You need to be careful when doing straight calculations like that - the big problem with lead-acid batteries is that their discharge is highly nonlinear. In other words if I have a 32 amp hour, 12-volt battery, if I drain it very slowly (a few amps only), I'll get the equivalent of 32 amp-hours out of it. If I were to draw, say, 32 amps out of it, it would be dead in much less (probably around 35 minutes') time.
There are much larger capacities available, but the big problem with this is that A.) The batteries may be affordable, but the control systems are definitely not and B.) the conversion from DC to AC will also kill your storage efficiency. We ran into some of these problems trying to design such a system for a house in a developing community in Ghana.
How soon before we're not allowed to make derogatory remarks about Congress itself, or the president? I was under the impression that the government and everything it owns, collectively, belong to the American People, but apparently I'm wrong.
Re:Makes a little bit of sense. . .
on
Treating the Dead
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Actually, it's more oxygen. The idea is that the alveoli can absorb enough oxygen from one breath to last for more compressions than was previously though. Up until about two years ago the accepted practice was 15 compressions/2 breaths, now it's 30 much harder, faster compressions/2 breaths. The idea behind it is to get more blood to flow to the brain and provide more oxygen.
And in case you've never had to do it, one round of CPR at an actual pace will exhaust you if you do it right. The new methodology is pretty intense.
Oops, seems I missed a decimal or two myself - should be 40,000 square miles, and sales last year for the electric industry were 3,815,668,880 WM-hours. To correct the calculations, we're looking at 435,280 MW of capacity compared to a total generation capacity (for the solar system covering a third of New Mexico) of 1,142,800 MW (which does, in fact provide for current US consumption, massive transmission problems aside). In 20 years, however, our consumption will double, according to current trends (also at doe.gov). Say goodbye to the Grand Canyon. Sorry for the miscalcs.
Those are a lot of assumptions, most of which aren't very god - take a look at trends in the cost of producing and using solar power on a large scale over the past twenty years, and explain just how your numbers check out. Not only that, but we must also consider that after 20 years, the chemicals in the panels break down and thus, the panel must be replaced. Since the life of the panel (20 years) is also its ROI, you'll never profit from it (AEP and such won't build something they can't profit off of, esp. at a 20 year ROI).
Not only that, but you say 400 square miles is enough for all our energy expenditures? I think you missed a decimal place, son. If you consider 1.4 square miles powers 10,000 homes (40 MW) then we could conclude that (and this is also not a great assumption) 400 square miles would produce 11,428 MW, correct? The Department of Energy shows that 237,054,631 MW-hours were used last year, averaging out (again a not-so-great assumption) to a draw of (8766 hours per year) 27042 MW....slightly more than 11,428.
Not only that, but you must also consider the peak capacity of the grid. Power use is not constant - we have a nameplate capacity here in the US of about 1,067,010 MW, and we're still increasing that as fast as possible. Just trying to "inject some common sense".
Isn't 1.4 square miles of land a bit ridiculous for 10,000 homes? I mean - that's a powerplant half the size of my hometown to power an area not even twice as big. Solar technology still has a long way to go in terms of energy density. At least with coal there are some options to make it really quite a clean, reliable process - and for now, it's also a good way to get the US off of foreign fuel sources (we have enough to power the entire country for the next 150 years easily). See these links:
I'm not a Mac user or anything, but if they're right about this trend, I say more power to 'em. I say anyone stepping up and taking a swing at Microsoft's market share is a good thing since it will drive innovation and value rather than good ol' incumbency.
From my experience, Linux isn't significantly harder to pick up than the next OS. In the end, it seems like it would be better suited to adapt it to the many different applications businesses might demand from it than something as standardized as Mac O/S.
Honestly, beyond wwriting letters to our members of congress, what control does the American public have over this sort of thing? It's getting to the point that I feel rather powerless over my government. Last I looked, we were supposed to control them, not the other way around.
While it may not be *how the world works*, it's certainly how it *should* work. Sure, there are unions that make it hard to fire people, people sleep with their bosses, but I think the heart of the matter isn't to maintain the status quo, but to change it. I think that's the point of the article. Since things are that way (and you sure don't sound too happy about it), shouldn't we be working to find a better mode of operation?
I've worked in American manufacturing for a long time now, and the problem that I see is exactly this - people aren't paid for what they're worth to the company, or to attract certain skill sets, but because their union agreement states that's how much they deserve because of x years of service. Wonder why outsourcing exists? Please.
Why would GE sit on this technology? If anything, they'd want to be the *first* to do this, and to do it so quickly as to destroy the competition.
People need to realize that corporations aren't all bad - that technology does, in fact, take time to develop. Personally, I think a ban on incandescents is the most ridiculous thing I've heard of, and it scares me that the government should even think it's their business to dabble in such a way.
I know the fluorescent and incandescent production processes in and out. While there's mercury created due to power production from incandescents, do you see us banning SUV's because they, in turn, produce more greenhouse gases than a pontiac vibe? Please! I think a little more logic needs to be demanded from our legislators. What about the mercury created from shipping CFL's from overseas? What about the added energy and materials in a CFL? Has that been assessed? If you have doubts, I dare you to find a CFL that doesn't have 'Made in China' stamped on it. Just try. None are made here in the good ol' U.S. of A.
In the end, it turns out that Average Joe is simply ill-informed, and the government and lobbyists are cashing in on it. When's the last time you questioned data and did the background digging to actually prove your point?
What if, you ask? Son, contemplating these fantasies of waking up next to strange, beautiful women is a quick ticket to dementia. We're engineers and scientists, not congressmen and celebrities. While strange, beautiful women may be intriguing, thinking outside those cubicle walls is dangerous thinking. You'd best get back to your programming, and focus on the real world, not this 'women' of which you speak.
Sure, I think it's met its match, until firefox dominates the market share and writers of malware, viruses, etc. begin focusing on it instead of IE. The real question is, how well will firefox respond to a barrage of such people if and when that happens?
I'm a mechanical engineer for a glass plant, and we have leveling lasers with microprocessors built into the sides of our furnaces (typically >1500 C) - they have a case with a water jacket built around them, and the water is cycled through a forced-air convective system outside. The lasers are typically kept at about 45 C with no problem. Firms do exist to design such systems.
By 'just started' I mean 'earlier this afternoon', so there's really nothing there, but the current address is openmechanics.netcipia.net -- if you know of a free wiki host that doesn't require outside users to register, let me know, I'd like this to be pretty open. The registration is free, btw. At any rate, there's really nothing there but a pseudo-mission statement, but I'm eager to build the thing, so stop on by, drop an email addy and we'll get started!
Well, by 'just started' I mean 'earlier this afternoon', so there's really nothing there, but the current address is openmechanics.netcipia.net -- if you know of a free wiki host that doesn't require outside users to register, let me know, I'd like this to be pretty open. The registration is free, btw. At any rate, there's really nothing there but a pseudo-mission statement, but I'm eager to build the thing, so stop on by, drop an email addy and we'll get started!
Neat to see open source applied to something outside of software. I've recently started a wiki for mechanical design, and I'm interested to see what collaboration on such a project is like. Anyone here done that before?
Honestly, I'm not a funded skeptic (although I wouldn't mind a few bucks for speaking my own piece) but some of the data collection methods (I'll attach a link when I get home, I can't find it here at work) for global warming have error ranges that pretty well invalidate the data. For example, there are instances of temperature data being derived by the date upon which grapes were harvested in a given year - it seems that science is being driven by politics and seeking the conclusions it wants to come to instead of the other way around.
I don't doubt for a minute that the globe might be warming up, but nobody has really hard data that shows that it is truly due to greenhouse gas emissions. Honestly, if we really knew the answer, would there be *this* much debate? I'm all for going green, and hey, it might do some good, but science hasn't much shown either way an effective relationship.
I could show you data that would just as easily say that global warming is due to my age.
I've had a Zen:Vision (not the Zen:Vision M that looks like the ipod, but the one with the huge screen) since early this past summer, and I love it! The screen is incredible, and it's easy to load/unload. The one drawback is that I have to boot into windows to load it up (I haven 't found a feasible linux app for it)...I agree about the music org., I have about 10000 songs on it, so getting around can take a bit, but given that I usually have the 'Random 'Play All' enabled, it doesn't much matter for me. I'd say the nices feature is being able to plug in my CompactFlash and upload pictures, esp. for reviewing/space purposes. On a month or two-long-trip to Ghana, it's nice to have something to offload pictures to.
I think Creative's stuff is largely overlooked. I've enjoyed a lot of their products for quite a while now, esp. their VERY simple players (I use a Zen Nano 512 for exercising)...nothing more than a usb drive that can decode mp3's and wma's.
I'll be more interested to see how the Zune does after a period of say, six months to a fiscal year. I can't say I'd be surprised one way or the other, but IMHO a month or two of sales data isn't enough for me to see whether a product is effective or not. How does this compare to Ipod's sales its first month?
While I can't speak towards designing a user interface, I must say that in all my design (primarily mechanical systems), KISS is the method, tried and true. If anyone tells you any different, THEY'RE SELLING SOMETHING.
From my point of view as a user, I haven't regularly used yahoo or msn for ages. I can get information I need through Google's interface much faster, primarily because it is so simple.
Slashdot Mirror
You need to be careful when doing straight calculations like that - the big problem with lead-acid batteries is that their discharge is highly nonlinear. In other words if I have a 32 amp hour, 12-volt battery, if I drain it very slowly (a few amps only), I'll get the equivalent of 32 amp-hours out of it. If I were to draw, say, 32 amps out of it, it would be dead in much less (probably around 35 minutes') time. There are much larger capacities available, but the big problem with this is that A.) The batteries may be affordable, but the control systems are definitely not and B.) the conversion from DC to AC will also kill your storage efficiency. We ran into some of these problems trying to design such a system for a house in a developing community in Ghana.
How soon before we're not allowed to make derogatory remarks about Congress itself, or the president? I was under the impression that the government and everything it owns, collectively, belong to the American People, but apparently I'm wrong.
Actually, it's more oxygen. The idea is that the alveoli can absorb enough oxygen from one breath to last for more compressions than was previously though. Up until about two years ago the accepted practice was 15 compressions/2 breaths, now it's 30 much harder, faster compressions/2 breaths. The idea behind it is to get more blood to flow to the brain and provide more oxygen.
And in case you've never had to do it, one round of CPR at an actual pace will exhaust you if you do it right. The new methodology is pretty intense.
Oops, seems I missed a decimal or two myself - should be 40,000 square miles, and sales last year for the electric industry were 3,815,668,880 WM-hours. To correct the calculations, we're looking at 435,280 MW of capacity compared to a total generation capacity (for the solar system covering a third of New Mexico) of 1,142,800 MW (which does, in fact provide for current US consumption, massive transmission problems aside). In 20 years, however, our consumption will double, according to current trends (also at doe.gov). Say goodbye to the Grand Canyon. Sorry for the miscalcs.
Those are a lot of assumptions, most of which aren't very god - take a look at trends in the cost of producing and using solar power on a large scale over the past twenty years, and explain just how your numbers check out. Not only that, but we must also consider that after 20 years, the chemicals in the panels break down and thus, the panel must be replaced. Since the life of the panel (20 years) is also its ROI, you'll never profit from it (AEP and such won't build something they can't profit off of, esp. at a 20 year ROI).
Not only that, but you say 400 square miles is enough for all our energy expenditures? I think you missed a decimal place, son. If you consider 1.4 square miles powers 10,000 homes (40 MW) then we could conclude that (and this is also not a great assumption) 400 square miles would produce 11,428 MW, correct? The Department of Energy shows that 237,054,631 MW-hours were used last year, averaging out (again a not-so-great assumption) to a draw of (8766 hours per year) 27042 MW....slightly more than 11,428.
Not only that, but you must also consider the peak capacity of the grid. Power use is not constant - we have a nameplate capacity here in the US of about 1,067,010 MW, and we're still increasing that as fast as possible. Just trying to "inject some common sense".
Isn't 1.4 square miles of land a bit ridiculous for 10,000 homes? I mean - that's a powerplant half the size of my hometown to power an area not even twice as big. Solar technology still has a long way to go in terms of energy density. At least with coal there are some options to make it really quite a clean, reliable process - and for now, it's also a good way to get the US off of foreign fuel sources (we have enough to power the entire country for the next 150 years easily). See these links:
Fischer-Tropsch Reactions
The Ohio Coal Research Center at Ohio University, and their biosequestration project (bacteria eats the SOx and NOx out of the emissions, down to the PPB level (PDF warning)
Coal Gasification plants are going in in Ohio and elsewhere in the country. - PDF Warning
I think it's good to see not only someone continuing to fight back, but that we can make a difference as a technical community (hopefully).
/2cents
2cents I also think that the RIAA and everyone from them can fornicate themselves with an iron stick.
I can see the troll/flamebait mods coming already.
I'm not a Mac user or anything, but if they're right about this trend, I say more power to 'em. I say anyone stepping up and taking a swing at Microsoft's market share is a good thing since it will drive innovation and value rather than good ol' incumbency.
...but I don't want to spend a lot of money.
From my experience, Linux isn't significantly harder to pick up than the next OS. In the end, it seems like it would be better suited to adapt it to the many different applications businesses might demand from it than something as standardized as Mac O/S.
Honestly, beyond wwriting letters to our members of congress, what control does the American public have over this sort of thing? It's getting to the point that I feel rather powerless over my government. Last I looked, we were supposed to control them, not the other way around.
While it may not be *how the world works*, it's certainly how it *should* work. Sure, there are unions that make it hard to fire people, people sleep with their bosses, but I think the heart of the matter isn't to maintain the status quo, but to change it. I think that's the point of the article. Since things are that way (and you sure don't sound too happy about it), shouldn't we be working to find a better mode of operation?
I've worked in American manufacturing for a long time now, and the problem that I see is exactly this - people aren't paid for what they're worth to the company, or to attract certain skill sets, but because their union agreement states that's how much they deserve because of x years of service. Wonder why outsourcing exists? Please.
Why would GE sit on this technology? If anything, they'd want to be the *first* to do this, and to do it so quickly as to destroy the competition.
People need to realize that corporations aren't all bad - that technology does, in fact, take time to develop. Personally, I think a ban on incandescents is the most ridiculous thing I've heard of, and it scares me that the government should even think it's their business to dabble in such a way.
I know the fluorescent and incandescent production processes in and out. While there's mercury created due to power production from incandescents, do you see us banning SUV's because they, in turn, produce more greenhouse gases than a pontiac vibe? Please! I think a little more logic needs to be demanded from our legislators. What about the mercury created from shipping CFL's from overseas? What about the added energy and materials in a CFL? Has that been assessed? If you have doubts, I dare you to find a CFL that doesn't have 'Made in China' stamped on it. Just try. None are made here in the good ol' U.S. of A.
In the end, it turns out that Average Joe is simply ill-informed, and the government and lobbyists are cashing in on it. When's the last time you questioned data and did the background digging to actually prove your point?
Just my two cents.
What if, you ask? Son, contemplating these fantasies of waking up next to strange, beautiful women is a quick ticket to dementia. We're engineers and scientists, not congressmen and celebrities. While strange, beautiful women may be intriguing, thinking outside those cubicle walls is dangerous thinking. You'd best get back to your programming, and focus on the real world, not this 'women' of which you speak.
'...He loved Big Brother. The End.'
Sure, I think it's met its match, until firefox dominates the market share and writers of malware, viruses, etc. begin focusing on it instead of IE. The real question is, how well will firefox respond to a barrage of such people if and when that happens?
I'm a mechanical engineer for a glass plant, and we have leveling lasers with microprocessors built into the sides of our furnaces (typically >1500 C) - they have a case with a water jacket built around them, and the water is cycled through a forced-air convective system outside. The lasers are typically kept at about 45 C with no problem. Firms do exist to design such systems.
By 'just started' I mean 'earlier this afternoon', so there's really nothing there, but the current address is openmechanics.netcipia.net -- if you know of a free wiki host that doesn't require outside users to register, let me know, I'd like this to be pretty open. The registration is free, btw. At any rate, there's really nothing there but a pseudo-mission statement, but I'm eager to build the thing, so stop on by, drop an email addy and we'll get started!
Well, by 'just started' I mean 'earlier this afternoon', so there's really nothing there, but the current address is openmechanics.netcipia.net -- if you know of a free wiki host that doesn't require outside users to register, let me know, I'd like this to be pretty open. The registration is free, btw. At any rate, there's really nothing there but a pseudo-mission statement, but I'm eager to build the thing, so stop on by, drop an email addy and we'll get started!
Neat to see open source applied to something outside of software. I've recently started a wiki for mechanical design, and I'm interested to see what collaboration on such a project is like. Anyone here done that before?
Honestly, I'm not a funded skeptic (although I wouldn't mind a few bucks for speaking my own piece) but some of the data collection methods (I'll attach a link when I get home, I can't find it here at work) for global warming have error ranges that pretty well invalidate the data. For example, there are instances of temperature data being derived by the date upon which grapes were harvested in a given year - it seems that science is being driven by politics and seeking the conclusions it wants to come to instead of the other way around. I don't doubt for a minute that the globe might be warming up, but nobody has really hard data that shows that it is truly due to greenhouse gas emissions. Honestly, if we really knew the answer, would there be *this* much debate? I'm all for going green, and hey, it might do some good, but science hasn't much shown either way an effective relationship. I could show you data that would just as easily say that global warming is due to my age.
I've had a Zen:Vision (not the Zen:Vision M that looks like the ipod, but the one with the huge screen) since early this past summer, and I love it! The screen is incredible, and it's easy to load/unload. The one drawback is that I have to boot into windows to load it up (I haven 't found a feasible linux app for it)...I agree about the music org., I have about 10000 songs on it, so getting around can take a bit, but given that I usually have the 'Random 'Play All' enabled, it doesn't much matter for me. I'd say the nices feature is being able to plug in my CompactFlash and upload pictures, esp. for reviewing/space purposes. On a month or two-long-trip to Ghana, it's nice to have something to offload pictures to.
I think Creative's stuff is largely overlooked. I've enjoyed a lot of their products for quite a while now, esp. their VERY simple players (I use a Zen Nano 512 for exercising)...nothing more than a usb drive that can decode mp3's and wma's.
I'll be more interested to see how the Zune does after a period of say, six months to a fiscal year. I can't say I'd be surprised one way or the other, but IMHO a month or two of sales data isn't enough for me to see whether a product is effective or not. How does this compare to Ipod's sales its first month?
While I can't speak towards designing a user interface, I must say that in all my design (primarily mechanical systems), KISS is the method, tried and true. If anyone tells you any different, THEY'RE SELLING SOMETHING. From my point of view as a user, I haven't regularly used yahoo or msn for ages. I can get information I need through Google's interface much faster, primarily because it is so simple.
Heh, unless you're at Ohio University...fake weapons are a quick ticket to the Nelsonville drunk tank with the other 500 arrests :)