It is and it isn't. It gives you freedom of mobility, but it also ties you down. And, of course by paying money to maintain and park a car, you decrease your freedom, in that you could use that money to do other things.
I only need a car once or twice a year, so I just rent one. Seems pointless to own a car.
Well, for you the calculation is quite simple. For others, it's not so simple.
Exactly. The value of owning a car varies tremendously depending on where you live and what you do, and the value of owning a self-driving car will vary even more.
Having a car that can drive by itself will make it a lot more valuable in some locations. I would really find it valuable to have a car that can drop me off and then go park itself, and then come pick me up when I need it again.
So I'm not at all sure that people will buy fewer cars if the cars are autonomous. I'll say that the cars will be more valuable, at least to people who travel a lot to places where parking is hard to find, and hence a new segment of people who previous didn't want to own a car will now want one.
"The coal we burn comes from hundreds of millions of years ago."
Not all of it. Like I said, dig down about 20 feet in any given forest, you'll find coal.
No, you won't. You might get peat, which can also be burned, but no, there isn't coal under every forest. If there were, coal mines wouldn't exist, and back in the middle ages the profession of charcoal burner would never have existed.
This seems a bit wasteful for society. We are now mapping things twice.
Not really wasteful. Since there are roughly a billion iPhones out there in the world, if Apple just gets the data from them, it basically has the mapping already, with real time updating.
The coal we burn comes from hundreds of millions of years ago.
Yes, there are some minor seams that are later-- fossil fuel formation doesn't stop. But, no, most fossil fuels are hundreds of millions of years old. The US coal comes mostly from Wyoming (sorry, West Virginia miners, but it's true-- they're the ones that really put you out of work). Those are Cretaceous to early Tertiary: between 50 and 130 million years old-- which is young, as coal deposits go. Powder River basin is as late as early Eocene-- but that's still not "a few thousand" years old.
Crops are grown using synthetic fertiliizers that rely on the Haber Bosch process to provide the nitrogen compounds.
And I never said it wasn't. The question was where does the carbon you exhale come from. The answer is, it originated from plants, who fixed it from the atmosphere.
It did not originate from the fertilizer. The fertilizer provides nitrogen, not carbon.
So I must point out that if we just dump fossil fuels today, everybody, across the board, we are going to be in a world of hurt
Which is an argument for a gradual replacement of power supplies with more sustainable ones, rather than abruptly dynamiting all the existing power plants and outlawing internal combustion engines. But gradual replacement is exactly what we are doing. Nobody is advocating an abrupt "stop all fossil fuel use immediately right now." So I'm not sure what your point is.
Either you didn't understand what the original poster wrote, or you don't understand the energetics of the ecological cycle.
All the CO2 you exhale originated from carbon compounds produced by photosynthesis. Either directly, when you eat plants, or indirectly, if you eat meat from animals that ate plants. One way or another, though, the original energy source was carbon taken from the atmosphere, fixed (primarily in the form of carbohydrates) by plants, eaten by you (or by something that is in turn eaten by you), and then metabolized back into carbon dioxide.
which ends with the conclusion "The Million Dollar Space Pen Myth is just that, a myth. The pens never cost a lot of money and were not developed by wasteful bureaucrats or overactive NASA engineers. The real story of the Space Pen is less interesting than the myth, but in many ways more inspiring. It is not a story of NASA bureaucrats versus simplistic Russians, but a story of a clever capitalist who built a superior product and conducted some innovative marketing. That story, however, is a little harder to sell to a public that believes what it wants to believe."
they should build it to look like a GIANT beetle, and build the solar panels like the wings that can fold out when the conditions are good and when not so good fold in and collapse flat with a hard weather-proof outer shell that covers and protects them (like some beetles that can fly)
That is not a bad description of the Soviet Lunakhod rover design, which enclosed the array at night.. Although most people say that they look more like a giant bathtub than a beetle.
I'm sure one of the dust devils will come along and clean the panels.
This location, on the rim of Endeavour crater, has been pretty windy. So if the rover calls home after the dust storm, there's a pretty good chance that the winds will clean the panels.
...The story reports an optical depth of the dust storm of tau=10.8. This is astoundingly dark. The transmittance of light through the atmosphere is 1/e^tau so that only 1/50,000 (0.002%) of the sunlight is getting through! It is effectively perpetual night there right now....
Note that the e^1/tau factor is for direct beam. What this means is that almost all of the light that gets through to the surface is scattered light.
The tau for a rainy day for earth is very high too. It doesn't mean that the surface is completely dark, it just means that the light that does get through has scattered many times-- you can't see the disk of the sun, but some light does reach the surface.
10.8 is a record for the highest tau measured from the surface of Mars, though.
Who is the "they" you speak of? I can think offhand of anybody who says "accept all the immigrants who show up."
That's effectively the position of Democrats.
Is it? Can you quote a single Democrat saying this? Ever?
No, I didn't think so.
This is technically the libertarian position
Libertarianism also favors small government, freedom of association and private property rights, all of which are severely limited; those are necessary prerequisites for libertarian style open borders.
Yep. Libertarians are pretty good at avoiding mentioning their position on the hot-button issue of immigration. Guns and drugs, that's what they want to talk about.
I think that this is the confusion here. "Organic" molecules, originally, meant molecules which were derived from living matter. But after 1828, when Friedrich Wöhler first synthesized Urea (an organic molecule), it was realized that the carbon molecules labelled "organic" could also be created by non-biological means. The word continues to have both meanings, chemists using it to mean molecules containing carbon, and non-chemists using it to mean molecules derived from living organisms (and, more recently, foods grown without technological intervention.)
I *think* the clathrates are actually pretty well established.
The fact that methane clathrates exist in deep arctic regions is indeed well known. The total amount of trapped methane, and the amount of methane release as a function of atmospheric heating, on the other hand, is not well established. And, again, I have never heard a credible suggestion that there's enough "to destroy life on Earth many times over."
You are right, indeed, about the buried organics in permafrost. The amount of greenhouse gasses that are released due to melting of permafrost is not well established, and this is much more closely coupled to surface temperatures. This may mean that future heating rate could be higher than expected.
Slashdot Mirror
What, they're killing the magsafe power connector????
Darn-- I love that connector.
This is all science fiction: speculating what the future will be like based on technology that doesn't exist yet.
You say that as if it's a bad thing.
owning a car == freedom
It is and it isn't. It gives you freedom of mobility, but it also ties you down. And, of course by paying money to maintain and park a car, you decrease your freedom, in that you could use that money to do other things.
So, like many things: it depends.
I only need a car once or twice a year, so I just rent one. Seems pointless to own a car.
Well, for you the calculation is quite simple. For others, it's not so simple.
Exactly. The value of owning a car varies tremendously depending on where you live and what you do, and the value of owning a self-driving car will vary even more.
Having a car that can drive by itself will make it a lot more valuable in some locations. I would really find it valuable to have a car that can drop me off and then go park itself, and then come pick me up when I need it again.
So I'm not at all sure that people will buy fewer cars if the cars are autonomous. I'll say that the cars will be more valuable, at least to people who travel a lot to places where parking is hard to find, and hence a new segment of people who previous didn't want to own a car will now want one.
Peat is a form of coal. And charcoal burners create charcoal out of wood from above the ground.
Ah. If you think peat is a form of coal, your previous posts are now understandable.
"The coal we burn comes from hundreds of millions of years ago."
Not all of it. Like I said, dig down about 20 feet in any given forest, you'll find coal.
No, you won't. You might get peat, which can also be burned, but no, there isn't coal under every forest. If there were, coal mines wouldn't exist, and back in the middle ages the profession of charcoal burner would never have existed.
This seems a bit wasteful for society. We are now mapping things twice.
Not really wasteful. Since there are roughly a billion iPhones out there in the world, if Apple just gets the data from them, it basically has the mapping already, with real time updating.
The coal we burn comes from hundreds of millions of years ago.
Yes, there are some minor seams that are later-- fossil fuel formation doesn't stop. But, no, most fossil fuels are hundreds of millions of years old. The US coal comes mostly from Wyoming (sorry, West Virginia miners, but it's true-- they're the ones that really put you out of work). Those are Cretaceous to early Tertiary: between 50 and 130 million years old-- which is young, as coal deposits go. Powder River basin is as late as early Eocene-- but that's still not "a few thousand" years old.
Of course that so-called "fossil carbon" was mainly forest a few thousand, or hundred thousand, years ago, and thus plants.
Uh, I believe you mean a few hundred million years ago.
A hundred thousand years is mere a blink of an eye in geologic time.
...then, in March, the Spanish National Police arrested Ukrainian citizen Denis Katana...
Wait... he's named katana?! Really?
No way. That has got to be a pseudonym.
Wow. So, who will be playing Carbanak in the movie? Brad Pitt?
Try again.
Crops are grown using synthetic fertiliizers that rely on the Haber Bosch process to provide the nitrogen compounds.
And I never said it wasn't. The question was where does the carbon you exhale come from. The answer is, it originated from plants, who fixed it from the atmosphere.
It did not originate from the fertilizer. The fertilizer provides nitrogen, not carbon.
So I must point out that if we just dump fossil fuels today, everybody, across the board, we are going to be in a world of hurt
Which is an argument for a gradual replacement of power supplies with more sustainable ones, rather than abruptly dynamiting all the existing power plants and outlawing internal combustion engines. But gradual replacement is exactly what we are doing. Nobody is advocating an abrupt "stop all fossil fuel use immediately right now." So I'm not sure what your point is.
the sea will rise approx. 200 feet. if all ice melts. is that acceptable ?
Even the worst case examples put forth by scientists don't predict ALL ice melting. Sea levels won't rise 200ft.
Not in the next century. If we keep on adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, in the long term, yes.
Ice caps aren't a permanent feature of the planet. They can very well melt.
Either you didn't understand what the original poster wrote, or you don't understand the energetics of the ecological cycle.
All the CO2 you exhale originated from carbon compounds produced by photosynthesis. Either directly, when you eat plants, or indirectly, if you eat meat from animals that ate plants. One way or another, though, the original energy source was carbon taken from the atmosphere, fixed (primarily in the form of carbohydrates) by plants, eaten by you (or by something that is in turn eaten by you), and then metabolized back into carbon dioxide.
The headline would have been accurate if it had said "Predates the Saturn V".
as noted by mykepredko, no, it doesn't predate Apollo.
Atlas was RP1/LOX. The Titan II (Gemini) was UDMH/N204. There were no nasty hypergolic explosions with the TItan II.
Titan explosion:
http://www.encyclopediaofarkan...
https://www.dailyrecord.com/story/news/2015/08/16/survivor-recalls-titan-ii-missile-silo-fire-killed/31815507/
Perhaps you meant to say There were no nasty hypergolic explosions with the Atlas?
NASA spent ~1,000,000$ on nitrogen pressurized pens so astronauts could write in space. Russia used pencils
Urban legend.
Yep. Check the snopes site here: https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch...
Or the Space Review site here: http://www.thespacereview.com/...
which ends with the conclusion "The Million Dollar Space Pen Myth is just that, a myth. The pens never cost a lot of money and were not developed by wasteful bureaucrats or overactive NASA engineers. The real story of the Space Pen is less interesting than the myth, but in many ways more inspiring. It is not a story of NASA bureaucrats versus simplistic Russians, but a story of a clever capitalist who built a superior product and conducted some innovative marketing. That story, however, is a little harder to sell to a public that believes what it wants to believe."
they should build it to look like a GIANT beetle, and build the solar panels like the wings that can fold out when the conditions are good and when not so good fold in and collapse flat with a hard weather-proof outer shell that covers and protects them (like some beetles that can fly)
That is not a bad description of the Soviet Lunakhod rover design, which enclosed the array at night.. Although most people say that they look more like a giant bathtub than a beetle.
My solar panels generate power under a full moon. Every little bit helps.
Enough to detect, maybe.
Enough to charge a battery, no.
The full moon isn't bright enough. The full moon gives 400,000 times less light than the sun.
I'm sure one of the dust devils will come along and clean the panels.
This location, on the rim of Endeavour crater, has been pretty windy. So if the rover calls home after the dust storm, there's a pretty good chance that the winds will clean the panels.
...The story reports an optical depth of the dust storm of tau=10.8. This is astoundingly dark. The transmittance of light through the atmosphere is 1/e^tau so that only 1/50,000 (0.002%) of the sunlight is getting through! It is effectively perpetual night there right now....
Note that the e^1/tau factor is for direct beam. What this means is that almost all of the light that gets through to the surface is scattered light.
The tau for a rainy day for earth is very high too. It doesn't mean that the surface is completely dark, it just means that the light that does get through has scattered many times-- you can't see the disk of the sun, but some light does reach the surface.
10.8 is a record for the highest tau measured from the surface of Mars, though.
That's effectively the position of Democrats.
Is it? Can you quote a single Democrat saying this? Ever?
No, I didn't think so.
This is technically the libertarian position
Libertarianism also favors small government, freedom of association and private property rights, all of which are severely limited; those are necessary prerequisites for libertarian style open borders.
Yep. Libertarians are pretty good at avoiding mentioning their position on the hot-button issue of immigration. Guns and drugs, that's what they want to talk about.
"Organic," in chemistry terms, is the study of all the fun things Carbon does.
"Organic," in the minds of many, means "non-GMO farming."
As you can see, there is a lot of difference in the scope and implications of those two categories.
And "organic" in the original sense of the word, "relating to or derived from living matter."
(cf: https://dictionary.cambridge.o...)
I think that this is the confusion here. "Organic" molecules, originally, meant molecules which were derived from living matter. But after 1828, when Friedrich Wöhler first synthesized Urea (an organic molecule), it was realized that the carbon molecules labelled "organic" could also be created by non-biological means. The word continues to have both meanings, chemists using it to mean molecules containing carbon, and non-chemists using it to mean molecules derived from living organisms (and, more recently, foods grown without technological intervention.)
I *think* the clathrates are actually pretty well established.
The fact that methane clathrates exist in deep arctic regions is indeed well known. The total amount of trapped methane, and the amount of methane release as a function of atmospheric heating, on the other hand, is not well established. And, again, I have never heard a credible suggestion that there's enough "to destroy life on Earth many times over."
You are right, indeed, about the buried organics in permafrost. The amount of greenhouse gasses that are released due to melting of permafrost is not well established, and this is much more closely coupled to surface temperatures. This may mean that future heating rate could be higher than expected.