plant follows similar trends.
There was a time when there was this thing called the iPod, and it had a small magnetic hard drive inside it. iPods were really big business - hundreds of millions were made. iPods practically cornered the market for 1.8" hard drives for a while. The world did not end.
More recently, Apple started producing iPods and, later on, entire freaking phones, tablets, and computers that did away with the spinning magnetic discs in favor of flash memory. Apple sold of lot of those, too, and for a long while has consumed a large fraction of the entire world output of flash memory. Lo and behold: world output increased to match demand.
If anything, these facile comparisons should give Elon Musk an idea: pre-purchase huge swaths of 18650s as a strategic move, just as Apple has done for flash memory and touchscreens over the years. Doing so would ensure the lowest possible price, a consistent supply chain, and make it harder for competitors to enter the market on equal terms.
[sigh...]
Super capacitors are awesome, and would dovetail very nicely with Tesla's high-capacity charging stations. But the simple fact is that they are still about an order of magnitude lower in energy density than Li-Ion. Sure, lots of people are looking to improve that, but it is doubtful that Musk is going to (or would even be able to) dump enough R&D money into the field to bring about an automotive "battery" using supercapacitors anytime soon. If he's going to put money into the field at all, it'll probably be to integrate a relatively small amount of supercapacitance into the conventional battery pack to improve the pulse power capability.
Maybe, but I am one of those people who still feel that words and definitions have actual and specific meanings (like instead of, uh, like, ya know, seriously). To my ears, when I hear someone saying that the constitution was written to protect us from fascism, the author, even if their meaning is understood and has a valid point, still comes off sounding like a dumbass that doesn't know history.
Damn - I wish I had mod points today. Well deserved!