Matt

Matt

  • Commented on The World of Tomorrow
    Not really sure you'd need that much energy: fast-grow LED lighting needs very little energy, and abandoned major urban buildings are probably sufficiently insulated that the heat generated by germinating seed and growing plants would make up for any additional...
  • Commented on The World of Tomorrow
    Renewables have a large human cost per megawatt-hour of generation, so high the boosters of renewables actually boast about it with recent press reports about the millions of jobs wind and solar installations have brought to the US. That's a...
  • Commented on 2117 revisited
    If not collapse, weakly post-scarcity. You can't manufacture more time, higher positions in the positional goods game, more dysprosium, more species that went extinct 60 years ago. OTOH, fighting to control human labor, oil, or ore bodies seems nearly as...
  • Commented on Duelling - Essentially a Bloody Stupid Idea
    It's transport safety experts, insurance companies, people with skin in the game but not in an 'influencing mode' It's tangible evidence based modelling based on actual crash scenarios etc. (and while the 30 is usually hyperbole, it's not always -...
  • Commented on Duelling - Essentially a Bloody Stupid Idea
    But when they put the question in if the same people would be happy if the driverless car gets to decide who lives and who dies (eg a semi trailer swerves in front of you and you can mow down...
  • Commented on Wooden Train Parenting
    Probably the best gift I received as a child was a 50 pound sack of potassium nitrate (fertilizer). This was for my 9th birthday, a few months after my father had me spellbound with a demonstration of the combustion of...
  • Commented on Facts of Life and Death
    Another upside of an economic crash is that it makes it easier to comply with CO2 reduction. The disintegration of the former USSR, and subsequent handover of the good pieces to looter-oligarchs, cut CO2 emissions faster, deeper, and for a...
  • Commented on What else can you do with a Big Dumb Booster?
    Now I think about it, though, it seems like massive east-west powerlines across eurasia are a bit more politically desirable than oil or gas pipelines. The resource of interest flows both ways and is awkward to horde, limiting the scope...
  • Commented on What else can you do with a Big Dumb Booster?
    The Preparatory Manual of Chemical Warfare Agents Third Edition 'Tis a bullshitter's book in the glorious tradition of The Poor Man's James Bond and The Anarchist's Cookbook, with somewhat more academic language to snare people who know a little (but...
  • Commented on What else can you do with a Big Dumb Booster?
    Xenon is heavy compared to most of what's in the atmosphere and thus hangs out down low. Helium not so much. Do you have a citation for that? AIUI stable gases are pretty well mixed throughout the troposphere. The heavier...
  • Commented on What else can you do with a Big Dumb Booster?
    I don't think that this BDB is going to be the key that leads to space sunshades. The mass needed to significantly offset anthropogenic radiative forcing appears to be on the order of millions of tonnes out past LEO. (Not...
  • Commented on Suspense is the key
    Iain Pears uses this device repeatedly in his historical fiction. In e.g. The Dream of Scipio the tension remains not because there's a chance to escape the fate sealed in the introductory pages -- there isn't -- but because we're...
  • Commented on Sad Trombone Exoplanet Reality Check
    I endured a mild, accidental hydrogen sulfide intoxication when I was 20. I became dizzy and couldn't smell the rotten eggs any more. It went away when I hastily shut down the apparatus and retired to outdoors. There were no...
  • Commented on Sad Trombone Exoplanet Reality Check
    No, the problem is simpler than this: stuff decays in a non-linear fashion. At a crude guess, it appears like the half-life of cultural materials is somewhere around 500-1,000 years. We've lost half (or more) of our cultural inheritance from...
  • Commented on The iron law of development
    Vertical farms: useful for fresh herbs and fruits/vegetables that can be grown for flavor instead of transport-and-storage durability; economically viable for urban centers containing enough higher-income people to support a premium-priced quality product. Not economically viable or useful for providing...
  • Commented on The iron law of development
    Much improved battery energy density might lead to much cheaper batteries but there's no good reason to presuppose that higher energy density is required to make stationary battery storage cheap. The key metric for stationary storage is (cost per unit...
  • Commented on What are you reading this summer?
    In fiction I've recently read Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning, a history of some important events of the 25th century narrated by someone close to the action. In terms of social and political institutions it's a very different world...
  • Commented on A plaintive request
    The North Sea Link between the UK and Norway apparently started its construction phase last year. Though as you say a project like this, big and still in early stages, might be thrown off by Brexit....
  • Commented on A plaintive request
    The "solutions" to the variability and non-dependability of wind and solar involve other people spending lots of money to implement either gigantic amounts of storage or oversupply of standby generating capacity, usually fossil-fuelled. At the moment wind and solar coast...
  • Commented on A plaintive request
    I wouldn't enjoy just sitting in the sun all day either. At least not every day. I have a scientific hobby so expansive that you might consider it a second career if it paid anything. If my material prosperity were...
  • Commented on A plaintive request
    I wrote this 5 years ago at Crooked Timber, regarding dystopian SF and its excitement: Is P.G. Wodehouse considered boring? There’s a marked lack of assassins, environmental collapse, alien invasions, bloodsport, and genocidal maniacs in his writing. Maybe Anna Karenina...
  • Commented on Cyberpunk 2.0: Political economy, energy, and the future US
    There was a bullshit article in a magazine (Mother Jones?) a while back about how the construction of uranium power reactors was encouraged to provide material for nuclear weapons and this claim has become absolute truth in a lot of...
  • Commented on Cyberpunk 2.0: Political economy, energy, and the future US
    As I've mentioned in this thread and previously, residents of the UK have a much worse case for solar than most of the world. It's a country with an exceptionally high population density, exceptionally low sunshine, and exceptionally large seasonal...
  • Commented on Cyberpunk 2.0: Political economy, energy, and the future US
    Heh. Almost the same reaction I get when people dismiss nuclear because of lack of proven reserves. That, and when they dismiss nuclear over the politics while simultaneously arguing either for solutions that markedly increase the cost of energy or...
  • Commented on Cyberpunk 2.0: Political economy, energy, and the future US
    As it is, for realistic voter approval comparisons in the event of power district bond referendums, you have to do a lot of subjectively biased arithmetic to discount for things like night time, slack wind times, reloading cycles and so...
  • Commented on Cyberpunk 2.0: Political economy, energy, and the future US
    If someone has an idea how an battery powered excavator might look like, why don't you chip in here: http://engineering.stackexchange.com/questions/10298/how-to-power-a-large-electric-motor-from-a-battery I have no StackExchange account and don't plan to register one, but... The poster there asks how you'd supply 250...
  • Commented on Cyberpunk 2.0: Political economy, energy, and the future US
    Esthetics ... most of the PV panels/modules that I've seen locally (in NA) are monstrous blue or black while at the same time most NA roofs are some other (clashing) color. Considering the impact of iPhone on smartphones (esthetics over...
  • Commented on Cyberpunk 2.0: Political economy, energy, and the future US
    Coking coal, the kind used to make steel, is about 13% of world coal consumption (in 2012, 0.984 billion tons coking coal produced out of 7.83 billion tons total -- See here). If we did absolutely nothing to reduce the...
  • Commented on Cyberpunk 2.0: Political economy, energy, and the future US
    It's true that the top 5 richest (nominal GDP per capita) countries have a total fertility rate below 2.0 and the bottom 5 have have a high TFR (all above 4.0). But the richest five countries are not the five...
  • Commented on Cyberpunk 2.0: Political economy, energy, and the future US
    Your battery storage efficiency is off too. See e.g. table E.2 in this report. As of 2011 battery storage was 78% for round-trip efficiency of sodium-sulfur or 80% for lithium ion. That includes losses from the charger, inverter, and actual...
Subscribe to feed Recent Actions from Matt

Following

Not following anyone

Specials

Merchandise

About This Page

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Propaganda