Rig the cooling towers to a pipe system and you've the biggest, hottest hypocaust ever made. The water is still carrying the heat away, so the towers still work as intended, all you are doing is making that heat available for domestic and industrial use rather than pumping it into the atmosphere.
Like co-generation? It's great, and results in an impressive efficiency improvement over just dumping waste heat. Universities, hospitals, and other large campuses with large heating and cooling needs often do this. Expanding it into domestic production hasn't been as widespread, because the steam pipe infrastructure doesn't exist yet, and is really expensive to lay in. It could work well in dense urban areas, like NYC, though.
I've heard of small cogen furnaces for domestic use. They generate electricity, and use the waste heat for hot water and indoor heating. It's generally only useful if you have a place to dump that waste heat - like a house in North Dakota in January. That same house in August will be sweltering as is, so you won't be able to produce much electricity. That isn't to say there wouldn't be value in it, though.
There is a physical limitation on the efficiency of any particular photovoltaic material, due to the fact that sunlight is a broad spectrum, and the bandgap of the semiconductor is a fixed quantity. For silicon-based PV, the theoretical maximum efficiency is something like 25-30% (sorry, I don't have specific figures). You can improve things by ganging several materials, with different bandgaps, together. Those are the so-called multijunction cells that get upwards of 40% efficient in the lab.
Quality silicon solar cells on the market today, without going to the extreme high end (in cost and efficiency), are more like 15% efficient. That might creep up some; for instance, you can pay a bit more and get 18%-20% efficiency. But, by and large, without some fundamental breakthrough, the efficiency isn't going to go much higher. Your best bet is to try and reduce the cost and increase the durability, so that they can become ubiquitous.
There's more to the charging infrastructure than just supplying bulk power. Actually, bulk power for an individual charging station is probably the easiest part. The tricky part is adding some intelligence behind it that allows thousands of cars to be plugged into a city's electric grid during peak hours, possibly adding tens or hundreds of megawatts of additional demand, without causing the whole city to brown out.
It's kind of like power in the the USB standard right now. If you plug in a USB-compliant device, the device is supposed to only draw a maximum of 100 mA from the host. It has to be enumerated by the host and be granted additional current from it, up to specified 500 mA limit. Something similar may be needed for car recharging stations to ensure grid stability. That could be centralized or decentralized control, but a lot of effort will be needed to get it to work right.
The major barrier to using supercaps for a hybrid vehicle is the fact that they can't store as much energy (for an equal volume or mass) as a battery. According to wikipedia, existing supercaps can store 0.5-10 Whr/kg, while a Li-Ion battery can do about 120 Whr/kg. There are demonstrations in labs and all manner of claims from companies that will eliminate this disparity, but for the moment, there isn't anything you could design a production vehicle around.
If they are able to get supercaps with the necessary density, there is still the problem of supplying the necessary power. If you want to recharge a vehicle in minutes or seconds, you're going to need to pump megawatts of power into it. I'm not saying that can't be done, but that, too, will take a lot of new infrastructure to make happen.
A problem with ultra capacitors, however, is that they don't store nearly as much energy (Whr) for the same weight (Whr/kg) or volume (Whr/L) compared to batteries. Compared to Li-Ion batteries, the difference in energy density is an order of magnitude with current technology. There will undoubtedly be advances that could even that out, but nothing that you could use to design a production vehicle for today.
Ultracaps do have advantages, like almost unlimited cycle lives, very low resistance, and much higher power ratings compared to chemical batteries. However, unless you want to drive a 2-door compact hauling a trailer's worth of ultra capacitors, you are not going to be able to produce a plug-in hybrid with an acceptable electric range.
That appeal to statistics assumes that the population of brilliant people (both inherently brilliant and the learned) is uniformly distributed among the rest of the population of the world. This is demonstrably not the case. Some cities have higher concentrations of inventors, entrepeneurs, PhDs, etc., than other cities of equal size. Perhaps one city has a university to draw these people in, while the other one doesn't. Perhaps one area, way back when, had a guy or group of people that made some major discovery, started a new industry, which set that region on the path to continued discovery (e.g., Silicon Valley).
The same could be said for countries as a whole. One would expect to find a greater proportion of scientists in an industrialized country over an agrarian one, or over a nation that has only recently industrialized.
I am not trying to make a nationalistic or xenophobic argument against India or China, because I know for a fact that they have lots of brilliant people, I am just trying to delve deeper into the notion that a larger national population equals a larger population of [whatever else].
One of the coolest things about the Perimeter Institute is that they have a public lecture series. The lecturers are a mix of eminent scientists from inside and outside the Institute. The topics are mostly drawn from the edges of physics and cosmology. Some are more accessible to lay people than other.
The sublimation they noticed was subtle, not total. The ice the rover uncovered didn't sublimate completely away, it just diminished enough for them to notice it. In this case, they'll gather the sample and process it quickly enough that they'll still have a fair bit to work with.
Sending the ISS to the moon, if experiments are still to be its purpose, instantly makes it more expensive to conduct research there. Flinging material out to the moon requires a lot more fuel than to LEO. It significantly raises the cost to do anything, which probably means that even less research will be accomplished. Is there more valuable research that can be done in lunar orbit that can't be done in low-earth orbit?
Also, if something were to go wrong on the station, there isn't a way for the crew to get home quickly. Apollo took 3-4 days to transit between the Earth and Moon, and hit the atmosphere at 38,000 kph. We don't yet have a crew "escape capsule" that can accommodate the full crew, nor one that is designed to travel so far and support people for so long, nor one that can survive reentry from anything other than LEO.
If you lose or break your cellphone, any cellphone out there, you are pretty much out of luck. If you bought into the seller's extended warranty or other such program, you can probably get a replacement. However, by and large, those types of services are a ripoff. Some credit cards have "insurance" for big ticket items like computers and appliances.
What could one expect - that after losing your cellphone, you would be given a replacement for free?
As for signing up for a new two-year contact, welcome to the insanity of the U.S. wireless market (and some international markets from what I hear). You might be able to haggle over that, however, and stick within your original contract. It depends on who you get and whether you can speak reasonably - yelling and screaming at them probably won't help you.
Correction: the problems people are experiencing have to do with the activation servers, it doesn't have much to do with syncing. Although, one cannot sync their phone (or do anything with it, really) until they first activate it through itunes.
The main problem with intelligent design is that it implies some creator, some higher being. The proponents of creationism all wink-wink, nudge-nudge that to be their Christian god. But, when it comes to the constitutional issues involves, the fact that ID relies on any mystical higher power runs smack into the establishment clause of the first amendment.
You do realize that the government has had regulations for the energy use in refrigerators for some 25 years now. They've been lowering the ceiling on electricity usage and efficiency of refrigerators, dishwashers, washing machines, and air conditioners, and forcing manufacturers to state, on a big yellow tag, how much electricity their appliance uses. Creating the Energy Star program provided a means for companies to differentiate their products in a positive way, by being able to brag their products used XX% less energy than the regulation. As a result, the fridge you buy today uses significantly less electricity than a few decades ago (I don't have figures in front of me, but it's like 1/3-1/5th).
Go ahead and cry that the government has meddled and that we're all going to hell for interfering in the market. For myself, I'm glad that I can buy a fridge that doesn't cost an arm and a leg to operate. Yes, believe it or not, those bits of government regulation have saved me money. I highly doubt that I would have those same efficient choices available to me today otherwise. The government made the rules through regulation, then let industry sort out how to make it happen. Markets are great at reacting to things, but they aren't as good at having the foresight to avoid crises through long-term planning.
Had the government worked to increase fuel economy in automobiles starting 10-15 years ago, the Big Three might not now be playing second fiddle to Toyota and Honda, and $4/gal gasoline wouldn't be such a hardship.
Part of the problem is that professors don't always know the cost of the textbooks they assign. It may not be that they are indifferent to the financial pain of the students, but rather that they are simply ignorant.
There are very, very few academics that make any kind of living off of doing textbooks. Fewer still make the sort of per book royalty that you are assuming exists. It's usually more of a one-time payment. Professors aren't like John Grisham or Tom Clancy.
Changing editions every few years is something done by the publishers. I know, I used to work very closely with the local (independent) college bookstore. We would specifically try to get used copies of books that professors request, because it would be cheaper for students (and undercut the corporate-owned bookstore down the street), and only then resort to new. But, when a publisher changed the edition, the used market for that book would dry up. I don't know where all the old copies went, but usually we couldn't even find them.
My understanding is that leaded gasoline allowed higher octane fuel to be run in engines with higher compression ratios without premature combustion. Not adding the lead to gasoline would have caused most engines of the time to fire incorrectly and wear out a lot faster. Finding a way to formulate gasoline with some anti-knock agent other than lead was difficult and, yes, a bit expensive.
Seeing "very long wait" beside so many films in my queue is awfully annoying
Broaden your horizons. There's tons of stuff at netflix (and not just the nth incarnation of the latest anime craze) that is available with no wait. If that latest hollywood blockbuster isn't available, try something a bit older, which would be about 95% of their catalog. There's also a sizeable collection available to stream instantly (though, mac users are still cut out from that feature).
Jeeze, which side of the bed did you get up on today?
The keynote did have a discussion of a standalone IM client, not based on SMS. It won't run as a background process, but rather rely on a new push service that Apple (and carriers I guess) are adding with the 2.0 firmware rollout. The push service is intended to be used for lots of things, not just IM-ing, and will be available through an API to all 3rd-party devs.
First-gen iPhones can already do some locating-aware stuff off of the location of cell towers. It ain't great - accuracy is to within a hundred feet at best in my experience, but it is good enough for some location-aware applications. It can already be used to tell you the nearest restaurants, etc., just not give you realtime directions, geotagging, etc.
Why do you suddenly expect that the rollout of a next-gen iPhone would suddenly mean an upgrade in the hardware of your current iPhone? New hardware with new capabilities is the march of technology.
Improvements to the software will come out on a continuing basis. In addition to getting 3rd party apps (which as you say can fill in a lot of missing capabilities), firmware 2.0 on first-gen iPhones will give support for a lot of enterprise stuff (I don't know if that applies to you), support for iWork and MS Office file formats, push-everything, and access to MobileMe (all your stuff is in the cloud, and accessible from anywhere, and pushed to all your devices).
CMOS is still a whole lot more power efficient than the TTL logic (i.e., bipolar junction transistors) that they replaced. Ideally, a CMOS transistor only requires power when switching states, whereas a BJT burns power continuously. Per transistor, they are a much better way to go.
The problem with high total power dissipation is the result of several interrelated trends, all of which can be related to Moore's Law. More transistors got crammed onto a single chip (a linear increase in power dissipation - double the transistors doubles the power). The clock speeds increased from kHz to MHz to GHz (power increases linearly (or squared) with increasing frequency). Thinner gate oxides permitted greater leakage currents. These trends can also be weighed against competing trends that save power, the greatest being that a smaller transistor uses less power than a large one - it is proportional to area.
The result is that you have orders of magnitude more transistors in a chip (hundreds of millions for a microprocessor), switching orders of magnitude faster (a few GHz), while each transistor is orders of magnitude smaller (less than a square micron) and requires orders of magnitude less power per switch.
On balance, it means that a microprocessor's TPD has increased only 1-2 orders of magnitude over the last few decades, and has leveled out at ~100 W as a sort of practical limit. When you think about it, and consider that a microprocessor today is millions or billions of times more computationally powerful than the first CPUs, it is amazing that all these orders of magnitude manage to balance out to a reasonable increase.
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Like co-generation? It's great, and results in an impressive efficiency improvement over just dumping waste heat. Universities, hospitals, and other large campuses with large heating and cooling needs often do this. Expanding it into domestic production hasn't been as widespread, because the steam pipe infrastructure doesn't exist yet, and is really expensive to lay in. It could work well in dense urban areas, like NYC, though.
I've heard of small cogen furnaces for domestic use. They generate electricity, and use the waste heat for hot water and indoor heating. It's generally only useful if you have a place to dump that waste heat - like a house in North Dakota in January. That same house in August will be sweltering as is, so you won't be able to produce much electricity. That isn't to say there wouldn't be value in it, though.
There is a physical limitation on the efficiency of any particular photovoltaic material, due to the fact that sunlight is a broad spectrum, and the bandgap of the semiconductor is a fixed quantity. For silicon-based PV, the theoretical maximum efficiency is something like 25-30% (sorry, I don't have specific figures). You can improve things by ganging several materials, with different bandgaps, together. Those are the so-called multijunction cells that get upwards of 40% efficient in the lab.
Quality silicon solar cells on the market today, without going to the extreme high end (in cost and efficiency), are more like 15% efficient. That might creep up some; for instance, you can pay a bit more and get 18%-20% efficiency. But, by and large, without some fundamental breakthrough, the efficiency isn't going to go much higher. Your best bet is to try and reduce the cost and increase the durability, so that they can become ubiquitous.
Indeed. Like this?
There's more to the charging infrastructure than just supplying bulk power. Actually, bulk power for an individual charging station is probably the easiest part. The tricky part is adding some intelligence behind it that allows thousands of cars to be plugged into a city's electric grid during peak hours, possibly adding tens or hundreds of megawatts of additional demand, without causing the whole city to brown out.
It's kind of like power in the the USB standard right now. If you plug in a USB-compliant device, the device is supposed to only draw a maximum of 100 mA from the host. It has to be enumerated by the host and be granted additional current from it, up to specified 500 mA limit. Something similar may be needed for car recharging stations to ensure grid stability. That could be centralized or decentralized control, but a lot of effort will be needed to get it to work right.
The major barrier to using supercaps for a hybrid vehicle is the fact that they can't store as much energy (for an equal volume or mass) as a battery. According to wikipedia, existing supercaps can store 0.5-10 Whr/kg, while a Li-Ion battery can do about 120 Whr/kg. There are demonstrations in labs and all manner of claims from companies that will eliminate this disparity, but for the moment, there isn't anything you could design a production vehicle around.
If they are able to get supercaps with the necessary density, there is still the problem of supplying the necessary power. If you want to recharge a vehicle in minutes or seconds, you're going to need to pump megawatts of power into it. I'm not saying that can't be done, but that, too, will take a lot of new infrastructure to make happen.
A problem with ultra capacitors, however, is that they don't store nearly as much energy (Whr) for the same weight (Whr/kg) or volume (Whr/L) compared to batteries. Compared to Li-Ion batteries, the difference in energy density is an order of magnitude with current technology. There will undoubtedly be advances that could even that out, but nothing that you could use to design a production vehicle for today.
Ultracaps do have advantages, like almost unlimited cycle lives, very low resistance, and much higher power ratings compared to chemical batteries. However, unless you want to drive a 2-door compact hauling a trailer's worth of ultra capacitors, you are not going to be able to produce a plug-in hybrid with an acceptable electric range.
National Geographic Magazine has an article touching on this very subject in their current issue. Full text is available online.
That appeal to statistics assumes that the population of brilliant people (both inherently brilliant and the learned) is uniformly distributed among the rest of the population of the world. This is demonstrably not the case. Some cities have higher concentrations of inventors, entrepeneurs, PhDs, etc., than other cities of equal size. Perhaps one city has a university to draw these people in, while the other one doesn't. Perhaps one area, way back when, had a guy or group of people that made some major discovery, started a new industry, which set that region on the path to continued discovery (e.g., Silicon Valley).
The same could be said for countries as a whole. One would expect to find a greater proportion of scientists in an industrialized country over an agrarian one, or over a nation that has only recently industrialized.
I am not trying to make a nationalistic or xenophobic argument against India or China, because I know for a fact that they have lots of brilliant people, I am just trying to delve deeper into the notion that a larger national population equals a larger population of [whatever else].
One of the coolest things about the Perimeter Institute is that they have a public lecture series. The lecturers are a mix of eminent scientists from inside and outside the Institute. The topics are mostly drawn from the edges of physics and cosmology. Some are more accessible to lay people than other.
The Institute has most of them available for offline viewing and reading. Maybe they could get Stephen Hawking one day.
The sublimation they noticed was subtle, not total. The ice the rover uncovered didn't sublimate completely away, it just diminished enough for them to notice it. In this case, they'll gather the sample and process it quickly enough that they'll still have a fair bit to work with.
Sending the ISS to the moon, if experiments are still to be its purpose, instantly makes it more expensive to conduct research there. Flinging material out to the moon requires a lot more fuel than to LEO. It significantly raises the cost to do anything, which probably means that even less research will be accomplished. Is there more valuable research that can be done in lunar orbit that can't be done in low-earth orbit?
Also, if something were to go wrong on the station, there isn't a way for the crew to get home quickly. Apollo took 3-4 days to transit between the Earth and Moon, and hit the atmosphere at 38,000 kph. We don't yet have a crew "escape capsule" that can accommodate the full crew, nor one that is designed to travel so far and support people for so long, nor one that can survive reentry from anything other than LEO.
If you lose or break your cellphone, any cellphone out there, you are pretty much out of luck. If you bought into the seller's extended warranty or other such program, you can probably get a replacement. However, by and large, those types of services are a ripoff. Some credit cards have "insurance" for big ticket items like computers and appliances.
What could one expect - that after losing your cellphone, you would be given a replacement for free?
As for signing up for a new two-year contact, welcome to the insanity of the U.S. wireless market (and some international markets from what I hear). You might be able to haggle over that, however, and stick within your original contract. It depends on who you get and whether you can speak reasonably - yelling and screaming at them probably won't help you.
Correction: the problems people are experiencing have to do with the activation servers, it doesn't have much to do with syncing. Although, one cannot sync their phone (or do anything with it, really) until they first activate it through itunes.
The main problem with intelligent design is that it implies some creator, some higher being. The proponents of creationism all wink-wink, nudge-nudge that to be their Christian god. But, when it comes to the constitutional issues involves, the fact that ID relies on any mystical higher power runs smack into the establishment clause of the first amendment.
You do realize that the government has had regulations for the energy use in refrigerators for some 25 years now. They've been lowering the ceiling on electricity usage and efficiency of refrigerators, dishwashers, washing machines, and air conditioners, and forcing manufacturers to state, on a big yellow tag, how much electricity their appliance uses. Creating the Energy Star program provided a means for companies to differentiate their products in a positive way, by being able to brag their products used XX% less energy than the regulation. As a result, the fridge you buy today uses significantly less electricity than a few decades ago (I don't have figures in front of me, but it's like 1/3-1/5th).
Go ahead and cry that the government has meddled and that we're all going to hell for interfering in the market. For myself, I'm glad that I can buy a fridge that doesn't cost an arm and a leg to operate. Yes, believe it or not, those bits of government regulation have saved me money. I highly doubt that I would have those same efficient choices available to me today otherwise. The government made the rules through regulation, then let industry sort out how to make it happen. Markets are great at reacting to things, but they aren't as good at having the foresight to avoid crises through long-term planning.
Had the government worked to increase fuel economy in automobiles starting 10-15 years ago, the Big Three might not now be playing second fiddle to Toyota and Honda, and $4/gal gasoline wouldn't be such a hardship.
Part of the problem is that professors don't always know the cost of the textbooks they assign. It may not be that they are indifferent to the financial pain of the students, but rather that they are simply ignorant.
There are very, very few academics that make any kind of living off of doing textbooks. Fewer still make the sort of per book royalty that you are assuming exists. It's usually more of a one-time payment. Professors aren't like John Grisham or Tom Clancy.
Changing editions every few years is something done by the publishers. I know, I used to work very closely with the local (independent) college bookstore. We would specifically try to get used copies of books that professors request, because it would be cheaper for students (and undercut the corporate-owned bookstore down the street), and only then resort to new. But, when a publisher changed the edition, the used market for that book would dry up. I don't know where all the old copies went, but usually we couldn't even find them.
Don't forget the Stevens.
My understanding is that leaded gasoline allowed higher octane fuel to be run in engines with higher compression ratios without premature combustion. Not adding the lead to gasoline would have caused most engines of the time to fire incorrectly and wear out a lot faster. Finding a way to formulate gasoline with some anti-knock agent other than lead was difficult and, yes, a bit expensive.
Broaden your horizons. There's tons of stuff at netflix (and not just the nth incarnation of the latest anime craze) that is available with no wait. If that latest hollywood blockbuster isn't available, try something a bit older, which would be about 95% of their catalog. There's also a sizeable collection available to stream instantly (though, mac users are still cut out from that feature).
The White House is planning on vetoing it.
Jeeze, which side of the bed did you get up on today?
The keynote did have a discussion of a standalone IM client, not based on SMS. It won't run as a background process, but rather rely on a new push service that Apple (and carriers I guess) are adding with the 2.0 firmware rollout. The push service is intended to be used for lots of things, not just IM-ing, and will be available through an API to all 3rd-party devs.
First-gen iPhones can already do some locating-aware stuff off of the location of cell towers. It ain't great - accuracy is to within a hundred feet at best in my experience, but it is good enough for some location-aware applications. It can already be used to tell you the nearest restaurants, etc., just not give you realtime directions, geotagging, etc. Why do you suddenly expect that the rollout of a next-gen iPhone would suddenly mean an upgrade in the hardware of your current iPhone? New hardware with new capabilities is the march of technology.
Improvements to the software will come out on a continuing basis. In addition to getting 3rd party apps (which as you say can fill in a lot of missing capabilities), firmware 2.0 on first-gen iPhones will give support for a lot of enterprise stuff (I don't know if that applies to you), support for iWork and MS Office file formats, push-everything, and access to MobileMe (all your stuff is in the cloud, and accessible from anywhere, and pushed to all your devices).
Bummer, I was hoping the Kwik-E-Mart would get the exclusive on this one.
CMOS is still a whole lot more power efficient than the TTL logic (i.e., bipolar junction transistors) that they replaced. Ideally, a CMOS transistor only requires power when switching states, whereas a BJT burns power continuously. Per transistor, they are a much better way to go.
The problem with high total power dissipation is the result of several interrelated trends, all of which can be related to Moore's Law. More transistors got crammed onto a single chip (a linear increase in power dissipation - double the transistors doubles the power). The clock speeds increased from kHz to MHz to GHz (power increases linearly (or squared) with increasing frequency). Thinner gate oxides permitted greater leakage currents. These trends can also be weighed against competing trends that save power, the greatest being that a smaller transistor uses less power than a large one - it is proportional to area.
The result is that you have orders of magnitude more transistors in a chip (hundreds of millions for a microprocessor), switching orders of magnitude faster (a few GHz), while each transistor is orders of magnitude smaller (less than a square micron) and requires orders of magnitude less power per switch.
On balance, it means that a microprocessor's TPD has increased only 1-2 orders of magnitude over the last few decades, and has leveled out at ~100 W as a sort of practical limit. When you think about it, and consider that a microprocessor today is millions or billions of times more computationally powerful than the first CPUs, it is amazing that all these orders of magnitude manage to balance out to a reasonable increase.