IF we can get the efficency of solar better then it may someday be possible to power a sufficient amount of vehicles. Hydro only works if you can do so without affecting the environment. New Zealand used to be the best example of hydro, but over the last decade, they have started to dismantle it ( I forget the reasons why). Nuclear unfortunately has too many messy byproduct and storing it is a problem. Fusion, on the other hand, might be something we can deal with. Northrop a few years ago, published a report that they expected to be able to bring fusion to market within a decade or 2. IF that is true, it would go a long way to solving a lot of problems with our current means of producing energy.
"We’ve noticed with the kangaroo being in mid-flight — when it’s in the air it actually looks like it’s further away, then it lands and it looks closer,” Volvo Australia’s technical manager David Pickett told ABC. In short, the car can’t figure out how far away the animal is because the shape and position of its body change so rapidly as it hops along."
As someone who has collided with such beasts three times in 40 years of driving ( and countless near misses ) : this is exactly right. Usually they blindside you as they don't go along the road like normal vehicles - we don't have a kangaroo lane. They intersect at varying heights while coming across. My father in law was driving his car along a road cut into the side of a hill. The roo hopped off the bank on the high side of the road, onto the roof of his car and then off again to the low side of the road. It just kept hopping on through the bush. Pushed the roof of the car in a bit, but later he gave it a whack on the inside and it popped back out to shape alright ! :-)
If you drive trucks long distance for a living you will meet them regularly. Up the back of New South Wales there are really large ones, the Big Reds, that are rather heavy and it can be like a calf flying towards you.
Quote:
..... expected to be able to bring fusion to market within a decade or 2.
They'd been saying that to old men, when I was a young man. Fusion is the power of the future, and always will be...... ;-))
Cheers, Mike.
( edit ) The difficulty is not in achieving nuclear fusion on Earth. That's been done and by the hand of man no problemo. I am mildly embarrassed to have the same name as the world's first triggered fusion weapon in the Ivy test series : Mike was the code word for 'Mega', as in megatons of TNT equivalent. The key bit is to do so in a non-destructive fashion and by getting more money out than you put in. BTW : you can get a small pile of gold out of fusion, you just have to start with a larger pile of gold. :-))
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
It may help to add here that the problem in the physical sense in not simply the presence of energy - obviously a prerequisite - but energy in the best entropic form. By that I mean condensed/local as opposed to dispersed. There's no point in having a tank's worth of refined petroleum if it is spread throughout the town's air volume as a vapour.
Take solar panels. What is happening here is that the panel intercepts photons, and ultimately causes a chemical transformation in some battery device and/or heating in a load. So a higher energy but lower entropic photon emissions from the Sun are converted, eventually, to lower energy but higher entropic photon emissions ( radiated into space on the night-side ). The trick is that there are very many more lower energy photons at the end, but you started with far fewer of them. Plus the Sun is condensed compared to vast volumes of space. You can blame the Big Bang & then subsequent astrophysics for that.
The situation is rather like 'arbitrage' in finance. This refers to some value differential from which a profit might be derived. The differential could be share prices at two times : if you bought low then sold high you will do well. Or if you 'shorted' - bet on a lower later price - then you can make money in a bear market. The arbitrage could be geographical eg. run guns across a border to sell higher than you bought. Or jurisdictional arbitrage : some transactions may be permitted in some places but not others. Hence the proliferation of offshore deals. In Isaac Newton's time you could get silver coinage, melt it down, take it to France and exchange it for gold at some ratio, take that gold back to England and sell to receive silver coins again. But more than you started with. You get the idea ( in reality after many iterations the values equalise and the differential is lost ).
Anyway the world around us is full of 'physical arbitrage' opportunities. To condense energy to a form which suits us eg. batteries for cars, we have to tap an entropy gradient which also happens to encompass an energy differential.
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
In Isaac Newton's time you could get silver coinage, melt it down, take it to France and exchange it for gold at some ratio, take that gold back to England and sell to receive silver coins again. But more than you started with.
Ah yes we had that in England at one point with coins being worth more melted down than their face value. Well, we soon scotched that idea by introducing cupro nickel coinage. Then again in 2013 there was a program to recover all cupro nickel five pence and ten pence coins from circulation, and replace them with nickel-plated steel ones. The new £1 coins are bi-metallic with a nickel brass outer and the inner a nickel plated alloy.
There are if course bullion coins like the USA Gold eagle (face vale $50 metal vale $1000), Krugerands and Gold sovereigns.
Waiting for Godot & salvation :-)
Why do doctors have to practice?
You'd think they'd have got it right by now
due to autonomous driving cars will in the near future be driving far closer to one another this reducing air resistance
We all know about slipstreaming, but that doesn't make any sense. Sorry.
Why would it not make any sense? Automated response times will be in milliseconds, while a human response time is a second. The required distance between cars to compensate for response time will be significantly shorter. What is senseless about that? When cars can share sensor data and future planned actions these distances in between can be close to nothing. This could be accomplished by defining common standards by which autonomous cars are required to work together. Government could enforce such standards to be applied.
The benefits of using some kind of standard are going to be large, so they will be addressed for sure. It's going to be relatively easy for a government to accomplish fuel savings and significantly reduce traffic jams due to an increased capacity of the road.
Or would you want to argue about air resistance being lower when driving closer to one another?
It may help to add here that the problem in the physical sense in not simply the presence of energy - obviously a prerequisite - but energy in the best entropic form. By that I mean condensed/local as opposed to dispersed. There's no point in having a tank's worth of refined petroleum if it is spread throughout the town's air volume as a vapour.
We also have to bear in mind the Conservation of energy principle that says that energy can't be destroyed only converted from one form to another.
Clean nuclear power whether fission or fusion has to be the way forward when fossil fuels run out. Star Trek matter/antimatter drives are just sci fi. The problem that Mike highlights is of course what do you do with spent fuel rods? The current answer seems to be burying them in deep old mines encased in concrete, very good for the environment that isn't. Then of course we have safety and operator error and simply bad design. Examples are, Chernobyl in Russia, the American Three Mile Island, and and the Japanese Fukushima, all of which have dented public confidence in nuclear power.
Unless of course we can design some sort of anti gravity transport like the Landspeeder Luke Skywalker used in Starwars.
Waiting for Godot & salvation :-)
Why do doctors have to practice?
You'd think they'd have got it right by now
these distances in between can be close to nothing. This could be accomplished by defining common standards by which autonomous cars are required to work together. Government could enforce such standards to be applied.
So in your view we have a string of 10 cars all travelling along together with fractions of an inch between each one? In which case you might just as well have each car coupled to the next one like railway wagons. And what if in this supposed convoy of 10 vehicles all close coupled, car No.3 wants to stop to let somebody off. Do the other 9 cars have to stop as well? Car No. 5 gets a puncture, does it get dragged along by the others?
Governments "enforcing" standards sounds like a dictatorship or an autocratic regime to me.
It's going to be relatively easy for a government to accomplish fuel savings
It will be the end consumers that will choose to benefit from any fuel savings, not governments. Fuel savings mean less fuel being used, therefore less taxes collected to the Treasury. Unless of course they want to get re-elected so jump on the green bandwagon.
Google and others are apparently experimenting, and are being allowed to experiment, with driverless cars. You won't get me in one! Elon Musk and his stuff can go take a hike! The London Docklands light railway was designed to be fully automatic, but the public wouldn't have it, and there is a member of staff on board every train for passenger confidence. The same as the London underground Victoria Line which has been operated by the ATO system since 1968. But there is still a man still in the cab, mainly through Union insistence.
Birmingham airport to Birmingham International rail station bucked the trend with its Maglev system in 1984 which closed in 1995. The current cable pulled system has been operating since 2003. Both systems were/are fully automatic with no staff on board.
Waiting for Godot & salvation :-)
Why do doctors have to practice?
You'd think they'd have got it right by now
This will start on highways, so if a car stops it will get of the highway. A car in trouble will too.
Any car in front of it won't have to respond to it slowing down. Other cars will need to either switch lane or slow down as you can't drive through other cars. After a car left there will be a gap between cars that should be closed if it is not too big. Else it is simply the front of a new train of cars.
In cities it's not much different though. If a car stops other cars will drive past if they safely can.
And setting standards has nothing to do with dictatorship. Here everyone drives on the right side of the road, not wherever they please. Government decided on many such rules. I don't see how setting rules to how cars should communicate amongst other cars should be any different.
We already have environmental zones, banning certain vehicles from entering them, this would be similar. Automated driving should be subject to certain rules just as getting a driving license is.
And seeing standards has nothing to do with dictatorship. Here everyone drives in the right side of the road, not wherever they please. Government decided on many such rules.
Which side of the road people drive on is a separate issue from traffic bunching. The UK, India, Australia and some other countries drive on the LH side of the road in RH drive vehicles. Europe, America and others drive on the RH side with LH drive vehicles. The idea being that the driver in all cases is closest to the centre of the road for safe overtaking. The history is fairly straightforward.
Back in the Middle ages (5th C-15th C) all we had were rural cart tracks, apart from the paved Roman roads they left behind when they went back home earlier. Travel was by horseback and as most people were right handed, a knight or other person would wear their sword scabbard on their left side to aid drawing their sword with their right hand. Therefore it made sense to pass a possible assailant ahead RH to RH to be able to defend yourself if necessary. It was the same throughout most of Europe.
Then in 1815 some chappie called Napoleon got defeated at Waterloo, and in a fit of pique ordered all his armies to march on the right so that any oncoming traffic would have to get out of their way. This caught on over all Europe. By then a year earlier in 1814, a certain building in Pennsylvania Avenue was set alight which rather miffed the Americans a tad, so they followed France in also driving on the right.
People stick to their designated side of the road in a country for simple safety reasons, if they don't then they get fined, lose their licence, or both. The UK has an official Highway Code book, I expect other countries have similar publications.
There you say it, it's about safety. So is being permitted to drive (real) close to the car in front of you. Again safety, so what is the difference?
The combination with an environmental zone? Driving real close to one another not only permits your own car to have a lower fuel consumption but also those of others.
Having a requirement for a self driving system meeting certain criteria for certain roads / road lanes / crowded areas / ...
I still don't see what is so senseless about that, or how it would even relate to a dictatorship.
IF we can get the efficency
IF we can get the efficency of solar better then it may someday be possible to power a sufficient amount of vehicles. Hydro only works if you can do so without affecting the environment. New Zealand used to be the best example of hydro, but over the last decade, they have started to dismantle it ( I forget the reasons why). Nuclear unfortunately has too many messy byproduct and storing it is a problem. Fusion, on the other hand, might be something we can deal with. Northrop a few years ago, published a report that they expected to be able to bring fusion to market within a decade or 2. IF that is true, it would go a long way to solving a lot of problems with our current means of producing energy.
Edit.. Actually found the page
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html
Zalster wrote:Chris S_2
"We’ve noticed with the kangaroo being in mid-flight — when it’s in the air it actually looks like it’s further away, then it lands and it looks closer,” Volvo Australia’s technical manager David Pickett told ABC. In short, the car can’t figure out how far away the animal is because the shape and position of its body change so rapidly as it hops along."
As someone who has collided with such beasts three times in 40 years of driving ( and countless near misses ) : this is exactly right. Usually they blindside you as they don't go along the road like normal vehicles - we don't have a kangaroo lane. They intersect at varying heights while coming across. My father in law was driving his car along a road cut into the side of a hill. The roo hopped off the bank on the high side of the road, onto the roof of his car and then off again to the low side of the road. It just kept hopping on through the bush. Pushed the roof of the car in a bit, but later he gave it a whack on the inside and it popped back out to shape alright ! :-)
If you drive trucks long distance for a living you will meet them regularly. Up the back of New South Wales there are really large ones, the Big Reds, that are rather heavy and it can be like a calf flying towards you.
They'd been saying that to old men, when I was a young man. Fusion is the power of the future, and always will be...... ;-))
Cheers, Mike.
( edit ) The difficulty is not in achieving nuclear fusion on Earth. That's been done and by the hand of man no problemo. I am mildly embarrassed to have the same name as the world's first triggered fusion weapon in the Ivy test series : Mike was the code word for 'Mega', as in megatons of TNT equivalent. The key bit is to do so in a non-destructive fashion and by getting more money out than you put in. BTW : you can get a small pile of gold out of fusion, you just have to start with a larger pile of gold. :-))
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
It may help to add here that
It may help to add here that the problem in the physical sense in not simply the presence of energy - obviously a prerequisite - but energy in the best entropic form. By that I mean condensed/local as opposed to dispersed. There's no point in having a tank's worth of refined petroleum if it is spread throughout the town's air volume as a vapour.
Take solar panels. What is happening here is that the panel intercepts photons, and ultimately causes a chemical transformation in some battery device and/or heating in a load. So a higher energy but lower entropic photon emissions from the Sun are converted, eventually, to lower energy but higher entropic photon emissions ( radiated into space on the night-side ). The trick is that there are very many more lower energy photons at the end, but you started with far fewer of them. Plus the Sun is condensed compared to vast volumes of space. You can blame the Big Bang & then subsequent astrophysics for that.
The situation is rather like 'arbitrage' in finance. This refers to some value differential from which a profit might be derived. The differential could be share prices at two times : if you bought low then sold high you will do well. Or if you 'shorted' - bet on a lower later price - then you can make money in a bear market. The arbitrage could be geographical eg. run guns across a border to sell higher than you bought. Or jurisdictional arbitrage : some transactions may be permitted in some places but not others. Hence the proliferation of offshore deals. In Isaac Newton's time you could get silver coinage, melt it down, take it to France and exchange it for gold at some ratio, take that gold back to England and sell to receive silver coins again. But more than you started with. You get the idea ( in reality after many iterations the values equalise and the differential is lost ).
Anyway the world around us is full of 'physical arbitrage' opportunities. To condense energy to a form which suits us eg. batteries for cars, we have to tap an entropy gradient which also happens to encompass an energy differential.
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
In Isaac Newton's time you
Ah yes we had that in England at one point with coins being worth more melted down than their face value. Well, we soon scotched that idea by introducing cupro nickel coinage. Then again in 2013 there was a program to recover all cupro nickel five pence and ten pence coins from circulation, and replace them with nickel-plated steel ones. The new £1 coins are bi-metallic with a nickel brass outer and the inner a nickel plated alloy.
There are if course bullion coins like the USA Gold eagle (face vale $50 metal vale $1000), Krugerands and Gold sovereigns.
Waiting for Godot & salvation :-)
Why do doctors have to practice?
You'd think they'd have got it right by now
Chris S_2 wrote: due to
Why would it not make any sense? Automated response times will be in milliseconds, while a human response time is a second. The required distance between cars to compensate for response time will be significantly shorter. What is senseless about that? When cars can share sensor data and future planned actions these distances in between can be close to nothing. This could be accomplished by defining common standards by which autonomous cars are required to work together. Government could enforce such standards to be applied.
The benefits of using some kind of standard are going to be large, so they will be addressed for sure. It's going to be relatively easy for a government to accomplish fuel savings and significantly reduce traffic jams due to an increased capacity of the road.
Or would you want to argue about air resistance being lower when driving closer to one another?
It may help to add here that
We also have to bear in mind the Conservation of energy principle that says that energy can't be destroyed only converted from one form to another.
Clean nuclear power whether fission or fusion has to be the way forward when fossil fuels run out. Star Trek matter/antimatter drives are just sci fi. The problem that Mike highlights is of course what do you do with spent fuel rods? The current answer seems to be burying them in deep old mines encased in concrete, very good for the environment that isn't. Then of course we have safety and operator error and simply bad design. Examples are, Chernobyl in Russia, the American Three Mile Island, and and the Japanese Fukushima, all of which have dented public confidence in nuclear power.
Unless of course we can design some sort of anti gravity transport like the Landspeeder Luke Skywalker used in Starwars.
Waiting for Godot & salvation :-)
Why do doctors have to practice?
You'd think they'd have got it right by now
these distances in between
So in your view we have a string of 10 cars all travelling along together with fractions of an inch between each one? In which case you might just as well have each car coupled to the next one like railway wagons. And what if in this supposed convoy of 10 vehicles all close coupled, car No.3 wants to stop to let somebody off. Do the other 9 cars have to stop as well? Car No. 5 gets a puncture, does it get dragged along by the others?
Governments "enforcing" standards sounds like a dictatorship or an autocratic regime to me.
It will be the end consumers that will choose to benefit from any fuel savings, not governments. Fuel savings mean less fuel being used, therefore less taxes collected to the Treasury. Unless of course they want to get re-elected so jump on the green bandwagon.
Google and others are apparently experimenting, and are being allowed to experiment, with driverless cars. You won't get me in one! Elon Musk and his stuff can go take a hike! The London Docklands light railway was designed to be fully automatic, but the public wouldn't have it, and there is a member of staff on board every train for passenger confidence. The same as the London underground Victoria Line which has been operated by the ATO system since 1968. But there is still a man still in the cab, mainly through Union insistence.
Birmingham airport to Birmingham International rail station bucked the trend with its Maglev system in 1984 which closed in 1995. The current cable pulled system has been operating since 2003. Both systems were/are fully automatic with no staff on board.
Waiting for Godot & salvation :-)
Why do doctors have to practice?
You'd think they'd have got it right by now
This will start on highways,
This will start on highways, so if a car stops it will get of the highway. A car in trouble will too.
Any car in front of it won't have to respond to it slowing down. Other cars will need to either switch lane or slow down as you can't drive through other cars. After a car left there will be a gap between cars that should be closed if it is not too big. Else it is simply the front of a new train of cars.
In cities it's not much different though. If a car stops other cars will drive past if they safely can.
And setting standards has nothing to do with dictatorship. Here everyone drives on the right side of the road, not wherever they please. Government decided on many such rules. I don't see how setting rules to how cars should communicate amongst other cars should be any different.
We already have environmental zones, banning certain vehicles from entering them, this would be similar. Automated driving should be subject to certain rules just as getting a driving license is.
And seeing standards has
Which side of the road people drive on is a separate issue from traffic bunching. The UK, India, Australia and some other countries drive on the LH side of the road in RH drive vehicles. Europe, America and others drive on the RH side with LH drive vehicles. The idea being that the driver in all cases is closest to the centre of the road for safe overtaking. The history is fairly straightforward.
Back in the Middle ages (5th C-15th C) all we had were rural cart tracks, apart from the paved Roman roads they left behind when they went back home earlier. Travel was by horseback and as most people were right handed, a knight or other person would wear their sword scabbard on their left side to aid drawing their sword with their right hand. Therefore it made sense to pass a possible assailant ahead RH to RH to be able to defend yourself if necessary. It was the same throughout most of Europe.
Then in 1815 some chappie called Napoleon got defeated at Waterloo, and in a fit of pique ordered all his armies to march on the right so that any oncoming traffic would have to get out of their way. This caught on over all Europe. By then a year earlier in 1814, a certain building in Pennsylvania Avenue was set alight which rather miffed the Americans a tad, so they followed France in also driving on the right.
People stick to their designated side of the road in a country for simple safety reasons, if they don't then they get fined, lose their licence, or both. The UK has an official Highway Code book, I expect other countries have similar publications.
Meanwhile be afraid ......
robots
Waiting for Godot & salvation :-)
Why do doctors have to practice?
You'd think they'd have got it right by now
There you say it, it's about
There you say it, it's about safety. So is being permitted to drive (real) close to the car in front of you. Again safety, so what is the difference?
The combination with an environmental zone? Driving real close to one another not only permits your own car to have a lower fuel consumption but also those of others.
Having a requirement for a self driving system meeting certain criteria for certain roads / road lanes / crowded areas / ...
I still don't see what is so senseless about that, or how it would even relate to a dictatorship.