Energy density of lithium batteries: 1 megajoule/kg Energy density of gasoline: 45 megajoules/kg
You forgot a few things:
a) Electric engines are on average about 4 times as efficient as petrol ones. If we use your numbers that then implies you need 11kg of battery to replace a kg of petrol.
b) Electric engines are much lighter than ICEs, so some of the weight gain is compensated for this way.
c) Electric cars in principle needs no transmission, gearbox, catalyst, exhaust system, raidator, starter engine etc... that knocks off a heck of a lot of weight.
Basically when you take into consideration the weight reduction from the much simpler drive train of an EV it is ore than enough to add in hundreds of kilograms of batteries. The problem is cost, not weight/energy ratio.
I asked all the questions -- is it necessary, is it recommended, why or why not, etc.
Well here is one you did not consider. About one in every few thousand babies born is transsexual. That is, the neurological gender of their brain does not match the apparent sex of their body. Typically these people will desire surgical "correction" of their genitals latter in life, and availability of skin is one of the key variables that impact the outcome. Now I realize this is a rare occurrence, but it does happen, and since I'm transsexual myself and thus know just how shit it can be, I can only hope that neither of your sons will turn out to be transsexual. Then again, with sufficiently many babies being circ'd it follows that it will happen to some.
I also imagine it may have an impact on other types of re-constructive surgery, should your sons ever have the misfortune of being hurt in an accident or something.
Tbh with the Tesla breaking 500km the main obstacle for Electric Vehicles is no longer storage capacity of the batteries but rather the recharge time and battery price. LiFeP batteries have short recharge times ( 5 minuets or so ) and are starting to come down in price, so the big issue right now is designing an electric interface that can safely deliver the 200kW or so that would be needed to charge the a Tesla-equivalent 50kWh battery pack in less than 15 minutes. The standard proposed in Europe supports up to 43kW so there's some way to go still, but theoretically if you just developed the EU's proposal to support 100kW then using 2 cables would get you down to a 15min charge time.
It's a bit of an engineering problem to make such an interface safe for the average commuter to use, but it seems to me it is now fairly clear that batteries will be future energy carrier for personal cars. Hydrogen no longer has any advantages over batteries since it is has a low energy efficiency and even worse refueling problems than electrics, not to mention the infrastructure challenges. There is still no good way to produce biofuel at the scales required, and even if you could you would have to set up a new infrastructure from scratch, and they would likely still result in more pollution than the batteries. With fast charging batteries on the market now flywheels have also lost their advantage of being able to "charge" very rapidly and their low energy density and high cost makes them unlikely.
Basically eventually battery price will come down enough, and the Oil price will rise high enough, that electric vehicles will be cheaper than petrol. It's now just a matter of time, maybe just a few decades, before the majority of cars produced will be electric.
Forget filesharing for a second. Anybody have the latest stats off how many have died as a direct result of us refusing developing countries generic antiretroviral drugs since they are covered by patents?
If you think the main issue here is about file-sharing and the MPAA, think again. The ACTA negotiations involve representatives from the Pharmaceutical industry but notably absent is the WHO , Amnesty, Doctors without Frontiers , and a number of other human rights organizations.
Basically if this treaty is allowed to go through it is likely millions will continue to die a morbid death needlessly. Focusing on file-sharing and the RIAA is only going to result in the Pharma industry getting to screw over the citizens of developing countries.
Could you please not refer to those nuts as fags? The majority of gay people are not very found of religious fanaticism and we'd rather not be lumped together with the Scientology bullshit.
What I did was use AppArmor to basically restrict firefox from writing to anything but its own config files, as well as a single directory for downloads. It also can't read from any of my user files ( like my mail or documents). I even stopped it from executing external programs like PDF readers or OpenOffice seeing that I prefer to download the files and open them manually anyway.
I disabled Java, installed no-script (surfing slashdot is way smoother without javascript btw ) and set firefox to clear all cookies and other offline data when I close it down. It also doesn't have write permissions to the macromedia directories to stop flash from storing its offline objects nonsense there.
Basically what I figured is that ok maybe the Browser could get compromised, but this way it should not be able to cause much harm to other parts of my system.
It was greed and corruption that brought about this situation and it is greed and corruption that will fix it. In particular:
Google wants Microsoft's desktop monopoly to break, and at the same time they compete directly with Apple's iTunes. As a consequence their only realistic shot at this is to help Linux flourish.
Microsoft sees Google as a threat to their monopoly and hence they can't let Google kill Firefox as Firefox users would likely prefer chrome to IE, thereby strengthening google further.
RIAA, MPAA etc... don't want google to grow to strong since they don't want google dictating terms to them, something they could do if they become the de-facto only site to serve video.
MPEG-LA will try to squeeze every penny from the patent licenses while the party lasts, something google and vimeo very much dislikes.
Essentially the usual short-sighted greed over quarterly profits amongst companies will cause them to push the situation until it breaks. It may take a few years but eventually the very greed that made a patent encumbered format the de-facto standard is the same greed that will kill it.
as long as you've got users who'll click on random executables and use their kid's name as a password and share their credentials with someone else, encryption isn't really going to get you very far.
It can get you pretty damn far if you do what Swedish banks do and use one of these:
You get one of those from your bank ( you have to pick it up in person ), use it to encrypt your PIN before even typing it into your computer, then you use it to sign any account and transaction details you send them, including the receiving account number as well as the amount of money to send. The little device itself has no means of exchanging information with the rest of teh world except the LCD window and the number keys. You literally perform the encryption "manually" as far as the computer is concerned. Ok, it's not perfect in the sense that if your computer gets owned they can eavesdrop on your sessions and get information about your transactions, but at least they won't be able to withdraw any cash.
My main point about this is that security is not a black or white thing, and encrypting transactions can dramatically reduce the number of possible attacks available. That it may be possible to get personal information about me if they own my computer is not quite the same as being able to withdraw all my savings if the bank used a software implementation.
Sodium metal in liquid metasl cooled reactors is corrosive.
No it's not. One of the reason sodium is used as a coolant is that it hardly corrodes the steel components at all. Even after decades of operations molten-sodium systems the "wet" side of the components can still have the scratch marks in the steel from when the reactor was constructed.
This is not to say sodium is trivial to work with. On contact with air or water it combusts spontaneously, and the chemicals formed can be quite corrosive. Also whether something is corrosive or not depends what it is reacting with. Sodium-hydroxide is extremely corrosive to organic compounds but it doesn't attack metals or glass. Water readily dissolves ionic compounds like salts, but not fatty compounds like butter.
So anything that's unclaimed like this defaults back to the city? I wonder what they're going to do with the remainder of everyone's unclaimed, unlimited internet access each month. Did they pool the unused hours off of old AOL CDs? What about all-you-can-eat buffets? Solved DC's hunger problems right there.
Dear Sir/Madam
We find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
The scary thing about Spam is that gmail actually manages to filter it with very few ( any ? ) false positives.
Seriously if you want to get an idea of just how horrifyingly good google is at data mining and pattern recognition create a gmail account and observe how little spam you get. Then check the spam folder and search it for false positives.
The only spam I get nowadays is things I have deliberately signed up to but neglected to unsubscribe from because I'm too lazy.
"It wasn't uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn't make sense."
That doesn't mean the data is wrong, it means the/hypothesis/ was wrong, if not the theory, and needs to be modified.
If they're really throwing out date just because it 'doesn't make sense', they're doing religion, not science.
a) You've clearly never done any real research or you would be well aware of the hundreds of millions of ways you can screw up an experiment and get nonsense data ( bad machinery, you wired up a detector wrong, the cell lines you were feeding vitamin K happened to get contaminated by bacteria halfway through etc... )
b) There is almost never a clear difference between data and theory. The only raw data you have is a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper, in order to determine if they correspond to your theory or not you need to interpret the numbers somehow, and it may just as well be the interpretation that is wrong as is the theory you were trying to test using the interpreted data.
c) Because you are often restricted by cost and time it's often not feasible to do a full analysis of why your experiment did not work. Hence if you did not get any useful results ( uncertainty was too large, it seems obvious you must have messed up somewhere etc.. ) then frequently the only sane option is to conclude your experiment was a failure.
d) If scientists followed your advice we would never have got the electronic equipment you used to make your post.
Basically your ideas about what science is or should be are extremely naive and to anybody who has done even a high school chemistry experiment it should be clear you have no idea what you're talking about.
If the LEDs work just fine without causing trouble in Norway and Sweden they should do well enough in the midwest. It's not the LED's fault some idiot government body fucked up their implementation.
It has been well documented that patients at risk for blood-clots or with other cardiovascular diseases are at increased risk during airline flights because you're forced to sit still for extended periods of time. Consequentially patients are often advised to get up and move about every now and then during long flights.
Consequentially these new security guidelines may well cause a number of strokes and heart attacks. If it is implemented on all American airlines then I imagine it would not take long until the number of causalities from this retarded security policy greatly exceed the number of people who would be killed by terrorists if common sense had been allowed to prevail.
Just as in the US they tried to get the government to bail them out using taxpayer's money, arguing it would save jobs, but the government rightly refused saying it was up to the companies themselves to sort out their finances.
Just goes to show. Even Sweden will let the free market actually do its job. Kinda ironic seeing how the neocons of other governments like to describe us.
Oh and while we're on the topic of governments acting sensibly, our presently rigth-wing government has lowered taxes AND cut carbon emissions. They basically reduced income tax and started taxing fossil fuels instead with the overall effect being a net reduction in tax revenue. So much for global warming just being a scam to tax us...
According to the abstract it is 30-47 Wh/kg as compared to 160 Wh/kg for Li-ion. So it is a factor 3 short of Li-Ion. Still not bad for such a new tech. With some optimizations it might actually stand a chance to replace Li-Ion.
How much silver is actually sued in these batteries? Will availability be an issue? Does it work with other conductive materials like copper or aluminum?
Intuitively I suspect the problem here will be energy density for the simple reason it is the one thing they did not promise would be awesome. That said with the tesla beating 500km recently these batteries coudl eprform well even if they had half of Li-Ion energy density.
None of the planets you list have the proportionally large amounts of O2 that Earth does. It's not that Earth has a large atmosphere, it's that the atmosphere is in so many ways different from even the other Earth-like bodies (hint Venus and Mars' atmospheres are dominated by CO2).
The Oxygen i our atmosphere is believed to be the result of photosynthesis in plants. Given the amount of CO2 in Venus' atmosphere it would probably also be very oxygen rich if it was not too hot for life to live there.
Similar reasoning goes for Mars. Its atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide. If you set plants and plankton to work on that for billions of years you could easily have a lot of oxygen. Also note that the other major constituent of Mars' atmosphere is nitrogen and that a large amount of Earth's carbon is presently stored as fossils underground, or various water soluble minerals in the oceans. Basically if Mars was more massive, had more water, and active life capable of photosynthesis, I would expect its atmosphere to be very similar to that of the earth.
In particular, heavier isotopes of each gas appear in larger proportions in the subterranean samples than they do in the atmosphere.
This is exactly what I would expect from a diffusion process since heavier atoms would move slower than light ones. Granted the ratios may be too large to be explained in this way, but still.
Also I dunno how large an effect it would be but in a system the radius of the entire earth, but would the mass difference make a measurable difference due to gravity ?
This sounds like a good idea for transferring content securely. The contents of the memory will degrade in a short time, making it ideal for carrying sensitive data.
Or you could encrypt the data and destroy the key when you don't need it anymore...
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." - Bertrand Russel
As evidence of the validity of Russel's insight, consider the people who are cocksure enough to assume it is they who are the doubters. They will even quarrel amongst each other about which of them is the intelligent, when in reality they are all idiots.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot a few things:
a) Electric engines are on average about 4 times as efficient as petrol ones. If we use your numbers that then implies you need 11kg of battery to replace a kg of petrol.
b) Electric engines are much lighter than ICEs, so some of the weight gain is compensated for this way.
c) Electric cars in principle needs no transmission, gearbox, catalyst, exhaust system, raidator, starter engine etc... that knocks off a heck of a lot of weight.
Basically when you take into consideration the weight reduction from the much simpler drive train of an EV it is ore than enough to add in hundreds of kilograms of batteries. The problem is cost, not weight/energy ratio.
Did you factor in:
a)Cost of petrol vs cost of electricity
b)Reduced maintenance costs since electric cars have fewer moving parts
c)That petrol prices are very likely to keep rising as cheap sources
of oil are depleted and replaced by more expensive ones.
d)The Tesla is a luxury car and certainly not aimed at the general public.
You should compare it to a Ferrari, not a Toyota.
Well here is one you did not consider. About one in every few thousand babies born is transsexual. That is, the neurological gender of their brain does not match the apparent sex of their body. Typically these people will desire surgical "correction" of their genitals latter in life, and availability of skin is one of the key variables that impact the outcome. Now I realize this is a rare occurrence, but it does happen, and since I'm transsexual myself and thus know just how shit it can be, I can only hope that neither of your sons will turn out to be transsexual. Then again, with sufficiently many babies being circ'd it follows that it will happen to some.
I also imagine it may have an impact on other types of re-constructive surgery, should your sons ever have the misfortune of being hurt in an accident or something.
Tbh with the Tesla breaking 500km the main obstacle for Electric Vehicles is no longer storage capacity of the batteries but rather the recharge time and battery price. LiFeP batteries have short recharge times ( 5 minuets or so ) and are starting to come down in price, so the big issue right now is designing an electric interface that can safely deliver the 200kW or so that would be needed to charge the a Tesla-equivalent 50kWh battery pack in less than 15 minutes. The standard proposed in Europe supports up to 43kW so there's some way to go still, but theoretically if you just developed the EU's proposal to support 100kW then using 2 cables would get you down to a 15min charge time.
It's a bit of an engineering problem to make such an interface safe for the average commuter to use, but it seems to me it is now fairly clear that batteries will be future energy carrier for personal cars. Hydrogen no longer has any advantages over batteries since it is has a low energy efficiency and even worse refueling problems than electrics, not to mention the infrastructure challenges. There is still no good way to produce biofuel at the scales required, and even if you could you would have to set up a new infrastructure from scratch, and they would likely still result in more pollution than the batteries. With fast charging batteries on the market now flywheels have also lost their advantage of being able to "charge" very rapidly and their low energy density and high cost makes them unlikely.
Basically eventually battery price will come down enough, and the Oil price will rise high enough, that electric vehicles will be cheaper than petrol. It's now just a matter of time, maybe just a few decades, before the majority of cars produced will be electric.
Forget filesharing for a second. Anybody have the latest stats off how many have died as a direct result of us refusing developing countries generic antiretroviral drugs since they are covered by patents?
If you think the main issue here is about file-sharing and the MPAA, think again. The ACTA negotiations involve representatives from the Pharmaceutical industry but notably absent is the WHO , Amnesty, Doctors without Frontiers , and a number of other human rights organizations.
Basically if this treaty is allowed to go through it is likely millions will continue to die a morbid death needlessly. Focusing on file-sharing and the RIAA is only going to result in the Pharma industry getting to screw over the citizens of developing countries.
Could you please not refer to those nuts as fags? The majority of gay people are not very found of religious fanaticism and we'd rather not be lumped together with the Scientology bullshit.
Fixed that for you.
What I did was use AppArmor to basically restrict firefox from writing to anything but its own config files, as well as a single directory for downloads. It also can't read from any of my user files ( like my mail or documents). I even stopped it from executing external programs like PDF readers or OpenOffice seeing that I prefer to download the files and open them manually anyway.
I disabled Java, installed no-script (surfing slashdot is way smoother without javascript btw ) and set firefox to clear all cookies and other offline data when I close it down. It also doesn't have write permissions to the macromedia directories to stop flash from storing its offline objects nonsense there.
Basically what I figured is that ok maybe the Browser could get compromised, but this way it should not be able to cause much harm to other parts of my system.
It was greed and corruption that brought about this situation and it is greed and corruption that will fix it. In particular:
Google wants Microsoft's desktop monopoly to break, and at the same time they compete directly with Apple's iTunes. As a consequence their only realistic shot at this is to help Linux flourish.
Microsoft sees Google as a threat to their monopoly and hence they can't let Google kill Firefox as Firefox users would likely prefer chrome to IE, thereby strengthening google further.
RIAA, MPAA etc... don't want google to grow to strong since they don't want google dictating terms to them, something they could do if they become the de-facto only site to serve video.
MPEG-LA will try to squeeze every penny from the patent licenses while the party lasts, something google and vimeo very much dislikes.
Essentially the usual short-sighted greed over quarterly profits amongst companies will cause them to push the situation until it breaks. It may take a few years but eventually the very greed that made a patent encumbered format the de-facto standard is the same greed that will kill it.
To all the people who quarrel about which game had better music, just listen to this. Seriously, just listen to it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U88zyFLzIXQ
The opening for that game set a standard I have yet to hear another game beat, though NWN 2 gets close:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGT7IY91jIE
It can get you pretty damn far if you do what Swedish banks do and use one of these:
http://www.swedbanksjuharad.se/bildarkivet/motiv/7131/Webb_Liten.jpg
You get one of those from your bank ( you have to pick it up in person ), use it to encrypt your PIN before even typing it into your computer, then you use it to sign any account and transaction details you send them, including the receiving account number as well as the amount of money to send. The little device itself has no means of exchanging information with the rest of teh world except the LCD window and the number keys. You literally perform the encryption "manually" as far as the computer is concerned. Ok, it's not perfect in the sense that if your computer gets owned they can eavesdrop on your sessions and get information about your transactions, but at least they won't be able to withdraw any cash.
My main point about this is that security is not a black or white thing, and encrypting transactions can dramatically reduce the number of possible attacks available. That it may be possible to get personal information about me if they own my computer is not quite the same as being able to withdraw all my savings if the bank used a software implementation.
No it's not. One of the reason sodium is used as a coolant is that it hardly corrodes the steel components at all. Even after decades of operations molten-sodium systems the "wet" side of the components can still have the scratch marks in the steel from when the reactor was constructed.
This is not to say sodium is trivial to work with. On contact with air or water it combusts spontaneously, and the chemicals formed can be quite corrosive. Also whether something is corrosive or not depends what it is reacting with. Sodium-hydroxide is extremely corrosive to organic compounds but it doesn't attack metals or glass. Water readily dissolves ionic compounds like salts, but not fatty compounds like butter.
Dear Sir/Madam
We find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Best regards:
The lawyers
The scary thing about Spam is that gmail actually manages to filter it with very few ( any ? ) false positives.
Seriously if you want to get an idea of just how horrifyingly good google is at data mining and pattern recognition create a gmail account and observe how little spam you get. Then check the spam folder and search it for false positives.
The only spam I get nowadays is things I have deliberately signed up to but neglected to unsubscribe from because I'm too lazy.
"It wasn't uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn't make sense."
That doesn't mean the data is wrong, it means the /hypothesis/ was wrong, if not the theory, and needs to be modified.
If they're really throwing out date just because it 'doesn't make sense', they're doing religion, not science.
a) You've clearly never done any real research or you would be well aware of the hundreds of millions of ways you can screw up an experiment and get nonsense data ( bad machinery, you wired up a detector wrong, the cell lines you were feeding vitamin K happened to get contaminated by bacteria halfway through etc... )
b) There is almost never a clear difference between data and theory. The only raw data you have is a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper, in order to determine if they correspond to your theory or not you need to interpret the numbers somehow, and it may just as well be the interpretation that is wrong as is the theory you were trying to test using the interpreted data.
c) Because you are often restricted by cost and time it's often not feasible to do a full analysis of why your experiment did not work. Hence if you did not get any useful results ( uncertainty was too large, it seems obvious you must have messed up somewhere etc.. ) then frequently the only sane option is to conclude your experiment was a failure.
d) If scientists followed your advice we would never have got the electronic equipment you used to make your post.
Basically your ideas about what science is or should be are extremely naive and to anybody who has done even a high school chemistry experiment it should be clear you have no idea what you're talking about.
If the LEDs work just fine without causing trouble in Norway and Sweden they should do well enough in the midwest. It's not the LED's fault some idiot government body fucked up their implementation.
It has been well documented that patients at risk for blood-clots or with other cardiovascular diseases are at increased risk during airline flights because you're forced to sit still for extended periods of time. Consequentially patients are often advised to get up and move about every now and then during long flights.
Consequentially these new security guidelines may well cause a number of strokes and heart attacks. If it is implemented on all American airlines then I imagine it would not take long until the number of causalities from this retarded security policy greatly exceed the number of people who would be killed by terrorists if common sense had been allowed to prevail.
Just as in the US they tried to get the government to bail them out using taxpayer's money, arguing it would save jobs, but the government rightly refused saying it was up to the companies themselves to sort out their finances.
Just goes to show. Even Sweden will let the free market actually do its job. Kinda ironic seeing how the neocons of other governments like to describe us.
Oh and while we're on the topic of governments acting sensibly, our presently rigth-wing government has lowered taxes AND cut carbon emissions. They basically reduced income tax and started taxing fossil fuels instead with the overall effect being a net reduction in tax revenue. So much for global warming just being a scam to tax us...
Yes!
They are also spherical, point sized and massless, thus making the question of how you cut them kinda moot.
According to the abstract it is 30-47 Wh/kg as compared to 160 Wh/kg for Li-ion. So it is a factor 3 short of Li-Ion. Still not bad for such a new tech. With some optimizations it might actually stand a chance to replace Li-Ion.
How much silver is actually sued in these batteries? Will availability be an issue? Does it work with other conductive materials like copper or aluminum? Intuitively I suspect the problem here will be energy density for the simple reason it is the one thing they did not promise would be awesome. That said with the tesla beating 500km recently these batteries coudl eprform well even if they had half of Li-Ion energy density.
The Oxygen i our atmosphere is believed to be the result of photosynthesis in plants. Given the amount of CO2 in Venus' atmosphere it would probably also be very oxygen rich if it was not too hot for life to live there.
Similar reasoning goes for Mars. Its atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide. If you set plants and plankton to work on that for billions of years you could easily have a lot of oxygen. Also note that the other major constituent of Mars' atmosphere is nitrogen and that a large amount of Earth's carbon is presently stored as fossils underground, or various water soluble minerals in the oceans. Basically if Mars was more massive, had more water, and active life capable of photosynthesis, I would expect its atmosphere to be very similar to that of the earth.
This is exactly what I would expect from a diffusion process since heavier atoms would move slower than light ones. Granted the ratios may be too large to be explained in this way, but still.
Also I dunno how large an effect it would be but in a system the radius of the entire earth, but would the mass difference make a measurable difference due to gravity ?
Or you could encrypt the data and destroy the key when you don't need it anymore...
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
- Bertrand Russel
As evidence of the validity of Russel's insight, consider the people who are cocksure enough to assume it is they who are the doubters. They will even quarrel amongst each other about which of them is the intelligent, when in reality they are all idiots.