Parapsychology theories have been given every chance. They've been tested under proper laboratory conditions according to the scientific method. They've been tested again and again, over and over, given far more chances than any ordinary scientist might expect to be given. The tests were scientific, and the theories failed those tests.
Hanging on to disproven theories is what makes parapsychology a non-science. The -ology suffix is just a desperate attempt to associate with proven laws of nature. Science is right to give crazy ideas a chance, but also right to shun them when they are emphatically shown to be wrong.
And when the pseudo-scientists persist in dressing up their mumbo-jumbo, quackery, and bullshit as respectable ideas as, you can forgive the real scientists for getting a little bit cross.
For "unconventional science" read "mumbo jumbo". Parapsychology does not qualify as science, unconventional or otherwise. It only qualifies as quackery and bullshit.
An impressive balancing act, but the really interesting thing is to see how Atlas stumbles on objects which shift under its weight. It vividy shows the need for flexible feet on a biped. That's going to be an interesting engineering puzzle to solve.
True enough, but I don't think we're ready to design the next big accelerator anyway. The science is at an impasse, and these machines are too big and costly to build speculatively. What we need to do is keep developing various novel technologies, including laser and dual-beam wakefield acceleration as well as muon sources, and hope fervently that new discoveries at the LHC will soon show us the way we should go next. If the LHC does not discover anything beyond the Higgs, then I think particle physics may be in for some dark ages.
There are also ideas to build a circular muon collider. Muons are similar to electrons so give a nice clean signal in the detectors, but being 200 times heavier than electrons they lose much less energy as they circulate around a ring-shaped path.
The problem is muons are unstable, with a half-life of just 2 micro-seconds. But if you can collect them fast enough and accelerate them to near-light-speed, their lifetime increases due to time dilation. The nearer they get to light-speed the longer they last for, and it's thought that it would be feasible to get them going fast enough that they would last for a useful amount of time.
There are lots of advantages to circular accelerators: You can re-use the expensive accelerating sections thousands of times over by recirculating the beam; the beam itself is re-used over and over (only a tiny fraction of the particle are lost on each collision); and most importantly you can install more than one detector. Having two independent measurements is very important in establishing the reliability of any results.
Why? He stopped when the car said he should, got out, and was fine.
We have no idea how bad the impact was. It might not have felt very serious at the time, and presumably the battery did not actually start overheating until the second warning. In any case switching off the "ignition" would not have prevented the battery from catching fire.
Fair point. But even at 130 miles per 19 kWh, there's some way to go before you rival the energy efficiency of the best diesel cars. BTW Honda's own figures are much more pessimistic - any idea why that is?
It's not that I especially like diesel as a source of energy. The fumes are unpleasant and unhealthy, and as a cyclist I breath in more than my fair share. I just think it's important to be aware of the true impact of electric transport.
Unreasoned belief... hatred when confronted with other ideas... do you have a special book too?
Go back to whatever you know about and let the real engineers discuss energy use
C'mon, one last chance. This thread is getting old now. The subject is "energy efficiency of electric cars",
and to give you something to shoot for I've revised my calculation:
Since the Tesla makes so much of its ecological credentials, I'll compare it with a Toyota Prius T3.
I'll also take into account Tesla's charger efficiency (80% reported by Tesla owners), and use better numbers for battery lifetime (500 full cycles) and power station efficiency (33% in the US).
The Tesla-S consumption at the socket is 814 kJ/km, and battery manufacture is 543 kJ/km. The heat energy required to generate that much electricity is 4.47 MJ/km, or 6.81 mBtu/mile.
Meanwhile the Pruis T3 claims 60.3 miles per US-gallon, which is equivalent to 1.40 MJ/km or 2.14 mBtu/mile. That's three times better than the EV!!! (No, I don't include engine manufacture, same as I don't include the manufacture of the electric engine and regenerative braking system the EV uses.)
If you're interested in environmental science and would like to improve on my calculation then you're very welcome. However your fact-less attack smacks of religious fanaticism, and that's not ok.
Too many people are getting rich by making environmental claims that don't stack up. Resources are wasted on technologies that don't work, delaying progress towards solving our energy problems. We need less hype and rhetoric, and more careful analysis.
if you are fully cycling the pack fully every day you are doing it wrong
How you use the battery doesn't change its lifespan, because wear is proportional to use. If you drive 10% of the EV's range and subsequently recharge the battery by 10% of its capacity, the impact is equivalent to 10% of one full cycle. So you get 10,000 10% cycles instead of 1000 100% cycles, which corresponds to the same number of miles driven before you have to replace the battery.
Re. 30mph testing: I'm talking about normal driving circumstances for both cars. Running at 30mph continuous will dramatically improve the mileage of both cars, but it's a totally irrelevant scenario.
Re. fuel transport: Yes, that should be taken into account -- for the power stations also. They need to transport their fuel too. Extraction and infrastructure should also be accounted for. I'd love to see the figures.
Re. diesel mileage: Remember I'm using UK gallons. My own car, a 150 hp 1.9 ton 4WD, gets about 50-52 mpg (city driving, measured). There are plenty of more economical vehicles closer in size to the Tesla.
Re. battery manufacture: the data come from a Japanese study by Ishihara et al., and accounts for recycling.
Right. Of course you can say exactly the same thing about transporting fuel (and infrastructure generally) for electricity generation. I've also not accounted for the battery charger, which apparently has a "peak efficiency of 92%" (no information on the average efficiency), and I've been rather generous with the power-station efficiency (55% losses would be more realistic). The point is that the claim that electric cars are dramatically more efficient is false.
You could broaden the argument and look at environmental damage generally, including the ecological effects of copper and lithium mines. Of course this is incredibly difficult to quantify, which is why I stuck to a simple energy comparison.
Running a car on energy from the electric grid is greener than running on gasoline, even if your power comes from coal plants.
Not true. In city driving Tesla claim a 292 mile range off a 85kWh battery, or 651kJ/km. Adding in battery manufacture and allowing a generous 1000 cycles, that goes up to 923kJ/km. Allowing for losses in electricity generation (40% at best) and transmission (~7%), the overall consumption is 1653kJ/km.
A medium size diesel gets about 60mpg (UK gallons), equivalent to 1690kJ/km. The difference is just 2%.
That's not right. In city driving Tesla claim a 292 mile range off a 85kWh battery, or 651kJ/km. Adding in battery manufacture and allowing a generous 1000 cycles, that goes up to 923kJ/km. Allowing for losses in electricity generation (40% at best) and transmission (~7%), the overall consumption is 1653kJ/km.
A medium size diesel gets about 60mpg (UK gallons), equivalent to 1690kJ/km. The difference is just 2%.
The point still stands: that drone looks really small to be carrying a 2kg payload, especially over any distance (when it would also have to carry large heavy batteries). Not to mention all the safety technology casually referred to in the article: backup batteries, delivery crane, laser range-finders, sonar, and yet more batteries to power the collision avoidance systems.
TFA does not demonstrate anything other than a hex-copter carrying a probably-empty box.
The problem is that people are being taught Shakespeare without seeing the plays. The books are just scripts - useful for studying the play, but they were never meant to stand on their own. Without the actors the lines are dry and uninteresting.
Even a video doesn't convey why Shakespeare is regarded as one of the greatest English writers. His plays were meant to be watched in a theatre, where actors can captivate the audience and convey their story. Good actors will make the story clear and accessible to anyone, as Shakespeare intended, in spite of the old-fashioned and sometimes-difficult language. Only then, once you've seen and understood the play can you start to study it in more detail.
The patent sounds technically dubious, but it's not even addressing the real problem.
Modern reactor designs can't fail catastrophically. Not even if you override all the safety systems, as at Chernobyl. Not even if you stop the cooling as at Fukushima. And people are working on even newer designs which don't even require a critical mass (entirely eliminating the risk of uncontrolled shutdowns), and ways to destroy the radioactive waste inside the core (eliminating the problems of decomissioning and waste storage).
This is why we absolutely need to maintain research into nuclear technologies. The bad reputation of old reactors is, to some extent, deserved. But the old problems are being solved and the promises of clean, safe energy are starting to come true. Now is not the time to turn our backs on nuclear energy.
The trouble is coal-fired power stations emit more radiation than nuclear reactors do. From the article: "fly ash emitted by a power plant [...] burning coal for electricity carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy." That statistic is from 1978, and nuclear reactor technology has greatly improved since then (and continues to improve).
We used to have home computers with less computing power than an ATmega328, so get off my lawn!
...which also didn't run Linux. But I'm curious: even if it were possible, what would you do with Linux on an Arduino?
BTW, an ATmega644 - a chip very similar to the processors used in Arduinos - was used in one of the early Raspberry Pi prototypes (if one can call a device utterly different to the final product a prototype). It didn't run Linux either.
Interesting numbers. Just to compare, here's the energy densities of lithium-polymer batteries and super-capacitors, taking the values for best easily-available components I could find.
LiPo: 168 W.h/kg, 370 W.h/l
Super-cap: 5.1 W.h/kg, 6.6 W.h/l (I'm being slightly generous to the capacitor here, by counting the energy to discharge it to zero volts. In practice that last bit of energy will not be usable.)
The volumetric figures are most critical for phones, and in those terms batteries are 56x better than super-capacitors. So an improvement of 3x is interesting, but there's a lot more work to do.
This analysis is very dubious, and the shadow analysis is just wrong. The people are in shadow -- they are not lit by the sun -- so you wouldn't expect the shadows on their faces to be determined by the sun. In fact they are illuminated by the sunlit wall, so the shadows are perfectly consistent.
To be sure the lighting is odd, and I wouldn't be surprised if the photographer had lifted the lighting on and around the people. But this is not proven by the analysis, and in any case I don't think that kind of alteration should be disallowed.
Finally the fact that the same group of people are visible together in a completely different photo is surely evidence that the original scene is highly plausible. In fact it becomes less probable that they were grouped and photographed separately, and the composite theory (for which I see no evidence anyway) becomes positively unlikely.
Time for a quote:
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. -- Franklin
This pithy quote comes up a lot in connection with civil liberties. The trouble is Benjamin Franklin wasn't talking about civil liberties, he was talking about self governance. A moment's thought would show that his words make no sense as a slogan for individual freedoms.
Since the beginning of civilisation we have had laws and people to enforce them: we have given up certain carefully chosen liberties in exchange for the much greater liberty of safety. The idea that safety and liberty of the individual are separate concepts is just wrong. They are both part of the same scale. Our task as citizens of a democracy is to find the most suitable balance.
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Parapsychology theories have been given every chance. They've been tested under proper laboratory conditions according to the scientific method. They've been tested again and again, over and over, given far more chances than any ordinary scientist might expect to be given. The tests were scientific, and the theories failed those tests.
Hanging on to disproven theories is what makes parapsychology a non-science. The -ology suffix is just a desperate attempt to associate with proven laws of nature. Science is right to give crazy ideas a chance, but also right to shun them when they are emphatically shown to be wrong.
And when the pseudo-scientists persist in dressing up their mumbo-jumbo, quackery, and bullshit as respectable ideas as, you can forgive the real scientists for getting a little bit cross.
For "unconventional science" read "mumbo jumbo". Parapsychology does not qualify as science, unconventional or otherwise. It only qualifies as quackery and bullshit.
An impressive balancing act, but the really interesting thing is to see how Atlas stumbles on objects which shift under its weight. It vividy shows the need for flexible feet on a biped. That's going to be an interesting engineering puzzle to solve.
True enough, but I don't think we're ready to design the next big accelerator anyway. The science is at an impasse, and these machines are too big and costly to build speculatively. What we need to do is keep developing various novel technologies, including laser and dual-beam wakefield acceleration as well as muon sources, and hope fervently that new discoveries at the LHC will soon show us the way we should go next. If the LHC does not discover anything beyond the Higgs, then I think particle physics may be in for some dark ages.
There are also ideas to build a circular muon collider. Muons are similar to electrons so give a nice clean signal in the detectors, but being 200 times heavier than electrons they lose much less energy as they circulate around a ring-shaped path.
The problem is muons are unstable, with a half-life of just 2 micro-seconds. But if you can collect them fast enough and accelerate them to near-light-speed, their lifetime increases due to time dilation. The nearer they get to light-speed the longer they last for, and it's thought that it would be feasible to get them going fast enough that they would last for a useful amount of time.
There are lots of advantages to circular accelerators: You can re-use the expensive accelerating sections thousands of times over by recirculating the beam; the beam itself is re-used over and over (only a tiny fraction of the particle are lost on each collision); and most importantly you can install more than one detector. Having two independent measurements is very important in establishing the reliability of any results.
The guy is an idiot.
Why? He stopped when the car said he should, got out, and was fine.
We have no idea how bad the impact was. It might not have felt very serious at the time, and presumably the battery did not actually start overheating until the second warning. In any case switching off the "ignition" would not have prevented the battery from catching fire.
Fair point. But even at 130 miles per 19 kWh, there's some way to go before you rival the energy efficiency of the best diesel cars. BTW Honda's own figures are much more pessimistic - any idea why that is?
It's not that I especially like diesel as a source of energy. The fumes are unpleasant and unhealthy, and as a cyclist I breath in more than my fair share. I just think it's important to be aware of the true impact of electric transport.
From your link: battery lifetime is 300-500 100% cycles, or 3750-4700 10% cycles.
Piss off fanboy. We don't want you or need you.
Unreasoned belief ... hatred when confronted with other ideas ... do you have a special book too?
Go back to whatever you know about and let the real engineers discuss energy use
C'mon, one last chance. This thread is getting old now. The subject is "energy efficiency of electric cars", and to give you something to shoot for I've revised my calculation:
Since the Tesla makes so much of its ecological credentials, I'll compare it with a Toyota Prius T3. I'll also take into account Tesla's charger efficiency (80% reported by Tesla owners), and use better numbers for battery lifetime (500 full cycles) and power station efficiency (33% in the US).
The Tesla-S consumption at the socket is 814 kJ/km, and battery manufacture is 543 kJ/km. The heat energy required to generate that much electricity is 4.47 MJ/km, or 6.81 mBtu/mile.
Meanwhile the Pruis T3 claims 60.3 miles per US-gallon, which is equivalent to 1.40 MJ/km or 2.14 mBtu/mile. That's three times better than the EV!!!
(No, I don't include engine manufacture, same as I don't include the manufacture of the electric engine and regenerative braking system the EV uses.)
Off you go.
If you're interested in environmental science and would like to improve on my calculation then you're very welcome. However your fact-less attack smacks of religious fanaticism, and that's not ok.
Too many people are getting rich by making environmental claims that don't stack up. Resources are wasted on technologies that don't work, delaying progress towards solving our energy problems. We need less hype and rhetoric, and more careful analysis.
if you are fully cycling the pack fully every day you are doing it wrong
How you use the battery doesn't change its lifespan, because wear is proportional to use. If you drive 10% of the EV's range and subsequently recharge the battery by 10% of its capacity, the impact is equivalent to 10% of one full cycle. So you get 10,000 10% cycles instead of 1000 100% cycles, which corresponds to the same number of miles driven before you have to replace the battery.
Re. 30mph testing: I'm talking about normal driving circumstances for both cars. Running at 30mph continuous will dramatically improve the mileage of both cars, but it's a totally irrelevant scenario.
Re. fuel transport: Yes, that should be taken into account -- for the power stations also. They need to transport their fuel too. Extraction and infrastructure should also be accounted for. I'd love to see the figures.
Re. diesel mileage: Remember I'm using UK gallons. My own car, a 150 hp 1.9 ton 4WD, gets about 50-52 mpg (city driving, measured). There are plenty of more economical vehicles closer in size to the Tesla.
Re. battery manufacture: the data come from a Japanese study by Ishihara et al., and accounts for recycling.
Right. Of course you can say exactly the same thing about transporting fuel (and infrastructure generally) for electricity generation. I've also not accounted for the battery charger, which apparently has a "peak efficiency of 92%" (no information on the average efficiency), and I've been rather generous with the power-station efficiency (55% losses would be more realistic). The point is that the claim that electric cars are dramatically more efficient is false.
You could broaden the argument and look at environmental damage generally, including the ecological effects of copper and lithium mines. Of course this is incredibly difficult to quantify, which is why I stuck to a simple energy comparison.
Running a car on energy from the electric grid is greener than running on gasoline, even if your power comes from coal plants.
Not true. In city driving Tesla claim a 292 mile range off a 85kWh battery, or 651kJ/km. Adding in battery manufacture and allowing a generous 1000 cycles, that goes up to 923kJ/km. Allowing for losses in electricity generation (40% at best) and transmission (~7%), the overall consumption is 1653kJ/km.
A medium size diesel gets about 60mpg (UK gallons), equivalent to 1690kJ/km. The difference is just 2%.
the tesla uses energy over 4x more efficiently
That's not right. In city driving Tesla claim a 292 mile range off a 85kWh battery, or 651kJ/km. Adding in battery manufacture and allowing a generous 1000 cycles, that goes up to 923kJ/km. Allowing for losses in electricity generation (40% at best) and transmission (~7%), the overall consumption is 1653kJ/km.
A medium size diesel gets about 60mpg (UK gallons), equivalent to 1690kJ/km. The difference is just 2%.
The point still stands: that drone looks really small to be carrying a 2kg payload, especially over any distance (when it would also have to carry large heavy batteries). Not to mention all the safety technology casually referred to in the article: backup batteries, delivery crane, laser range-finders, sonar, and yet more batteries to power the collision avoidance systems.
TFA does not demonstrate anything other than a hex-copter carrying a probably-empty box.
When in remote places like Mongolia, most parts of Africa or even Germany, it can be difficult to acquire wine
I can see you how you got from German wine to urine.
The problem is that people are being taught Shakespeare without seeing the plays. The books are just scripts - useful for studying the play, but they were never meant to stand on their own. Without the actors the lines are dry and uninteresting.
Even a video doesn't convey why Shakespeare is regarded as one of the greatest English writers. His plays were meant to be watched in a theatre, where actors can captivate the audience and convey their story. Good actors will make the story clear and accessible to anyone, as Shakespeare intended, in spite of the old-fashioned and sometimes-difficult language. Only then, once you've seen and understood the play can you start to study it in more detail.
The patent sounds technically dubious, but it's not even addressing the real problem.
Modern reactor designs can't fail catastrophically. Not even if you override all the safety systems, as at Chernobyl. Not even if you stop the cooling as at Fukushima. And people are working on even newer designs which don't even require a critical mass (entirely eliminating the risk of uncontrolled shutdowns), and ways to destroy the radioactive waste inside the core (eliminating the problems of decomissioning and waste storage).
This is why we absolutely need to maintain research into nuclear technologies. The bad reputation of old reactors is, to some extent, deserved. But the old problems are being solved and the promises of clean, safe energy are starting to come true. Now is not the time to turn our backs on nuclear energy.
The trouble is coal-fired power stations emit more radiation than nuclear reactors do. From the article: "fly ash emitted by a power plant [...] burning coal for electricity carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy." That statistic is from 1978, and nuclear reactor technology has greatly improved since then (and continues to improve).
We used to have home computers with less computing power than an ATmega328, so get off my lawn!
...which also didn't run Linux. But I'm curious: even if it were possible, what would you do with Linux on an Arduino?
BTW, an ATmega644 - a chip very similar to the processors used in Arduinos - was used in one of the early Raspberry Pi prototypes (if one can call a device utterly different to the final product a prototype). It didn't run Linux either.
Forgot to mention self-discharge rates: 0.007 C/day for LiPo batteries, and 0.08 C/day for super-caps (12x greater)
Interesting numbers. Just to compare, here's the energy densities of lithium-polymer batteries and super-capacitors, taking the values for best easily-available components I could find.
LiPo: 168 W.h/kg, 370 W.h/l
Super-cap: 5.1 W.h/kg, 6.6 W.h/l (I'm being slightly generous to the capacitor here, by counting the energy to discharge it to zero volts. In practice that last bit of energy will not be usable.)
The volumetric figures are most critical for phones, and in those terms batteries are 56x better than super-capacitors. So an improvement of 3x is interesting, but there's a lot more work to do.
This analysis is very dubious, and the shadow analysis is just wrong. The people are in shadow -- they are not lit by the sun -- so you wouldn't expect the shadows on their faces to be determined by the sun. In fact they are illuminated by the sunlit wall, so the shadows are perfectly consistent.
To be sure the lighting is odd, and I wouldn't be surprised if the photographer had lifted the lighting on and around the people. But this is not proven by the analysis, and in any case I don't think that kind of alteration should be disallowed.
Finally the fact that the same group of people are visible together in a completely different photo is surely evidence that the original scene is highly plausible. In fact it becomes less probable that they were grouped and photographed separately, and the composite theory (for which I see no evidence anyway) becomes positively unlikely.
Time for a quote: They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. -- Franklin
This pithy quote comes up a lot in connection with civil liberties. The trouble is Benjamin Franklin wasn't talking about civil liberties, he was talking about self governance. A moment's thought would show that his words make no sense as a slogan for individual freedoms.
Since the beginning of civilisation we have had laws and people to enforce them: we have given up certain carefully chosen liberties in exchange for the much greater liberty of safety. The idea that safety and liberty of the individual are separate concepts is just wrong. They are both part of the same scale. Our task as citizens of a democracy is to find the most suitable balance.