KipIngram

I think there's a trick in that one, yes. The video shows it accelerating over multiple rotations. That's more "goodie" than you can get by starting at a preferential angle.

Ok. I'd just read that QED is a QFT, and is stunningly, amazingly accurate.

You're presuming all kids would use alcohol in some heavy way. I am certainly not advocating that alcohol should be legal for children, but if you imagine a world where it was it would no longer be forbidden fruit. The biggest thing that draws kids to alcohol is that it's a "grown up thing," and it's *forbidden*. You don't know what a that world would be like, so presumptions about it do not constitution convincing arguments in any way. But the alcohol thing was just an example - I don't need a comparison to alcohol to feel completely sure that social media is, in total, bad for our kids. No - not every single bit of it is bad. But much more bad arises from it than good. And yet parents have virtually no choice other than to allow it, because if they don't then their child will be the one outcast who isn't "in the game," and that in itself causes them to become targets. Children can be extremely cruel to one another - giving them new ways to do it was bound to make the problem worse.

I thought QFTs were our very best theories - why is relying on that bad? ^ Honest question there - not a poke of any kind.

Sure. For me that's being "guided by my values." Anyway, I think it's clear that religion as a social meme has been one of the really powerful ones - it's just very hard for people to cast off such beliefs when they were raised in the environment of those beliefs. I'm not really religious, but on the other hand my mom and dad really didn't push it with me. We went to church some, but not always; it was just never hammered into me as a super big deal. So I don't really know how I might have turned out if they'd been much more focused about it.

Yes, and if alcohol were legal for children, then I imagine "a good portion of kids" would probably use it in a way that wasn't a problem. But of course some would not be so lucky. We made a decision about that - we could make it about social media too. I hope you weren't attaching the other parts of that reply to me - I hugely support the right of parents to raise their kids. Some parents will do that very well, and some parents will do it terribly. But it's the natural order of things. It beats the heck out of the government choosing it all. When a central authority enforces one set of ideas, and that set of ideas happens to turn out bad (which it will be at some point in time throughout time, even if it's good at some points too), there is no recovery mechanism. With a diverse, widely distributed set of ideas driven at the family level you get a free market of ideas - the things that work well will be selected over the things that don't. May take a few generations, but it will happen.

I think you meant prove instead of disprove? And yes, it's clear that the details in all of those documents are in no way literally true. I tried to make the distinction between literalist interpretations and general spirituality in my reply. I absolutely think that people who try to take the stuff too literally are falling into the "believing in spite of disproof" category. I think it's a comfort thing for a lot of people. They were raised to believe, and they want to believe. So the most intelligent ones of them recognize the parts that just cannot stand and "draw in" their belief system to a point where they don't recognize any further incompatibility. So now you have a spectrum - some people probably do a very good job of that, and wind up with a pretty unassailable belief system, while others probably reject the most ludicrous literal interpretations but still have some things in their belief system that they just don't realize can be easily disproven. And some people take great delight in popping those bubbles for them.

A book I read recently made a pretty solid case that men are drawn to females based on biological cues that imply lots of baby-making potential (combination of age, generally vibrant health, and other such things), whereas women are drawn to men based on biological cues that imply fitness as a provider and protector. I would guess that there's a background of pure biology stuff in both cases, combined with a "cultural overlay." For instance, in the world we live in right now women find a man's financial success very attractive. I even read an article recently that cited a study claiming that there is a correlation between women's reported orgasm frequency and the wealth of their partner. So evidently money even makes a man better in bed. :-| One of the cues I remember for men (rating women) was eye and iris size. The studies showed men pictures that contained female faces that were exactly the same except for those attributes. The men chose as more attractive the women with larger eyes / irises. Apparently it's indicative of youth. The bottom line was that men considered 20 year old women the most attractive overall. Female fertility peaks at 25, but factoring time into the equation 20 year old women can be shown to have the highest "reproduction potential" factor. I saw that same fact "reported on" on a feminist website, and you can imagine the editorial reaction.

Oh, well, when you spin your flywheel a stress distribution arises in the material due to the outward force caused by the rotation. So you also get strain per the stress/strain relationship of the material. That's basically a stretching of the chemical bonds in the material's crystal lattice. If you spin the flywheel too fast you exceed the yield strength of the material and it flies apart. That's all I meant. All that stuff boils down to something going on at the atomic / molecular level.

Yes, I saw that one too when I went off and poked around in response to this thread. At least in the place I saw it there was some... "lively" conversation. Pretty astounding how vehemently people will argue even when they don't have any knowledge in the area. I think there's something in human nature that wants to think scientists are either 1) don't really know what they're doing or 2) are trying to hide something from everyone. I watched the video of the one you just posted (at least I think it's the same one) and it "worked" so well that I couldn't believe the people who made it had made an honest oversight of some kind. I think it was a full-on fraudulent design. Could be wrong, I guess, but that was my take-away.

Hmmm. I haven't done any flywheel calculations in a long time. Flywheels don't actually store energy by stretching bonds; the bond-stretching is a by-product of the stress created by the rotational motion. The first order storage is purely kinetic. But the bond strength would of course be one of the limiting factors. I still think it will be hard to compete with a storage technology based on completely forming and breaking bonds as the primary mechanism, but I guess we'll see way or the other. The market will pick a winner from whatever contenders appear. I guess the next year or two will tell us a lot more about the viability of the glass batteries. The outfit I worked with at UT was heavily into flywheel storage - the flywheel being the rotor of a pulse mode generator. Our main research was in using such things (which we designed in-house), spun up slowly with a hydraulic motor and then discharged over a very short period, to generate electrical pulses used to fire railguns. The main competition was Maxwell Labs, who focused on capacitor-based technology for the most part. This all ancient history, though; going on 30 years. At the time the military was really interested in deploying railguns on tanks. In the end they gave it up, though. Gunpowder was just too good at the job. I'm hitting the sack for the night - catch you again later. Maybe before I sleep I'll put in a pre-order for my very own De Beers flywheel.

I have a feeling that both acts of kindness and bullying have been part and parcel of the human condition for... well, forever. Social media has made it a lot harder to have any escape from. When I was a kid the school day ended and there was a safe haven until the next day. Kids these days are connected 24/7. And the news media absolutely does make sure that we hear about every single unfortunate thing that happens - they thrive on sensationalizing misery and sorrow. Both of those things are technology related - technology has changed. Human nature has not. Human nature will not. I sometimes think we should treat social media the same way we treat alcohol: a really cool and enjoyable thing, but not suitable for minors.

+1 for better bicycles... Seriously, I think the key requirements are having conditions that create the desire to progress (at an individual level, I mean - seeing that a better life is possible and wanting it for one's self) coupled with sufficient freedom to allow that desire to be pursued and realized. A really common desire-kindler, I'd think, would simply be seeing other living better lives and wanting to improve your own. But as far as how well that process goes, yeah, education and luck certainly play roles.

Well, fuel cells still use fuel; it's not an all-electric technology that could use electricity sourced by nuclear power. I think we've talked in another thread about capacitors vs. chemical energy storage. Humans have accomplished too many amazing things for me to say "never" very easily, but pure electric energy storage has a tough challenge to compete with chemical storage. I believe the point I made in the other forum was that the former stores energy via fields without breaking / forming chemical bonds, whereas the latter does have access to the full energy of those bonds. Like I said, I won't say never, but I have severe doubts. I'm not fixated on any one thing - "whatever gets us there" is great in my book. I just think that if the team at UT can make battery capabilities such as the ones mentioned in the article commercially realizable, then it could make a real difference. Electric already has a lot of advantages over internal combustion (not the least of which is efficiency). Safer, more economically competitive, and safer batteries could put them on the inside track. Can you recharge a fuel cell? By that I mean by inputting electrical power, as opposed to adding fresh fuel. If so, how fast is that process?

Ah - learn something every day. There you go. I'm still sort of new here.

One of the things I love most about the modern era we live in is the resources it makes available for self-education. I think it's a wonderful thing. Also, I don't want to be perceived as taking the recent battery announcement as a slam dunk done deal. It absolutely could fail to prove out. But one can certainly hope otherwise; maybe this will be one of the rounds we win. It would certainly be a good thing for the planet. I've never been very enthusiastic about electric vehicles. It's cool technology, and I was loosely connected with a couple of EV programs while I worked at UT Austin. But I've always felt that the battery technology available was limiting. What people (many, at least; perhaps not all) is a vehicle they can take a road trip in. That means being able to hold several hundred miles worth of energy, which batteries are at least in the ballpark for. But it also means being able to stop at a service station and re-fuel in a period of minutes, which batteries have not offered previously. If this announcement lives up to the stated potential it could change that. Energy storage and conversion is a fascinating field; I very much enjoyed working in that area. I found it necessary to move to move from Austin to Houston for personal reasons, though, and the job market at the time took me back into digital electronics. Which can also be very fun, but I sometimes think that the 1990's was the high water mark for people with my particular skill set. I think the most interesting things going on in electronics today are at the VLSI level. I still remember the UT work with enormous fondness.

Raider5678: +1

I'm an electrical engineer by training, but I don't claim familiarity with battery chemistries. I do have a good understanding of EM field theory and so forth, though. Within EE I'd say my specialties are digital electronics / computer architecture and also electromechanical energy conversion. What's yours? My undergraduate training and the largest part of my career relate to the digital electronics area. My PhD research and the smaller part of my career relate to the electromechanical conversion area.

Replying to the original post. I'm not particularly religious myself; I don't subscribe to any organized religion, nor do I think the Bible is literally true, etc. But here's the thing - you're taking the position that religion and intelligence are mutually incompatible. As far as I can tell, religion has a lot to do with faith, which means believing in something without proof. That's very different from believing in something that is provably untrue. To take the "literal interpretation" group as one example, I think a pretty good case can be made that they fall into the latter category, and I somewhat agree with your point in that case. But many faithful people are not literalists. In point of fact, the big abstract questions like "does God exist" fall into the first of my categories, not the second. I don't see how the existence of God can be disproven, because any universe we observe around us could have been created just that way. So I see room for highly intelligent people to accept every aspect of the universe around us and all of our scientific knowledge, and still choose to believe in divine things. The scientific mindset and the religious mindset are just two completely different things. As scientists, one of our "rules" it not to accept things without an appropriate amount of supporting evidence. That's just not how the process of faith works, though.

How about the advantage of people being free to engage in mutually consensual activities? It's ultimately not about what's "better" in terms of results. It's about people being free to choose. The only reason to have public education is to provide an opportunity for education for those who are economically unable to fund the process. It's essentially a welfare program. I believe education is important, so I support the idea, but I surely do wish it was more well-executed than it is in modern America.

Funny how taxes for specific purposes never seem to go away. It's like toll roads in my area. When the tolls are proposed, it's "to pay for the road construction." But they never, ever, ever go away.

Well, they mentioned that they can be charged much faster than Li-ion batteries. It's hard to see why power would go faster one way but slower the other way. I'm definitely not an expert, though.

I think they call those "keepers."

That's really quite interesting; thanks Strange.

Doh... Nice one.