Even if it were, I'm sure there's a sizable portion of the government and electorate that would like to see it killed off because...well...it's gub'mint!
Never mind that it has saved U.S. consumers (and governments, funded by taxpayers) tens-to-hundreds of billions of dollars over its life, and forced companies to create more efficient products that probably wouldn't have come about solely by the magic of capitalism.
than on political manipulation like buying the Washington Post and turning it into a political blog
On the other hand, Jeff Bezos is also funding Blue Origin, which is building rockets. I suppose if you have enough money, you can do all kinds of things.
My personal favorite of "I have so much money..." examples is Larry Ellison, who essentially bought the America's Cup by plowing so much money into winning, largely so that he could totally remake it into a high-speed, trimarans of death, competition circuit. Oh, and he bought a Hawaiian Island to be his personal fiefdom.
I would give Tracey Kidder's Soul of a New Machine a heavy recommendation. Released in 1981, it recounts events at Data General in 1979-1980, where a small team of engineers rapidly developed a 32-bit minicomputer. The team was up against nearly impossible deadlines and breaking new ground to create a machine that paved new ground while maintaining backwards compatibility with 16-bit predecessors. Some of it is just narrative, but mostly it is a study of the players: their motivations, their backgrounds, and how they all operated as a team. If you enjoy the TV show Halt and Catch Fire, this book will be right up your alley.
I applaud developing new technologies for energy efficiency. Still, it's going to be a while before this is available.
In the meantime one could consider a heat-pump clothes dryer. Rather than using electricity or natural gas to heat indoor air, pass it over the clothes, then dump it to the outside in a once-through cycle, a heat-pump dryer uses (as you can guess) a heat pump. The hot side of the heat pump creates warm air that passes over the clothes gathering moisture. The cold side condenses the moisture back out, before passing this de-humidifed air back to the hot side.
Advantages:
* Uses 1/2 the electricity of an ordinary dryer
* It has no vent to the outdoors, so the whole home envelope can be that much tighter. (It does have a water drain for the condensate.)
* The mechanism relies on warm, de-humidified air, rather than heavily heated air, so it is more gentle on clothes
* They've been available as consumer products for a number of years now - it's not brand new technology
Yes, they are more expensive. That is to be expected, considering how dirt-simple the mechanisms of a traditional dryer are. However, depending on your local electricity rates and how much laundry you do, the breakeven should be well within the lifetime of the appliance. Maybe that's not enough to junk a perfectly good existing dryer, but should definitely be considered when purchasing a replacement.
Part of the problem is that they have a lot of chemical similarities, and so are difficult to separate from one another and to purify to the point where you can do something useful with them.
and while it is true that the rare earths are actually pretty easy to find, the natural concentrations tend to be quite low, making it not commercially viable in most places.
Cold War: a convenient shorthand for simmering tensions between two nuclear-capable factions. War definitely not declared.
All those fun and games we had down in Central and South America? That's just the military and intelligence agencies off at summer camp. War never declared.
Remember that time when we put the beatdown on Saddam Hussein because he invaded Kuwait? Nope, not a war.
You better believe we would never go to war to stop a genocide in the Balkans.
Remember that other time we put the beatdown on Saddam Hussein, because he supposedly had weapons of mass destruction? That wasn't a war either. Can you believe it?!
And the gift that keeps on giving in Afghanistan? We still haven't gotten around to declaring that a war.
Now, I'll grant you - those last two were A-OK due to an authorization for the use of military force. I'm not sure what Iraq had to do with 9/11, but G.W. can't be wrong.
I'm from 'Merica. If it ain't green, it ain't money!
Unless it's solid gold, I'm good with that, too. And once we're back on the gold standard, all will be right with the world.
I jest, but it is increasingly disappointing, as someone from the United States, that we cling to the notion that paper currency must be of uniform size and color. Varying size and color by denomination is a sensible feature that 1) makes it easier to identify notes, particularly if you are blind and 2) makes it a lot harder to counterfeit by washing. I think the U.S. is the last major economy that hasn't done it.
Plastic bills? I'm still trying to wrap my head around that.
I will assume that this research was conducted using 4-digit PINs, which are the default for iOS and Android. I wonder how their success rate would hold up against, say, a 5-digit PIN, or 8, or N?
I generally rely on a biometric sign in for my phone*, but fall back on the PIN code once or twice per week. It's a whole lot more than 4 digits.
We are getting a new awesome space movie soon, right?
Not anytime soon, no. Cassini was the last of the real flagship, multi-billion dollar planetary exploration programs. The Jovian Icy Moons / Europa mission may or may not proceed. An orbiter mission to Neptune or Uranus isn't scientifically sexy enough to warrant the funding. There was a lot of scraping to get the relatively low-cost Pluto Express launched; a redux of Voyager is astromechanically impractical. We have Juno in orbit around Jupiter, but that, too, was a relatively low-cost mission. Oh, and we're just about out of Pu-238, so power options in the outer solar system are limited.
The biggest budget stuff now is directed at Mars and James Webb Space Telescope. Maybe those could have awesome narration.
Excellent advice when you have an author looking after your interests who will ensure things work out in the end. But in real life, if you believe that....
Or you could run for president, I hear he doesn't listen to experts either.
Why does TFS go out of its way to tell us that Syed Nawaz is 40, while not mentioning how old Jayavel Murugan is. Is there something significant about being 40 that I'm missing?
Ah, see, that's called editing. We don't do that here.
One could probably find a radio, but then you have to keep yourself in proximity to said radio. That is, if your most readily-accessible radio is in your car, it's bloody inconvenient to sit in the car just to listen to the radio (assuming you're not actively driving somewhere - sheltering in place). Restaurants, offices,..., sure, they may have a radio, but you take it with you to go somewhere else? One person probably could, assuming it could be run on batteries, but that one person is probably not you.
The beauty of unlocking the capability of your smartphone is that you are likely to have it on your person a lot of the time, and it is trivial to take with you.
and to think, these engineers could have been spending their time doing something so mundane and pointless, like saving the world or improving everyday peoples' lives. Instead, the beneficent forward thinkers at McDonalds have showered upon them the blessing of using their extraordinary abilities and scarce resources to design a straw!
Mostly I'm thinking about the impending shareholder lawsuit: you guys spent how much f*$^ing money getting a high powered team of engineers to design a straw?!
That's right, he does have nothing to hide. He's just another victim of more fake news coming out of the Washington Post, a democrat propaganda machine.
Since you haven't provided any links to back your data, I have to ask: is that energy value just a conversion of the raw BTUs, or into electricity delivered to end users. It's a really important difference, since most coal plants are only 25-35% efficient in creating electricity from raw heat. If you are quoting the raw energy content as heat, then I'd argue you need to discount it by a factor of 3-4x, since most coal is burned to make electricity, and PV creates electricity directly.
Here's another approach: the wholesale price for electricity is, depending on the region, something like $25-50/MWh [source]. Unfortunately, the breakdown doesn't tell us the cost for each source (coal, nuke, gas, etc.), but let's argue that it's on the low end: $25/MWh. That captures the cost not only of the fuel, but also the operating costs of the plant, profit, paying off the loans to build the plant, etc. On the other hand, a large pile of coal is pretty useless for generating electricity without all the rest of those costs, so I'd say it's fair to include them.
At $25/MWh, a $5k purchase would get you 200 MWh of electricity, which makes PV look much more favorable.
The thing that blows my mind is not that one measurement is higher and another lower, it's just how closely they agree: to less than 10%. This despite the fact that they were arrived at from different instruments and lines of inquiry. The earlier measurement from Planck satellite measurements is derived from measurements of cosmic background radiation. The newer measurement comes from images of gravitational lensing of distant quasars, from the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes. For such a tricky measurements, and such an abstruse topic, I wouldn't have been surprised if they differed by an order of magnitude.* And yet, the agree pretty closely.
Science is really freaking awesome. Sure, assuming that the expansion is universal and constant (i.e., there is only one value for the Hubble Constant, which is hardly a sure thing), you ought to be able to measure the same answer by any experiment designed to measure it, within the experimental error. I ought to arrive at the same value for the gravitational constant, too, whether I experiment using a precision pendulum, or dropping a cannonball from the tower of Pisa (accounting for air friction, of course), or analyze the tides, or by successfully putting a man on the Moon. It doesn't matter who I am, or where I live, or under which government, or what language(s) I speak - it all still works.
* Hubble's own initial estimate was about 10x the current values. For those that are interested, here's a graph of the value of H0, with error bars, through history. [source]
At this point his tax returns are as irrelevant as Obama's birth certificate, or college records were after he had been elected
But we did get those records, didn't we? Whereas we're still waiting for, and probably never will receive short of a subpoena, Trump's tax records. And there is a significant difference in relevance between the tax returns and Obama's records: Trump's records can tell us some very important things about the present that we don't already know, whereas Obama's records only show interesting tidbits about the past, and didn't tell us anything that we didn't already know.
Anyone with a basic understanding of circuitry can make a series-parallel array of cells for whatever current draw and voltage requirements you can imagine. Keeping it cool is simple, airflow and aluminum battery casings are the answer.
If your only goal is to pump out power, then yes, most anyone with some basic knowledge can do it.
If, however, you want to make a reliable and safe product that can last for years with predictable behavior, replicate it 100,000 times at reasonably cost, then stuff it into an automobile to let any joe-shmo use it, it's a whole hell of a lot harder. That takes uncommon knowledge, skill, and experience, a whole hell of a lot of money, and a tremendous comfort with risk.
For anyone who is interested, here is a 2014 teardown of a Model S battery pack. It's pretty awesome stuff, and clearly a lot of careful thought and design went into it. Incidentally, the pack is not thermoregulated* using airflow - it has tubing with circulated coolant.
* For Li-Ion chemistry, it's not merely a matter of keeping the cells cool; keeping them at a uniform temperature across the pack is far more important for avoiding accelerated aging and catastrophic failure
I was under the impression that setting off a nuke on an impactor only works in movies. In reality there is no atmosphere, therefore almost no shockwave, and the object continues approaching on the same vector and with the same mass.
The people who developed Project Orion would beg to differ. A nuclear blast in proximity to a solid object can definitely provide impulse.
Who actually thinks NASA will thrive under Donald fucking Trump? LOL.
I could see Trump being an enthusiastic supporter of manned spaceflight. Because, ya know, back during the mythic time that America was great, we landed on the fucking moon. "It was a beautiful moon; a 'uuuuge moment for our country. America will never be Great Again (tm) so long as we're doing laps in a tin can. And can you believe this - the space station was made in Taiwan. We need to go back to the Moon, bigly."
But the arguably more important (and higher-ROI) science and basic research that NASA works on? Shit, man, Trump has no use for knowledge, he's already smarter than everyone else. If anything I learned from the campaign, the President-elect hasn't a shred of intellectual curiosity in him, nor the humility to acknowledge that he doesn't actually know everything. He's finally in a position to stick it to the eggheads that made him look bad back in school.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if it were, I'm sure there's a sizable portion of the government and electorate that would like to see it killed off because...well...it's gub'mint!
Never mind that it has saved U.S. consumers (and governments, funded by taxpayers) tens-to-hundreds of billions of dollars over its life, and forced companies to create more efficient products that probably wouldn't have come about solely by the magic of capitalism.
On the other hand, Jeff Bezos is also funding Blue Origin, which is building rockets. I suppose if you have enough money, you can do all kinds of things.
My personal favorite of "I have so much money..." examples is Larry Ellison, who essentially bought the America's Cup by plowing so much money into winning, largely so that he could totally remake it into a high-speed, trimarans of death, competition circuit. Oh, and he bought a Hawaiian Island to be his personal fiefdom.
I would give Tracey Kidder's Soul of a New Machine a heavy recommendation. Released in 1981, it recounts events at Data General in 1979-1980, where a small team of engineers rapidly developed a 32-bit minicomputer. The team was up against nearly impossible deadlines and breaking new ground to create a machine that paved new ground while maintaining backwards compatibility with 16-bit predecessors. Some of it is just narrative, but mostly it is a study of the players: their motivations, their backgrounds, and how they all operated as a team. If you enjoy the TV show Halt and Catch Fire, this book will be right up your alley.
In the meantime one could consider a heat-pump clothes dryer. Rather than using electricity or natural gas to heat indoor air, pass it over the clothes, then dump it to the outside in a once-through cycle, a heat-pump dryer uses (as you can guess) a heat pump. The hot side of the heat pump creates warm air that passes over the clothes gathering moisture. The cold side condenses the moisture back out, before passing this de-humidifed air back to the hot side.
Advantages:
Yes, they are more expensive. That is to be expected, considering how dirt-simple the mechanisms of a traditional dryer are. However, depending on your local electricity rates and how much laundry you do, the breakeven should be well within the lifetime of the appliance. Maybe that's not enough to junk a perfectly good existing dryer, but should definitely be considered when purchasing a replacement.
Damn. It appears I so quickly squandered my mod points yesterday, and so have none left to bestow upon you today. Well played.
Part of the problem is that they have a lot of chemical similarities, and so are difficult to separate from one another and to purify to the point where you can do something useful with them.
and while it is true that the rare earths are actually pretty easy to find, the natural concentrations tend to be quite low, making it not commercially viable in most places.
Correction: turns out 1945 was the last time we officially were at war. At least, if you're talking about how how it pertains to the Constitution.
Korea: just some misadventure by the 38th parallel. War never actually declared.
Vietnam: just some misadventure on the Mekong. War never actually declared. I think this movie summed it up best: Bob Hope doesn't play at police actions.
Cold War: a convenient shorthand for simmering tensions between two nuclear-capable factions. War definitely not declared.
All those fun and games we had down in Central and South America? That's just the military and intelligence agencies off at summer camp. War never declared.
Remember that time when we put the beatdown on Saddam Hussein because he invaded Kuwait? Nope, not a war.
You better believe we would never go to war to stop a genocide in the Balkans.
Remember that other time we put the beatdown on Saddam Hussein, because he supposedly had weapons of mass destruction? That wasn't a war either. Can you believe it?!
And the gift that keeps on giving in Afghanistan? We still haven't gotten around to declaring that a war.
Now, I'll grant you - those last two were A-OK due to an authorization for the use of military force. I'm not sure what Iraq had to do with 9/11, but G.W. can't be wrong.
Still, it ain't a war unless Congress says so.
Isn't it?
Nah, we don't flip our shit, we just ignore it until it goes away.
I'm from 'Merica. If it ain't green, it ain't money!
Unless it's solid gold, I'm good with that, too. And once we're back on the gold standard, all will be right with the world.
I jest, but it is increasingly disappointing, as someone from the United States, that we cling to the notion that paper currency must be of uniform size and color. Varying size and color by denomination is a sensible feature that 1) makes it easier to identify notes, particularly if you are blind and 2) makes it a lot harder to counterfeit by washing. I think the U.S. is the last major economy that hasn't done it.
Plastic bills? I'm still trying to wrap my head around that.
I will assume that this research was conducted using 4-digit PINs, which are the default for iOS and Android. I wonder how their success rate would hold up against, say, a 5-digit PIN, or 8, or N?
I generally rely on a biometric sign in for my phone*, but fall back on the PIN code once or twice per week. It's a whole lot more than 4 digits.
* I know, biometrics have their own set of risks; different conversation
Not anytime soon, no. Cassini was the last of the real flagship, multi-billion dollar planetary exploration programs. The Jovian Icy Moons / Europa mission may or may not proceed. An orbiter mission to Neptune or Uranus isn't scientifically sexy enough to warrant the funding. There was a lot of scraping to get the relatively low-cost Pluto Express launched; a redux of Voyager is astromechanically impractical. We have Juno in orbit around Jupiter, but that, too, was a relatively low-cost mission. Oh, and we're just about out of Pu-238, so power options in the outer solar system are limited.
The biggest budget stuff now is directed at Mars and James Webb Space Telescope. Maybe those could have awesome narration.
Or you could run for president, I hear he doesn't listen to experts either.
Ah, see, that's called editing. We don't do that here.
Let's get Willem Dafoe on this straight away! (obscure movie ref?)
One could probably find a radio, but then you have to keep yourself in proximity to said radio. That is, if your most readily-accessible radio is in your car, it's bloody inconvenient to sit in the car just to listen to the radio (assuming you're not actively driving somewhere - sheltering in place). Restaurants, offices, ..., sure, they may have a radio, but you take it with you to go somewhere else? One person probably could, assuming it could be run on batteries, but that one person is probably not you.
The beauty of unlocking the capability of your smartphone is that you are likely to have it on your person a lot of the time, and it is trivial to take with you.
and to think, these engineers could have been spending their time doing something so mundane and pointless, like saving the world or improving everyday peoples' lives. Instead, the beneficent forward thinkers at McDonalds have showered upon them the blessing of using their extraordinary abilities and scarce resources to design a straw!
Mostly I'm thinking about the impending shareholder lawsuit: you guys spent how much f*$^ing money getting a high powered team of engineers to design a straw?!
So whines the anonymous coward.
Since you haven't provided any links to back your data, I have to ask: is that energy value just a conversion of the raw BTUs, or into electricity delivered to end users. It's a really important difference, since most coal plants are only 25-35% efficient in creating electricity from raw heat. If you are quoting the raw energy content as heat, then I'd argue you need to discount it by a factor of 3-4x, since most coal is burned to make electricity, and PV creates electricity directly.
Here's another approach: the wholesale price for electricity is, depending on the region, something like $25-50/MWh [source]. Unfortunately, the breakdown doesn't tell us the cost for each source (coal, nuke, gas, etc.), but let's argue that it's on the low end: $25/MWh. That captures the cost not only of the fuel, but also the operating costs of the plant, profit, paying off the loans to build the plant, etc. On the other hand, a large pile of coal is pretty useless for generating electricity without all the rest of those costs, so I'd say it's fair to include them.
At $25/MWh, a $5k purchase would get you 200 MWh of electricity, which makes PV look much more favorable.
The thing that blows my mind is not that one measurement is higher and another lower, it's just how closely they agree: to less than 10%. This despite the fact that they were arrived at from different instruments and lines of inquiry. The earlier measurement from Planck satellite measurements is derived from measurements of cosmic background radiation. The newer measurement comes from images of gravitational lensing of distant quasars, from the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes. For such a tricky measurements, and such an abstruse topic, I wouldn't have been surprised if they differed by an order of magnitude.* And yet, the agree pretty closely.
Science is really freaking awesome. Sure, assuming that the expansion is universal and constant (i.e., there is only one value for the Hubble Constant, which is hardly a sure thing), you ought to be able to measure the same answer by any experiment designed to measure it, within the experimental error. I ought to arrive at the same value for the gravitational constant, too, whether I experiment using a precision pendulum, or dropping a cannonball from the tower of Pisa (accounting for air friction, of course), or analyze the tides, or by successfully putting a man on the Moon. It doesn't matter who I am, or where I live, or under which government, or what language(s) I speak - it all still works.
* Hubble's own initial estimate was about 10x the current values. For those that are interested, here's a graph of the value of H0, with error bars, through history. [source]
But we did get those records, didn't we? Whereas we're still waiting for, and probably never will receive short of a subpoena, Trump's tax records. And there is a significant difference in relevance between the tax returns and Obama's records: Trump's records can tell us some very important things about the present that we don't already know, whereas Obama's records only show interesting tidbits about the past, and didn't tell us anything that we didn't already know.
obligatory Futurama reference
If your only goal is to pump out power, then yes, most anyone with some basic knowledge can do it.
If, however, you want to make a reliable and safe product that can last for years with predictable behavior, replicate it 100,000 times at reasonably cost, then stuff it into an automobile to let any joe-shmo use it, it's a whole hell of a lot harder. That takes uncommon knowledge, skill, and experience, a whole hell of a lot of money, and a tremendous comfort with risk.
For anyone who is interested, here is a 2014 teardown of a Model S battery pack. It's pretty awesome stuff, and clearly a lot of careful thought and design went into it. Incidentally, the pack is not thermoregulated* using airflow - it has tubing with circulated coolant.
* For Li-Ion chemistry, it's not merely a matter of keeping the cells cool; keeping them at a uniform temperature across the pack is far more important for avoiding accelerated aging and catastrophic failure
The people who developed Project Orion would beg to differ. A nuclear blast in proximity to a solid object can definitely provide impulse.
I could see Trump being an enthusiastic supporter of manned spaceflight. Because, ya know, back during the mythic time that America was great, we landed on the fucking moon. "It was a beautiful moon; a 'uuuuge moment for our country. America will never be Great Again (tm) so long as we're doing laps in a tin can. And can you believe this - the space station was made in Taiwan. We need to go back to the Moon, bigly."
But the arguably more important (and higher-ROI) science and basic research that NASA works on? Shit, man, Trump has no use for knowledge, he's already smarter than everyone else. If anything I learned from the campaign, the President-elect hasn't a shred of intellectual curiosity in him, nor the humility to acknowledge that he doesn't actually know everything. He's finally in a position to stick it to the eggheads that made him look bad back in school.