Solar thermal isn't much different from every other thermal based energy. Steam turbines have pretty much hit a practical limit in efficiency. Scaling them down decreases the efficiency/cost ratio considerably. Thus, most interest in solar thermal is on the industrial scale and a lot of investigation is theoretical. There are plants being built, but Photovoltaics has the advantage of being relatively cheap to investigate in a lab on the small scale. In addition, the small size and lack of moving parts makes them attractive for distributed collection, which in theory decreases distribution losses.
On a side note, photovoltaics also happens to be a great buzzword for getting funding for new material science research. There are a lot of groups who want to investigate graphene, nanowires, quantum dots, etc., but to get funding you need to propose some possible applications. Energy is on everyone's mind, so naturally photovoltaics gets brought up a lot.
Truth, like purpose, is a relationship - not an absolute. Even mathematics has axioms upon which all "truth" depends. Thus truth is a relationship between a statement and the axiomatic system from which all facts are derived.
In a complex system such as human interaction, it is difficult to say what the axioms are, and it is unlikely that the axioms one person holds to be true are the same as those another person holds to be true. Thus, facts depend on what you believe to be correct.
I wrote a paper on this idea last semester, and as interesting a find as it is, I don't think it's ever going to lead to enhanced power conversion efficiencies (PCE). The "Double Solar Energy Efficiency" is actually a theoretical doubling of the thermodynamic limit on PCE, and it doesn't take non-radiative losses into account. These losses have been minimized in the record breaking silicon and multi-junction solar cells, but quantum dots bring lots of problems with them.
It's definitely worth further investigation, but currently I'm not convinced that it will ever bring improvements.
I haven't read the paper, and I don't really understand the abstract, but it seems to be suggesting a linear and infinite gravity well. Are either of these criteria ever satisfied? Obviously not later, since there can't be an infinite gravity well, but what about the first? Gravity wells in free space are quadratic.
It seems to me that a linear gravity well would require a nonuniform, continuous (or at least much smaller than the QM wave packet in question) distribution of matter. Is that really plausible? You would need a very delocalized particle.
You want to reduce cost, but you suggest developing new propulsion, energy, life support, etc. You do realize that the cost of development of these technologies dwarfs the cost of implementation, do you not? Why fix something if it isn't broke?
Yes, but at the same time, it is probably a good thing that Julian is now an international celebrity. If he were to mysteriously disappear now, there would be an outcry, whereas before no one would have flinched. Even if wikileaks eventually goes down, 3 will pop up in its place. There are too many people who see the importance of it for it to die.
Long term investment in the stock market is like being the house, not the gambler. Stock prices, in general, rise faster than inflation. In addition, the stock market is not completely random. It is just sufficiently complex that it appears to be random to the casual observer.
If the only way to safely and effectively stop a leaky well is to drill a relief well, then the US government needs to require that relief wells be drilled for any and all wells. It is ridiculous that the contingency plan for this event involves leaking hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil into the gulf over a period of months.
Alot of the blizzard games came with game editors so that people can make maps, script events, etc. Many of the games invented by players were actually more fun than Starcraft and Warcraft III.
Even if it doesn't lead to programming, just doing something creative is so much better than playing most video games.
Check out RepRap. It is a 3D printer that can copy itself (or a significant part of itself, really). There is a lot of room for research which can be performed with a small budget. In fact, that is the whole point of the project.
You can even try to win the $80,000 Gada Prize. Basically, join a group and try to make enough improvements to make it accessible to residents of developing countries.
I haven't started participating yet, but I plan to.
Actually, depending on how you achieve ultrahigh vacuum, it might. Cryopumps are pretty standard for maintaining ultrahigh vacuum, and can be used to get there from the milliTorr regime.
What? That is not at all what adapt means. If the world suddenly froze over, and humans adapted, they would not be returning to the status quo. To adapt is to survive in a new environment, or to become better suited to a habitat.
There's a difference between being aware of autism and being able to diagnose autism. You shouldn't expect people to realise that your son is autistic unless someone tells them.
I would like to point out that the guy promoting the use of negative index materials (NIMs) in solar cells is being extremely optimistic. The Kramers-Kronig dispersion relations require any and all passive NIMs to be inherently lossy at the wavelength of interest. In addition, the wider your try to make the bandwidth, the more loss will incur.
Don't get me wrong, metamaterials are an extremely interesting field of research, but to promote their use for energy harvesting is ridiculous. They are much more interesting for beating the diffraction limit.
First of all, 20x more effective at trapping heat is very different from the 80x more powerful than the GP quoted.
Second of all, the half life of CO2 is ~38 years, which is several times longer than methane. So, although methane traps more heat while it is in the atmosphere, it does not stay in the atmosphere near as long.
The earth's magnetic field protects us from charged particle radiation, not from electromagnetic waves (which are 99.9999% the cause of solar heating). Thus, your entire theory was just shot down in 1 sentence.
The greenhouse effect is indisputable; earth would be at least 20C colder without it. The drastic increase in carbon dioxide (a major greenhouse gas) over the past 150 years is indisputable. You could possibly dispute mans effect on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but my guess is that it has been studied and verified already (I am not a climatologist). Thus, if man has an effect on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, man has an effect on the greenhouse effect, which has a major effect on the global average temperature.
If we could stop wasting our time trying to convince all the people incapable of logical thought, maybe we could use our ability to control the global average temperature to our advantage.
Genetically altering humans is a fairly big ethical question.
People keep saying that, but is it? An ethical question would be: "Is it okay to steel from the rich and corrupt and give to the poor?". I fail how to see improving people and people's lives presents an ethical question.
Slashdot Mirror
It would just say so if that was the case.
What bible are you reading?
I doubt you could get net energy out of fermentation and distillation. It is a very energy intensive process.
Solar thermal isn't much different from every other thermal based energy. Steam turbines have pretty much hit a practical limit in efficiency. Scaling them down decreases the efficiency/cost ratio considerably. Thus, most interest in solar thermal is on the industrial scale and a lot of investigation is theoretical. There are plants being built, but Photovoltaics has the advantage of being relatively cheap to investigate in a lab on the small scale. In addition, the small size and lack of moving parts makes them attractive for distributed collection, which in theory decreases distribution losses.
On a side note, photovoltaics also happens to be a great buzzword for getting funding for new material science research. There are a lot of groups who want to investigate graphene, nanowires, quantum dots, etc., but to get funding you need to propose some possible applications. Energy is on everyone's mind, so naturally photovoltaics gets brought up a lot.
Truth, like purpose, is a relationship - not an absolute. Even mathematics has axioms upon which all "truth" depends. Thus truth is a relationship between a statement and the axiomatic system from which all facts are derived.
In a complex system such as human interaction, it is difficult to say what the axioms are, and it is unlikely that the axioms one person holds to be true are the same as those another person holds to be true. Thus, facts depend on what you believe to be correct.
I wrote a paper on this idea last semester, and as interesting a find as it is, I don't think it's ever going to lead to enhanced power conversion efficiencies (PCE). The "Double Solar Energy Efficiency" is actually a theoretical doubling of the thermodynamic limit on PCE, and it doesn't take non-radiative losses into account. These losses have been minimized in the record breaking silicon and multi-junction solar cells, but quantum dots bring lots of problems with them.
It's definitely worth further investigation, but currently I'm not convinced that it will ever bring improvements.
I haven't read the paper, and I don't really understand the abstract, but it seems to be suggesting a linear and infinite gravity well. Are either of these criteria ever satisfied? Obviously not later, since there can't be an infinite gravity well, but what about the first? Gravity wells in free space are quadratic.
It seems to me that a linear gravity well would require a nonuniform, continuous (or at least much smaller than the QM wave packet in question) distribution of matter. Is that really plausible? You would need a very delocalized particle.
You want to reduce cost, but you suggest developing new propulsion, energy, life support, etc. You do realize that the cost of development of these technologies dwarfs the cost of implementation, do you not? Why fix something if it isn't broke?
Yes, but at the same time, it is probably a good thing that Julian is now an international celebrity. If he were to mysteriously disappear now, there would be an outcry, whereas before no one would have flinched. Even if wikileaks eventually goes down, 3 will pop up in its place. There are too many people who see the importance of it for it to die.
Long term investment in the stock market is like being the house, not the gambler. Stock prices, in general, rise faster than inflation. In addition, the stock market is not completely random. It is just sufficiently complex that it appears to be random to the casual observer.
This is just the exception that proves the rule.
If the only way to safely and effectively stop a leaky well is to drill a relief well, then the US government needs to require that relief wells be drilled for any and all wells. It is ridiculous that the contingency plan for this event involves leaking hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil into the gulf over a period of months.
Four words: Blizzard use map settings.
Alot of the blizzard games came with game editors so that people can make maps, script events, etc. Many of the games invented by players were actually more fun than Starcraft and Warcraft III.
Even if it doesn't lead to programming, just doing something creative is so much better than playing most video games.
Check out RepRap. It is a 3D printer that can copy itself (or a significant part of itself, really). There is a lot of room for research which can be performed with a small budget. In fact, that is the whole point of the project.
You can even try to win the $80,000 Gada Prize. Basically, join a group and try to make enough improvements to make it accessible to residents of developing countries.
I haven't started participating yet, but I plan to.
Actually, depending on how you achieve ultrahigh vacuum, it might. Cryopumps are pretty standard for maintaining ultrahigh vacuum, and can be used to get there from the milliTorr regime.
What? That is not at all what adapt means. If the world suddenly froze over, and humans adapted, they would not be returning to the status quo. To adapt is to survive in a new environment, or to become better suited to a habitat.
So physicists would be good at finding a cure for cancer? Why didn't we think of this before?!?
There's a difference between being aware of autism and being able to diagnose autism. You shouldn't expect people to realise that your son is autistic unless someone tells them.
Is anyone else not able to get it to work? I installed steam, but cannot figure out how to install portal.
What kind of a scientist doesn't include at least 2 significant digits?
>>> 5.0/2.0
2.5
Problem solved
Or modelica. I haven't used it, but it looks interesting.
Here is a link to the actual journal article.
I would like to point out that the guy promoting the use of negative index materials (NIMs) in solar cells is being extremely optimistic. The Kramers-Kronig dispersion relations require any and all passive NIMs to be inherently lossy at the wavelength of interest. In addition, the wider your try to make the bandwidth, the more loss will incur.
Don't get me wrong, metamaterials are an extremely interesting field of research, but to promote their use for energy harvesting is ridiculous. They are much more interesting for beating the diffraction limit.
I would like to point out 2 things.
First of all, 20x more effective at trapping heat is very different from the 80x more powerful than the GP quoted.
Second of all, the half life of CO2 is ~38 years, which is several times longer than methane. So, although methane traps more heat while it is in the atmosphere, it does not stay in the atmosphere near as long.
I disagree. This is a prime example of rationality.
The earth's magnetic field protects us from charged particle radiation, not from electromagnetic waves (which are 99.9999% the cause of solar heating). Thus, your entire theory was just shot down in 1 sentence.
The greenhouse effect is indisputable; earth would be at least 20C colder without it. The drastic increase in carbon dioxide (a major greenhouse gas) over the past 150 years is indisputable. You could possibly dispute mans effect on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but my guess is that it has been studied and verified already (I am not a climatologist). Thus, if man has an effect on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, man has an effect on the greenhouse effect, which has a major effect on the global average temperature.
If we could stop wasting our time trying to convince all the people incapable of logical thought, maybe we could use our ability to control the global average temperature to our advantage.
Genetically altering humans is a fairly big ethical question.
People keep saying that, but is it? An ethical question would be: "Is it okay to steel from the rich and corrupt and give to the poor?". I fail how to see improving people and people's lives presents an ethical question.