On 10/12/2021 9:19 AM, MitchAlsup wrote:
> On Tuesday, October 12, 2021 at 10:53:46 AM UTC-5, Ivan Godard wrote:
>> On 10/12/2021 7:40 AM, MitchAlsup wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, October 12, 2021 at 3:31:13 AM UTC-5, Terje Mathisen wrote:
>>>> MitchAlsup wrote:
>>>>> On Monday, October 4, 2021 at 2:49:07 PM UTC-5, Quadibloc wrote:
>>>>>> A while back, a big topic in the news was how China was bullying
>>>>>> the world by limiting its exports of rare earth metals, in violation
>>>>>> of certain trade agreements.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The minerals from which rare earth metals are extracted, however,
>>>>>> are common in many places around the world. China had no
>>>>>> monopoly - except that it was hard to perform the extraction
>>>>>> anywhere else, due to environmental concerns and economic
>>>>>> factors.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Now this:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> https://www.techspot.com/news/91552-reduced-silicon-output-china-leading-increased-chip-production.html
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Silicon - one of the Earth's most common elements, the basis
>>>>>> for most kinds of rock - would seem the most unlikely thing for
>>>>>> any country to be able to monopolize.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> And this time, the shortage isn't due to a direct intention by China,
>>>>>> but instead due to restrictions on energy use the country put in
>>>>>> place to reduce pollution!
>>>>> <
>>>>> Has anyone given a thought to where all the electricity is going to
>>>>> come from once we transition completely away from carbon based
>>>>> energy sources (excepting for airplanes) and dump all those EV cars
>>>>> onto the grid ??
>>>> Yes, of course!
>>>>
>>>> a) Switching all cars to EVs increase the need for electricity by
>>>> something like 4% (depending upon where in the world you are).
>>> <
>>> To get down this low, they have to be 5× more thermally efficient that
>>> your Hybrid Honda.
>>>>
>>>> b) Running a refinery takes a _lot_ of electricity! In fact, it takes so
>>>> much that a modern EV use less KWh to drive a given route than an
>>>> average ICE vehicle needs to produce the gasoline/diesel it will burn.
>>> <
>>> Citation ?
>>>>
>>>> With a highly efficient modern small diesel the case isn't quite that
>>>> clear, but EVs will definitely be a part of the solution.
>>> <
>>> EVs will be "THE" solution for transportation needs of less than 200 miles
>>> (300 Km) but will remain a nuisance for trips of 500 Miles or more.
> <
>> I have heard it asserted that half of the energy cost of a car is
>> driving it, and the other half is building it. So if AI can make
>> self-drive taxis universal enough to get half the car fleet off
>> driveways then you cut 25% off the global transportation budget.
> <
> Trains get several hundred miles to the ton/gallon
> Trucks get several miles to the ton/gallon
> <
> By your logic, trains would have taken over bulk transportation......
> The opposite has actually happened.

Huh? Trains compared to trucks have a first/last mile problem for
anything but bulk-to-bulk. Cars vs. robocabs don't. And trains have a
who-pays-for-infrastructure problem that cars vs. robocars don't. Straw man?

On 10/10/2021 5:52 PM, antispam@math.uni.wroc.pl wrote:
> Stephen Fuld <sfuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid> wrote:
>> On 10/10/2021 12:02 AM, BGB wrote:
>>
>>> Also, none of those countries seems to use the same voting system as the
>>> US ("first past the post" + "winner takes all"). Which was the point I
>>> was getting at here. Namely, that a system like the one the US uses is
>>> prone to almost invariably collapse down to two parties.
>>
>> I think a bigger difference is that they don't have the people vote for
>> the leader directly. They are Parliamentary systems where the people
>> vote for a local candidate of a particular party, and the parties, not
>> the people choose the leader. I do believe the local elections are
>> "first past the post".
>
> AFAIK most countries use "proportional representation".

Is that true? I was basing my understanding of parliamentary systems on
the UK and Canada, which I at least thought use first past the
post/winner take all for the elections for their parliementary
elections. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable about their systems can
chime in. (John Savard or David Brown respectively. Or others.)

Clearly I did not know about the Polish system. Thanks for explaining
it. It does seem complex, but avoids the problems pointed out in
Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. Unfortunately, the US suffers from
having its system set in stone long before Arrow pointed out the
problems. :-(

snipped well stated description of Polish system

>
> My impressing is that original idea of D'Hooft rule was
> to apply it in scale of country, then it would produce
> reasonably accurate representation of voter preferences
> to parties.

I am unfamiliar with the D'Hooft rule, and the only references to
D'Hooft I can find are about quantum physics. :-( Can you help me learn
more?

> As above, with threshold and districts
> of order of 15% of voters are without representation and
> next 10% gets tiny representation. OTOH big parties
> end up with higher proportion of places than votes.
>
> Disadvantages are that party system with threshold means
> that there are no independent candidates. Also,
> candidates are strongly connected to party and only
> weakly to voters in their district: personally unpopular
> candidate has basically warranted place in parlament
> when allocated to district where party is strong and
> party does not provide enough alternative candidates.
> On voter side, D'Hooft rule means that voter looks
> more at party membership and less at personal qualites
> of candidate.
>
> Anyway, this system is quite different than "first past
> the post".

Yes. Do you end up with party coalitions required required to get
things done?

>
> As an extra thing, when there is single position (say
> president or city mayor) normal system is two phase
> one. In first phase there may be many candidates,
> it one gets majority then he/she is declared a winner.
> Otherwise there is second phase between two highest
> scoring candidates.

We (the US) have that, or variants of that for some sate and local
elections.

> BTW: There were various proposals to improve representation
> of minority views. Thinking about this I came to
> scheme that may be new which I call "random voting".
> It should work as follows: first there is normal
> voting and votes are counted. Then candidate is
> chosen randomly, with probablity proportional to
> received number of votes. In this scheme expected
> number of places is exactly proportional to number
> of votes. In scale of country random variation
> would create some deviation from proportionality,
> but smaller than most existing schemes. Also,
> this scheme removes most incentives for "tactical
> voting": voting from somebody different than most
> preffered candidate has no advantages. Of course
> from point of view of ruling class this is very
> bad: results of election would represent views
> of population and argument of sort "most voters
> support our position" in many cases would be
> shown false.

An interesting idea.

Thanks for pointing out the use of proportional representation systems.
I learned something, which is one of the things I enjoy most.

--
- Stephen Fuld
(e-mail address disguised to prevent spam)

On 10/12/2021 10:53 AM, Ivan Godard wrote:
> On 10/12/2021 7:40 AM, MitchAlsup wrote:
>> On Tuesday, October 12, 2021 at 3:31:13 AM UTC-5, Terje Mathisen wrote:
>>> MitchAlsup wrote:
>>>> On Monday, October 4, 2021 at 2:49:07 PM UTC-5, Quadibloc wrote:
>>>>> A while back, a big topic in the news was how China was bullying
>>>>> the world by limiting its exports of rare earth metals, in violation
>>>>> of certain trade agreements.
>>>>>
>>>>> The minerals from which rare earth metals are extracted, however,
>>>>> are common in many places around the world. China had no
>>>>> monopoly - except that it was hard to perform the extraction
>>>>> anywhere else, due to environmental concerns and economic
>>>>> factors.
>>>>>
>>>>> Now this:
>>>>>
>>>>> https://www.techspot.com/news/91552-reduced-silicon-output-china-leading-increased-chip-production.html
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Silicon - one of the Earth's most common elements, the basis
>>>>> for most kinds of rock - would seem the most unlikely thing for
>>>>> any country to be able to monopolize.
>>>>>
>>>>> And this time, the shortage isn't due to a direct intention by China,
>>>>> but instead due to restrictions on energy use the country put in
>>>>> place to reduce pollution!
>>>> <
>>>> Has anyone given a thought to where all the electricity is going to
>>>> come from once we transition completely away from carbon based
>>>> energy sources (excepting for airplanes) and dump all those EV cars
>>>> onto the grid ??
>>> Yes, of course!
>>>
>>> a) Switching all cars to EVs increase the need for electricity by
>>> something like 4% (depending upon where in the world you are).
>> <
>> To get down this low, they have to be 5× more thermally efficient that
>> your Hybrid Honda.
>>>
>>> b) Running a refinery takes a _lot_ of electricity! In fact, it takes so
>>> much that a modern EV use less KWh to drive a given route than an
>>> average ICE vehicle needs to produce the gasoline/diesel it will burn.
>> <
>> Citation ?
>>>
>>> With a highly efficient modern small diesel the case isn't quite that
>>> clear, but EVs will definitely be a part of the solution.
>> <
>> EVs will be "THE" solution for transportation needs of less than 200
>> miles
>> (300 Km) but will remain a nuisance for trips of 500 Miles or more.
>
> I have heard it asserted that half of the energy cost of a car is
> driving it, and the other half is building it. So if AI can make
> self-drive taxis universal enough to get half the car fleet off
> driveways then you cut 25% off the global transportation budget.

They need to give the AI driven taxis a tacky-looking robotic avatar,
that is then all like "Welcome to Johnny Cab!".

....

Otherwise, yeah, could probably work.

There are people like my dad, who are like "AIs can never compete with
humans in driving ability! They will just crash into stuff!" ...

And, then there are people like myself where the perceptual load of
trying to drive a car is bad enough that I can barely avoid running into
stuff as-is, so an AI could probably do better.

Also, if there were some sort of AI + AR thingy which could run facial
recognition and tell me just who I am looking at much of the time, that
would be helpful. Like, not all of us have an innate "easily tell one
person apart from another" sense, ...

....

Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> schrieb:
>
>> I think though, that when you consider a larger political entity like
>> the EU, the USA, or China, low production in one place can be
>> compensated by high production elsewhere. You are not going to have
>> clouds and calm wind everywhere at the same time.
>
>If you look at the EU, you will have a dark season everywhere at
>once,

Most of the EU does not lie north of the polar circle. There may be
shorter solar energy generation in Winter, but OTOH the cold increases
the efficiency of solar cells; a collegue of mine evaluated the
production of his PV installation, and IIRC he saw the rated output in
February. The problem is not winter, but clouds and fog.

>and you will also have EU-wide calm periods. One or two weeks
>is not uncommon, this is the feared "Dunkelflaute" (dark wind lull).

Citation needed. Looking at
<https://www.dwd.de/DE/presse/pressekonferenzen/DE/2018/PK_06_03_2018/pressemitteilung_20180306.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=4>,
it says that there are 0.2 cases per year with low (<10% rated power)
over 48hours across the whole of EU; but that relates to the PV and
Wind installations of 2018; with better distribution of such
installations, I expect the number of such cases to become smaller.

>I've run a few calculations a few years back. If you wanted to
>bridge two week's electricity demand in winter of Germany alone,
>you would have to lift Lake Constance by 200 m. Lake Constance
>has around 1/6 of the annual rainfall on Germany, so any reasonable
>amount of hydro storage is going to involve geoengineering on
>a scale that nobody has even dreamt of up to now.

If you add up the various reserviors of hydro dams, you will find that
we have made a lot of geo-engineering in the last century.

- anton
--
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>

On 12.10.2021 19:21, Stephen Fuld wrote:
> On 10/10/2021 5:52 PM, antispam@math.uni.wroc.pl wrote:
>
> Is that true? I was basing my understanding of parliamentary systems on
> the UK and Canada, which I at least thought use first past the
> post/winner take all for the elections for their parliementary
> elections. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable about their systems can
> chime in. (John Savard or David Brown respectively.  Or others.)
>
> Clearly I did not know about the Polish system.  Thanks for explaining
> it.  It does seem complex, but avoids the problems pointed out in
> Arrow's Impossibility Theorem.  Unfortunately, the US suffers from
> having its system set in stone long before Arrow pointed out the
> problems.  :-(
>
> snipped well stated description of Polish system
>
>
>
> I am unfamiliar with the D'Hooft rule, and the only references to
> D'Hooft I can find are about quantum physics. :-(  Can you help me learn
> more?
>

I reckon he meant to say D'Hondt:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method

Other methods are linked in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party-list_proportional_representation

>
>
>
> Yes.  Do you end up with party coalitions required required to get
> things done?
>
>
> We (the US) have that, or variants of that for some sate and local
> elections.
>
>
>
> An interesting idea.
>
> Thanks for pointing out the use of proportional representation systems.
>  I learned something, which is one of the things I enjoy most.
>
>

On 10/12/2021 11:38 AM, Bernd Linsel wrote:
> On 12.10.2021 19:21, Stephen Fuld wrote:

snip

>> I am unfamiliar with the D'Hooft rule, and the only references to
>> D'Hooft I can find are about quantum physics. :-(  Can you help me
>> learn more?
>>
>
> I reckon he meant to say D'Hondt:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method
>
> Other methods are linked in
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party-list_proportional_representation

Thanks. I'll check those out.

--
- Stephen Fuld
(e-mail address disguised to prevent spam)

MitchAlsup wrote:
> On Tuesday, October 12, 2021 at 3:31:13 AM UTC-5, Terje Mathisen wrote:
>> MitchAlsup wrote:
>>> On Monday, October 4, 2021 at 2:49:07 PM UTC-5, Quadibloc wrote:
>>>> A while back, a big topic in the news was how China was bullying
>>>> the world by limiting its exports of rare earth metals, in violation
>>>> of certain trade agreements.
>>>>
>>>> The minerals from which rare earth metals are extracted, however,
>>>> are common in many places around the world. China had no
>>>> monopoly - except that it was hard to perform the extraction
>>>> anywhere else, due to environmental concerns and economic
>>>> factors.
>>>>
>>>> Now this:
>>>>
>>>> https://www.techspot.com/news/91552-reduced-silicon-output-china-leading-increased-chip-production.html
>>>>
>>>> Silicon - one of the Earth's most common elements, the basis
>>>> for most kinds of rock - would seem the most unlikely thing for
>>>> any country to be able to monopolize.
>>>>
>>>> And this time, the shortage isn't due to a direct intention by China,
>>>> but instead due to restrictions on energy use the country put in
>>>> place to reduce pollution!
>>> <
>>> Has anyone given a thought to where all the electricity is going to
>>> come from once we transition completely away from carbon based
>>> energy sources (excepting for airplanes) and dump all those EV cars
>>> onto the grid ??
>> Yes, of course!
>>
>> a) Switching all cars to EVs increase the need for electricity by
>> something like 4% (depending upon where in the world you are).
> <
> To get down this low, they have to be 5× more thermally efficient that
> your Hybrid Honda.

European numbers probably. :-)
>>
>> b) Running a refinery takes a _lot_ of electricity! In fact, it takes so
>> much that a modern EV use less KWh to drive a given route than an
>> average ICE vehicle needs to produce the gasoline/diesel it will burn.
> <
> Citation ?

I didn't write it down, but the link tot he research/article was posted
here in c.arch afair.

>>
>> With a highly efficient modern small diesel the case isn't quite that
>> clear, but EVs will definitely be a part of the solution.
> <
> EVs will be "THE" solution for transportation needs of less than 200 miles
> (300 Km) but will remain a nuisance for trips of 500 Miles or more.

Not really true: We already have reached parity with ICE vehicles for
voyages of 1000 km, as proven by Tesla-Bjørn's many, many 100 km tests
of all new EVs and a reference ICE car.

I.e. on Norwegian/Swedish highways, driving at about 120 km/h (~75 mph),
it takes a little less than 10 hours.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1HOwktdiZmm40atGPwymzrxErMi1ZrKPP

You can also look here at one of his videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu5ViMvYLhU&t=9s

Terje

--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> schrieb:
> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>>Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> schrieb:
>>
>>> I think though, that when you consider a larger political entity like
>>> the EU, the USA, or China, low production in one place can be
>>> compensated by high production elsewhere. You are not going to have
>>> clouds and calm wind everywhere at the same time.
>>
>>If you look at the EU, you will have a dark season everywhere at
>>once,
>
> Most of the EU does not lie north of the polar circle. There may be
> shorter solar energy generation in Winter, but OTOH the cold increases
> the efficiency of solar cells;

Fewer hours, and the sun is much lower. If you look at

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnenstand#/media/Datei:SonnStand49Nord.svg

you will see (calculated for 49° north) that the sun rises at most
~18 degrees above the horizon on December 21st. The sine of 18
degrees is around 0.3, so you get at most 30% of the solar radiation
per given area on the ground. On the 21st of July, it is around 62
degrees, for approximately 88%.

>a collegue of mine evaluated the
> production of his PV installation, and IIRC he saw the rated output in
> February. The problem is not winter, but clouds and fog.

It's the combination of both - it is often overcast in winter.

>
>>and you will also have EU-wide calm periods. One or two weeks
>>is not uncommon, this is the feared "Dunkelflaute" (dark wind lull).
>
> Citation needed. Looking at
><https://www.dwd.de/DE/presse/pressekonferenzen/DE/2018/PK_06_03_2018/pressemitteilung_20180306.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=4>,
> it says that there are 0.2 cases per year with low (<10% rated power)
> over 48hours across the whole of EU; but that relates to the PV and
> Wind installations of 2018; with better distribution of such
> installations, I expect the number of such cases to become smaller.

Look at

https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=de&c=DE&stacking=stacked_absolute_area&interval=month&year=2017&month=01

between the 16th and the 25th of 2017, for the energy production
in Germany. Existing wind turbines were at around 5% of their
nominal capacity.

Statistical bromides like what the DWD presented there are not
very meaningful in such a case when these events are consecutive,
and you face the alternative of shutting down your country if
things don't go well. Remember the old joke about the statistics
professor who drowned in a lake which was 60 cm deep on average?

Wind turbines are not such a safe technology either, look at

https://www.halternerzeitung.de/haltern/eingestuerztes-windrad-in-haltern-experte-sieht-zwei-moegliche-ursachen-w1683177-p-3000348499/

(which happened very close to where I spent my childhood, so there
a bit of personal interest).

Then again, there is no public certification for wind turbines
in Germany (except for the lifts), so shoddy engineering
and construction is to be expected. I suspect that they
would not be profitable otherwise.

>>I've run a few calculations a few years back. If you wanted to
>>bridge two week's electricity demand in winter of Germany alone,
>>you would have to lift Lake Constance by 200 m. Lake Constance
>>has around 1/6 of the annual rainfall on Germany, so any reasonable
>>amount of hydro storage is going to involve geoengineering on
>>a scale that nobody has even dreamt of up to now.
>
> If you add up the various reserviors of hydro dams, you will find that
> we have made a lot of geo-engineering in the last century.

Simply not on that scale, off by a factor of several orders
of magnitude.

Do the math yourself, if you want to - the figures are readily
available.

On 2021-10-12, Terje Mathisen <terje.mathisen@tmsw.no> wrote:
> Branimir Maksimovic wrote:
>> On 2021-10-12, Terje Mathisen <terje.mathisen@tmsw.no> wrote:
>>> MitchAlsup wrote:
>>>> On Monday, October 4, 2021 at 2:49:07 PM UTC-5, Quadibloc wrote:
>>>>> A while back, a big topic in the news was how China was bullying
>>>>> the world by limiting its exports of rare earth metals, in violation
>>>>> of certain trade agreements.
>>>>>
>>>>> The minerals from which rare earth metals are extracted, however,
>>>>> are common in many places around the world. China had no
>>>>> monopoly - except that it was hard to perform the extraction
>>>>> anywhere else, due to environmental concerns and economic
>>>>> factors.
>>>>>
>>>>> Now this:
>>>>>
>>>>> https://www.techspot.com/news/91552-reduced-silicon-output-china-leading-increased-chip-production.html
>>>>>
>>>>> Silicon - one of the Earth's most common elements, the basis
>>>>> for most kinds of rock - would seem the most unlikely thing for
>>>>> any country to be able to monopolize.
>>>>>
>>>>> And this time, the shortage isn't due to a direct intention by China,
>>>>> but instead due to restrictions on energy use the country put in
>>>>> place to reduce pollution!
>>>> <
>>>> Has anyone given a thought to where all the electricity is going to
>>>> come from once we transition completely away from carbon based
>>>> energy sources (excepting for airplanes) and dump all those EV cars
>>>> onto the grid ??
>>>
>>> Yes, of course!
>>>
>>> a) Switching all cars to EVs increase the need for electricity by
>>> something like 4% (depending upon where in the world you are).
>>>
>>> b) Running a refinery takes a _lot_ of electricity! In fact, it takes so
>>> much that a modern EV use less KWh to drive a given route than an
>>> average ICE vehicle needs to produce the gasoline/diesel it will burn.
>>>
>>> With a highly efficient modern small diesel the case isn't quite that
>>> clear, but EVs will definitely be a part of the solution.
>>>
>> Electricity is cheap to produce eg wind power water power all clean
>> sources.
>
> I agree with that, more or less, but you didn't respond to my post which
> was how a liter of gasoline or diesel require so much electricity to
> refine it that you can more or less bypass the refinery and the ICE
> pollution and instead use the electricity in an EV.
>

I agree with that. Electric vehicles are much superior to gasoline
ones.

> Terje
>

--

7-77-777
Evil Sinner!
with software, you repeat same experiment, expecting different results...

On 10/12/2021 12:13 PM, Anton Ertl wrote:
> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>> Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> schrieb:
>>
>>> I think though, that when you consider a larger political entity like
>>> the EU, the USA, or China, low production in one place can be
>>> compensated by high production elsewhere. You are not going to have
>>> clouds and calm wind everywhere at the same time.
>>
>> If you look at the EU, you will have a dark season everywhere at
>> once,
>
> Most of the EU does not lie north of the polar circle. There may be
> shorter solar energy generation in Winter, but OTOH the cold increases
> the efficiency of solar cells; a collegue of mine evaluated the
> production of his PV installation, and IIRC he saw the rated output in
> February. The problem is not winter, but clouds and fog.
>

Would be funny though if it did go full dark for part of the year, and
full day for another part (say, if in mid-summer the sun just sorta
circled overhead).

I lived in an area for a few years where there was hardly any difference
between summer and winter (just some parts of the year, it rained more
often, and other parts, less often).

Where I am right now, the leaves fall off many of the trees from around
mid/late November to February or so.

Sometimes it might snow occasionally, but then the roads are chaos until
it all goes away (usually in a few days). One can make jokes about
Christmas or similar whenever it snows, but it is kind of a coin toss as
to whether or not snow and Christmas will be coincident.

I think there is some sort of foamy material people can spray on their
lawn to make it look snowy though (via something resembling a leaf
blower). Usually coincides with them putting up other forms of holiday
decorations (lights, plastic or styrofoam snowmen, ...).

Well, apart from some chaos fairly recently (earlier this year IIRC),
where their was lots of snow and ice.

>> and you will also have EU-wide calm periods. One or two weeks
>> is not uncommon, this is the feared "Dunkelflaute" (dark wind lull).
>
> Citation needed. Looking at
> <https://www.dwd.de/DE/presse/pressekonferenzen/DE/2018/PK_06_03_2018/pressemitteilung_20180306.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=4>,
> it says that there are 0.2 cases per year with low (<10% rated power)
> over 48hours across the whole of EU; but that relates to the PV and
> Wind installations of 2018; with better distribution of such
> installations, I expect the number of such cases to become smaller.
>

PV is still pretty rare here.

Until recently, one was still expected to pay the utility company for
any power they used (from the Sun), but this has apparently changed more
recently (and it is possible to get a subsidy by installing PV).

Apparently the legality of things like rain barrels and similar is still
a topic of debate, ...

>> I've run a few calculations a few years back. If you wanted to
>> bridge two week's electricity demand in winter of Germany alone,
>> you would have to lift Lake Constance by 200 m. Lake Constance
>> has around 1/6 of the annual rainfall on Germany, so any reasonable
>> amount of hydro storage is going to involve geoengineering on
>> a scale that nobody has even dreamt of up to now.
>
> If you add up the various reserviors of hydro dams, you will find that
> we have made a lot of geo-engineering in the last century.
>
> - anton
>

Terje Mathisen <terje.mathisen@tmsw.no> schrieb:

> I agree with that, more or less, but you didn't respond to my post which
> was how a liter of gasoline or diesel require so much electricity to
> refine it that you can more or less bypass the refinery and the ICE
> pollution and instead use the electricity in an EV.

This is so implausible as to be almost ludicrous.

What refieries do is distill. You get the energy from the
distillation from steam, not from electricity.

If you're good, you use a cogeneration facility so you can extract
electricity from the heat (at close to 100% thermal efficiency)
before using it for running your distillation columns.

Of course, if somebody wants to run a distillery like the Swiss
ran their steam locomotives in World War II when they could not
get enough coal... like here:

http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/LOCOLOCO/swisselec/swisselc.htm

It's enough to make any thermodynamics engineer weep, much worse
than the proverbial vanilla ice cream with hot raspberries.

On 2021-10-08, chris <chris-nospam@tridac.net> wrote:
>>
>
> I've been monitoring the climate change issue for over a decade, and
> it's not so clear cut as those with an agenda would claim. Climate
> change ?, yes, but no evidence for a climate emergency. We have decades
> to sort this out and humanity will fix it just as they always have in
> the past, through advances in the sciences and the political will to
> push the R&D. Instead, most of the western world running round like
> headless chickens, while the likes of China and India carry on business
> as usual and are unlikely to change.
>

Please analize research of Milutin Milankvic Serb that spent significant
time in clymate chage research. They you will be all clear...

--

7-77-777
Evil Sinner!
with software, you repeat same experiment, expecting different results...

Den 2021-10-12 kl. 22:59, skrev BGB:
> On 10/12/2021 12:13 PM, Anton Ertl wrote:
>> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>>> Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> schrieb:
>>>
>>>> I think though, that when you consider a larger political entity like
>>>> the EU, the USA, or China, low production in one place can be
>>>> compensated by high production elsewhere.  You are not going to have
>>>> clouds and calm wind everywhere at the same time.
>>>
>>> If you look at the EU, you will have a dark season everywhere at
>>> once,
>>
>> Most of the EU does not lie north of the polar circle.  There may be
>> shorter solar energy generation in Winter, but OTOH the cold increases
>> the efficiency of solar cells; a collegue of mine evaluated the
>> production of his PV installation, and IIRC he saw the rated output in
>> February.  The problem is not winter, but clouds and fog.
>>
>
> Would be funny though if it did go full dark for part of the year, and
> full day for another part (say, if in mid-summer the sun just sorta
> circled overhead).
>

Like at the north & south poles? And of course the effect is partially
effective from the pole down/up to the polar circle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_circle

I've been at and north of the arctic circle in Sweden and Norway, but
I've never lived there.

/Marcus

Thomas Koenig wrote:
> Terje Mathisen <terje.mathisen@tmsw.no> schrieb:
>
>> I agree with that, more or less, but you didn't respond to my post which
>> was how a liter of gasoline or diesel require so much electricity to
>> refine it that you can more or less bypass the refinery and the ICE
>> pollution and instead use the electricity in an EV.
>
> This is so implausible as to be almost ludicrous.

I googled "how much electricity does it take to produce a liter of
gasoline?" and the top of the search page was the following statement:

About 238,000,000 results (0.68 seconds)
You take an average of 5 kilowatt hours to refine gasoline, something
like the Model S can go 20 miles on 5 kilowatt hours. You basically have
the energy needed to power electric vehicles if you stop refining.”Jul
27, 2017

Even if that is wrong by a binary order of magnitude, it still shows
that you need a lot of power to operate a refinery.

Terje

>
> What refieries do is distill. You get the energy from the
> distillation from steam, not from electricity.
>
> If you're good, you use a cogeneration facility so you can extract
> electricity from the heat (at close to 100% thermal efficiency)
> before using it for running your distillation columns.
>
> Of course, if somebody wants to run a distillery like the Swiss
> ran their steam locomotives in World War II when they could not
> get enough coal... like here:
>
> http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/LOCOLOCO/swisselec/swisselc.htm
>
> It's enough to make any thermodynamics engineer weep, much worse
> than the proverbial vanilla ice cream with hot raspberries.
>

--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

On 12/10/2021 19:21, Stephen Fuld wrote:
> On 10/10/2021 5:52 PM, antispam@math.uni.wroc.pl wrote:
>> Stephen Fuld <sfuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid> wrote:
>>> On 10/10/2021 12:02 AM, BGB wrote:
>>>
>>>> Also, none of those countries seems to use the same voting system as
>>>> the
>>>> US ("first past the post" + "winner takes all"). Which was the point I
>>>> was getting at here. Namely, that a system like the one the US uses is
>>>> prone to almost invariably collapse down to two parties.
>>>
>>> I think a bigger difference is that they don't have the people vote for
>>> the leader directly.  They are Parliamentary systems where the people
>>> vote for a local candidate of a particular party, and the parties, not
>>> the people choose the leader.  I do believe the local elections are
>>> "first past the post".
>>
>> AFAIK most countries use "proportional representation".
>
> Is that true? I was basing my understanding of parliamentary systems on
> the UK and Canada, which I at least thought use first past the
> post/winner take all for the elections for their parliementary
> elections. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable about their systems can
> chime in. (John Savard or David Brown respectively.  Or others.)

I know nothing about Canada here. But we can always look to Wikipedia :-)

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation>

It looks like much of the world uses some kind of proportional
representation (there are several kinds).

The UK has the old first-past-the-post system for British members of
parliament, but in Scotland the Scottish parliament uses proportional
representation (AFAIK - being an ex-pat, I don't vote there).

Norway has proportional representation. (I think Terje explained it
already somewhere. I can't vote in the national elections here, as I am
not a citizen as yet. I have to prove I can speak Norwegian before
they'll give me citizenship. I've been fairly fluent for nearly 25
years, but I have to have it documented!)

>
> Clearly I did not know about the Polish system.  Thanks for explaining
> it.  It does seem complex, but avoids the problems pointed out in
> Arrow's Impossibility Theorem.  Unfortunately, the US suffers from
> having its system set in stone long before Arrow pointed out the
> problems.  :-(
>

The US is famous for taking election corruption to the extremes of legal
possibilities. They don't have the honest corruption of some countries,
by jailing or assassinating your political enemies, but they have great
imagination for legal but contemptible and unethical tricks such as
Gerrymandering, passing laws to restrict or encourage groups of voters
that are likely to support whoever is currently in power, their
ridiculous voter registration system, and so on.

The British system is more civilised - they stick firmly to the system
that was picked long ago, when Britain still had a right to the
adjective "Great", with no regard to how the control of the country
differs from the popular vote. And most people vote for whoever Rupert
Murdoch's newspapers tell them to vote.

(Not that I am at all cynical...)

On Wednesday, October 13, 2021 at 9:59:23 AM UTC+3, Terje Mathisen wrote:
> Thomas Koenig wrote:
> > Terje Mathisen <terje.m...@tmsw.no> schrieb:
> >
> >> I agree with that, more or less, but you didn't respond to my post which
> >> was how a liter of gasoline or diesel require so much electricity to
> >> refine it that you can more or less bypass the refinery and the ICE
> >> pollution and instead use the electricity in an EV.
> >
> > This is so implausible as to be almost ludicrous.
> I googled "how much electricity does it take to produce a liter of
> gasoline?" and the top of the search page was the following statement:
>
> About 238,000,000 results (0.68 seconds)
> You take an average of 5 kilowatt hours to refine gasoline, something
> like the Model S can go 20 miles on 5 kilowatt hours. You basically have
> the energy needed to power electric vehicles if you stop refining.寧ul
> 27, 2017
>

5kW is for US gallon = 3.78541 liter

> Even if that is wrong by a binary order of magnitude, it still shows
> that you need a lot of power to operate a refinery.
>

I suspect, a one binary order of magnitude will come when we operate Model S under realistic conditions.

Another mistake of Musk's statement (1-3 binary of orders of magnitude) explained in my first google hit.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/so-exactly-how-much-electricity-does-take-produce-gallon-paul-martin

Summary: Musk does not compare apples to apples. 5kWh used by refinery are not electricity, but heat.
If you try to convert it to electricity, you would be extremely lucky to get 3kW (if you have huge gas turbine power
plant), but more likely "the quality" of the heat is much lower than that, i.e. we do not begin with pure methane, but with vapor at 100-150 degrees Celsius. I.e. something capable to generate at best ~1.5KWh of electricity.

> Terje
> >
> > What refieries do is distill. You get the energy from the
> > distillation from steam, not from electricity.
> >
> > If you're good, you use a cogeneration facility so you can extract
> > electricity from the heat (at close to 100% thermal efficiency)
> > before using it for running your distillation columns.
> >
> > Of course, if somebody wants to run a distillery like the Swiss
> > ran their steam locomotives in World War II when they could not
> > get enough coal... like here:
> >
> > http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/LOCOLOCO/swisselec/swisselc.htm
> >
> > It's enough to make any thermodynamics engineer weep, much worse
> > than the proverbial vanilla ice cream with hot raspberries.
> >
> --
> - <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
> "almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

On 13/10/21 08:36, David Brown wrote:
> The US is famous for taking election corruption to the extremes of legal
> possibilities. They don't have the honest corruption of some countries,
> by jailing or assassinating your political enemies, but they have great
> imagination for legal but contemptible and unethical tricks such as
> Gerrymandering, passing laws to restrict or encourage groups of voters
> that are likely to support whoever is currently in power, their
> ridiculous voter registration system, and so on.
>
> The British system is more civilised - they stick firmly to the system
> that was picked long ago, when Britain still had a right to the
> adjective "Great", with no regard to how the control of the country
> differs from the popular vote. And most people vote for whoever Rupert
> Murdoch's newspapers tell them to vote.
>
> (Not that I am at all cynical...)

You haven't been following the news about Great Britain; BoJo
is taking leaves out of the US's far right playbook :(
Steve Bannon has had BoJo's ear in the past.

The most obvious example is that they have declared they are
going to stamp out (non-existent) postal voting fraud by
introducing the need for photo id at the polling booth.
It should take you several nanoseconds to work out which
party that would benefit.

"The government is twisting the rules of the game in their favour. Yesterday's
Queen's Speech revealed that it is prioritising a discredited, evidence-free
voter ID policy – the exact sort of partisan gerrymandering that is used as a
tool for voter suppression in the United States."
https://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2019/10/15/photo-id-govt-voting-reform-will-discourage-ethnic-minority-voting/

Fortunately there is opposition in Scotland (and Wales)

https://www.politics.co.uk/news/2021/10/01/holyrood-refuses-consent-for-elections-bill/

David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> writes:

> On 12/10/2021 19:21, Stephen Fuld wrote:
>> On 10/10/2021 5:52 PM, antispam@math.uni.wroc.pl wrote:
>>> Stephen Fuld <sfuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid> wrote:
>>>> On 10/10/2021 12:02 AM, BGB wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Also, none of those countries seems to use the same voting system as
>>>>> the
>>>>> US ("first past the post" + "winner takes all"). Which was the point I
>>>>> was getting at here. Namely, that a system like the one the US uses is
>>>>> prone to almost invariably collapse down to two parties.
>>>>
>>>> I think a bigger difference is that they don't have the people vote for
>>>> the leader directly.  They are Parliamentary systems where the people
>>>> vote for a local candidate of a particular party, and the parties, not
>>>> the people choose the leader.  I do believe the local elections are
>>>> "first past the post".
>>>
>>> AFAIK most countries use "proportional representation".
>>
>> Is that true? I was basing my understanding of parliamentary systems on
>> the UK and Canada, which I at least thought use first past the
>> post/winner take all for the elections for their parliementary
>> elections. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable about their systems can
>> chime in. (John Savard or David Brown respectively.  Or others.)
>
> I know nothing about Canada here. But we can always look to Wikipedia :-)
>
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation>
>
> It looks like much of the world uses some kind of proportional
> representation (there are several kinds).
>
> The UK has the old first-past-the-post system for British members of
> parliament, but in Scotland the Scottish parliament uses proportional
> representation (AFAIK - being an ex-pat, I don't vote there).
>
> Norway has proportional representation. (I think Terje explained it
> already somewhere. I can't vote in the national elections here, as I am
> not a citizen as yet. I have to prove I can speak Norwegian before
> they'll give me citizenship. I've been fairly fluent for nearly 25
> years, but I have to have it documented!)
>
>>
>> Clearly I did not know about the Polish system.  Thanks for explaining
>> it.  It does seem complex, but avoids the problems pointed out in
>> Arrow's Impossibility Theorem.  Unfortunately, the US suffers from
>> having its system set in stone long before Arrow pointed out the
>> problems.  :-(
>>
>
> The US is famous for taking election corruption to the extremes of legal
> possibilities. They don't have the honest corruption of some countries,
> by jailing or assassinating your political enemies, but they have great
> imagination for legal but contemptible and unethical tricks such as
> Gerrymandering, passing laws to restrict or encourage groups of voters
> that are likely to support whoever is currently in power, their
> ridiculous voter registration system, and so on.
>
> The British system is more civilised - they stick firmly to the system
> that was picked long ago, when Britain still had a right to the
> adjective "Great", with no regard to how the control of the country
> differs from the popular vote. And most people vote for whoever Rupert
> Murdoch's newspapers tell them to vote.
>
> (Not that I am at all cynical...)

CGP Grey[1] has some videos describing several different voting systems,
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cgp+voting&t=ffab&iar=videos&iax=videos&ia=videos

For me the videos were entertaining and educational at the same time.

clamky@hotmail.com writes:

> David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> writes:
>
>> On 12/10/2021 19:21, Stephen Fuld wrote:
>>> On 10/10/2021 5:52 PM, antispam@math.uni.wroc.pl wrote:

[..]

>
> CGP Grey[1] has some videos describing several different voting systems,
> https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cgp+voting&t=ffab&iar=videos&iax=videos&ia=videos
>
> For me the videos were entertaining and educational at the same time.

[1] Was supposed to contain some attempted humor regarding an American
(CGP Grey) moving to UK to take the space left behind by en-masse
Scottish migration to .no

On 12/10/2021 09:50, BGB wrote:
> On 10/12/2021 1:56 AM, Terje Mathisen wrote:
>> Marcus wrote:
>>> On 2021-10-08 17:43, MitchAlsup wrote:
>>>> On Thursday, October 7, 2021 at 11:33:30 PM UTC-5, Quadibloc wrote:
>>>>> On Thursday, October 7, 2021 at 6:21:49 PM UTC-6, MitchAlsup wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Has anyone given a thought to where all the electricity is going to
>>>>>> come from once we transition completely away from carbon based
>>>>>> energy sources (excepting for airplanes) and dump all those EV cars
>>>>>> onto the grid ??
>>>>> Yes. It is claimed that new energy storage technologies will make it
>>>>> possible to meet our power needs from wind and solar.
>>>> <
>>>> So, what has grown to 2%-5% will be able to run at 130% in 20 years !?!
>>>> (130% provides for the growth in energy consumption as population grows
>>>> and as industries consume more energy.)
>>>
>>> Not sure if it can reach 130% in 20 years, but we can surely do better.
>>>
>>> Solar is actually quite cheap, and a very safe investment (near zero
>>> maintenance costs and guaranteed power delivery for a few decades). The
>>> only real problem w.r.t. investment in solar is that the price of panels
>>> are dropping so fast ;-) OTOH that means that you can just keep ramping
>>> up at a faster pace...
>>>
>>> A simple trick that can be done with solar (that can't really be done
>>> with any other energy source) is to subsidize solar panels for homes.
>>> This was done in Germany, and they're up at 10% solar (that's excluding
>>> wind, which is at some 25%).
>>
>> 10-15 years ago I thought nuclear was humanity's only option, but then
>> I learned that a 100x100 km slice of Sahara would produce more energy
>> that the world is currently using.
>>
>> Solar has the obvious huge drawback of only producing 10-11 hours/day,
>> and long-distance transmission lines that could transport the energy
>> needed across 6+ time zones are simply not going to happen, so we then
>> end up with an energy storage problem: Is is just as obvious that we
>> cannot store 13-14 hours of energy need in batteries so we either need
>> some alternate form of energy storage that does scale, or humanity
>> must adjust to only using significant power during daytime.
>>
>
> I guess one possibility could be converting water (probably from the
> ocean) into H2 and O2, or alternatively, someone devises a practical way
> to convert water and CO2 back into a usable fuel.
>
> Reacting H2 and CO2 to produce CH4 and H2O, and maybe polymerizing the
> CH4 back into longer-chain hydrocarbons; using massive amounts of solar
> power to pull all this off.
>

The ideal solution would perhaps to convert it to ethanol, rather than
methane, since that could be used (almost) directly in the world's
existing fleet of petrol cars. No new cars, no new infrastructure, and
significantly higher energy density than today's batteries.

> Then one can ship off the gases in large tanks to use as combustible
> fuels (or use fuel-cells, but these are fairly expensive compared with
> gas turbines or combustion engines).
>

The best fuel cells currently use platinum as a catalyst, AFAIK, which
stops scalability (regardless of how much people are willing to pay, the
available platinum is rather limited).

>
> I guess another crazy idea would be large air-ships, which double as a
> flying cargo ship for liquified gas canisters, and also as a large
> storage tank for gaseous hydrogen (also serves as a lifting gas). So,
> giant flying fuel tanks.
>

Air-ships work by having a low-density gas at a pressure only just high
enough to keep the balloon inflated. Gas transport aims to have such a
high pressure that the gas is liquefied, in order to transport as much
as possible. An air-ship transporting hydrogen would fly about as well
as a balloon filled with water.

>
> Could in premise put lots of solar in places like Nevada and Utah, but
> not a whole lot of water there. Could almost make sense to run a
> pipepline through the Rocky Mountains to allow piping in large amounts
> of ocean water (could maybe also be used as a water supply for Vegas and
> Phoenix and similar as well, as an alternative to doing the whole
> "reclaimed water" thing).
>

It's likely that it would make more sense to transport the
solar-generated electricity to a place where there is water, rather than
vice-versa.

> Places like California and Israel have access to both deserts and the
> ocean (as do many places in West Africa, ...).
>
>
>> Wind helps even though it often blows less in the evening/early night,
>> going offshore is better.
>>
>> Tidal power would solve the entire issue simply because there are huge
>> phase delays between max tide over surprisingly short distances, i.e.
>> the UK has more than a full 6 hour period around its coast.
>>
>
> Possible, but only really relevant to coastal areas.
>

Tides are everywhere. The biggest "rivers" in terms of volume of water,
speed and length, are all undersea. Sure, you need to move the
generated electricity to land - but the majority of people live near the
coast. They mostly live nearer to coastlines than to deserts.

> Granted, I guess transmission lines can go a long ways, so say, much of
> the US could benefit if a bunch of tidal stuff was built in, say,
> Louisiana and similar...

Electricity can be sent a /long/ way with low losses, if you are willing
to invest in more modern infrastructure here (very high voltage DC
lines). There are some challenges if there is a lot of seismic activity
or lightning.

>
>
>> Nuclear is close to the worst possible night-time fill-in since it
>> really wants to run at optimal power output day and night, but it is
>> possible that more modern reactor designs are more amenable to a
>> 24-hour output level swing?
>>
>
> Most reactors can be throttled.
> Though, ideally, don't really want yet more light-water-reactors though.
>

I don't think any nuclear reactors are good at short-cycle variations.

On 12/10/2021 10:47, Marcus wrote:
> On 2021-10-12 08:56, Terje Mathisen wrote:
>> Marcus wrote:
>>> On 2021-10-08 17:43, MitchAlsup wrote:
>>>> On Thursday, October 7, 2021 at 11:33:30 PM UTC-5, Quadibloc wrote:
>>>>> On Thursday, October 7, 2021 at 6:21:49 PM UTC-6, MitchAlsup wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Has anyone given a thought to where all the electricity is going to
>>>>>> come from once we transition completely away from carbon based
>>>>>> energy sources (excepting for airplanes) and dump all those EV cars
>>>>>> onto the grid ??
>>>>> Yes. It is claimed that new energy storage technologies will make it
>>>>> possible to meet our power needs from wind and solar.
>>>> <
>>>> So, what has grown to 2%-5% will be able to run at 130% in 20 years !?!
>>>> (130% provides for the growth in energy consumption as population grows
>>>> and as industries consume more energy.)
>>>
>>> Not sure if it can reach 130% in 20 years, but we can surely do better.
>>>
>>> Solar is actually quite cheap, and a very safe investment (near zero
>>> maintenance costs and guaranteed power delivery for a few decades). The
>>> only real problem w.r.t. investment in solar is that the price of panels
>>> are dropping so fast ;-) OTOH that means that you can just keep ramping
>>> up at a faster pace...
>>>
>>> A simple trick that can be done with solar (that can't really be done
>>> with any other energy source) is to subsidize solar panels for homes.
>>> This was done in Germany, and they're up at 10% solar (that's excluding
>>> wind, which is at some 25%).
>>
>> 10-15 years ago I thought nuclear was humanity's only option, but then
>> I learned that a 100x100 km slice of Sahara would produce more energy
>> that the world is currently using.
>>
>> Solar has the obvious huge drawback of only producing 10-11 hours/day,
>> and long-distance transmission lines that could transport the energy
>> needed across 6+ time zones are simply not going to happen, so we then
>> end up with an energy storage problem: Is is just as obvious that we
>> cannot store 13-14 hours of energy need in batteries so we either need
>> some alternate form of energy storage that does scale, or humanity
>> must adjust to only using significant power during daytime.
>
> That's an obvious and huge drawback. I wonder what new doors would open
> up if we stopped thinking that we need 100% energy efficiency, though.
> E.g. with coal etc, we sure do not want to throw away 50% of the
> produced energy - but with solar and wind? Does it matter if we
> overproduce and/or have losses in energy storage solutions?

Yes, it matters. It can be hard to get rid of that extra power.
Sometimes in the grids in Europe, where there is a lot of wind power,
the spot price for electricity goes negative - the generating companies
will /pay/ people to use the electricity because it is cheaper to do
that than to have a way to burn off the excess.

> It seems to
> me that even low efficiency/durability energy storage solutions could be
> viable. And rather than thinking electrical batteries there are plenty
> of other options, suitable at different scales (water + gravity (dams),
> heating/freezing liquid/gas, kinetic/flywheel, etc).
>

This is a big area of research and investment. The idea is not new -
the UK has two reversible hydroelectric plants that pump up water during
the night, and can generate during peak times. (The speed of turnaround
is impressive - they can go from 0 to 100% production in about a minute.
They were built to handle TV football matches and Saturday night films
in the days of two or three channel television, where half the
households in the country would boil their kettles at half-time.)

>> Wind helps even though it often blows less in the evening/early night,
>> going offshore is better.
>>
>> Tidal power would solve the entire issue simply because there are huge
>> phase delays between max tide over surprisingly short distances, i.e.
>> the UK has more than a full 6 hour period around its coast.
>>
>> Nuclear is close to the worst possible night-time fill-in since it
>> really wants to run at optimal power output day and night, but it is
>> possible that more modern reactor designs are more amenable to a
>> 24-hour output level swing?
>
> Another thing about nuclear is that it's a very centralized energy
> source (unless someone comes up with super-safe mini-scale plants that
> people are fine with having in their neighborhoods). E.g. in Sweden we
> have traditionally had a ~50/50 split between hydro and nuclear (wind
> is replacing nuclear in recent years, though), but we have >10x the
> number of hydro power plants compared to nuclear power plants.
>
> Wind and especially solar are much more suitable for distributed energy
> production, which in turn has benefits in terms of resilience and such.
>
> /Marcus

Marcus wrote:
> Den 2021-10-12 kl. 22:59, skrev BGB:
>>
>> Would be funny though if it did go full dark for part of the year, and
>> full day for another part (say, if in mid-summer the sun just sorta
>> circled overhead).
>>
>
> Like at the north & south poles? And of course the effect is partially
> effective from the pole down/up to the polar circle:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_circle
>
> I've been at and north of the arctic circle in Sweden and Norway, but
> I've never lived there.
>
> /Marcus
I did parts of my military service in Finnmark and Troms, on a warm
summer it is a big advantage to have a south-facing room/barracks since
that is both darker and cooler than the one on the opposite side where
the sun is shining all night.

We had a thin mesh curtain as a mosquito barrier, then slept in just the
douvet cover as the night-time temperature never got below about 25C.

Summer of 1978 the 30 km march with full pack & rifle was first moved to
after midning to try to get the temperature low enough, later on as i
kept getting warmer several companies had to postpone until the stable
high-pressure weather ended.

Nothing quite like getting a sports furlough for a week and the use of a
4x4 to drive to Harstad. That evening as my battery was on an exercise
in Bardufoss I was sitting on the dockside railing eating a bag of
prawns fresh off the boat just below me. :-)

Terje

--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

On 2021-10-13, Terje Mathisen <terje.mathisen@tmsw.no> wrote:
> Marcus wrote:
>> Den 2021-10-12 kl. 22:59, skrev BGB:
>>>
>>> Would be funny though if it did go full dark for part of the year, and
>>> full day for another part (say, if in mid-summer the sun just sorta
>>> circled overhead).
>>>
>>
>> Like at the north & south poles? And of course the effect is partially
>> effective from the pole down/up to the polar circle:
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_circle
>>
>> I've been at and north of the arctic circle in Sweden and Norway, but
>> I've never lived there.
>>
>> /Marcus
> I did parts of my military service in Finnmark and Troms, on a warm
> summer it is a big advantage to have a south-facing room/barracks since
> that is both darker and cooler than the one on the opposite side where
> the sun is shining all night.
>
> We had a thin mesh curtain as a mosquito barrier, then slept in just the
> douvet cover as the night-time temperature never got below about 25C.
>
> Summer of 1978 the 30 km march with full pack & rifle was first moved to
> after midning to try to get the temperature low enough, later on as i
> kept getting warmer several companies had to postpone until the stable
> high-pressure weather ended.
>
> Nothing quite like getting a sports furlough for a week and the use of a
> 4x4 to drive to Harstad. That evening as my battery was on an exercise
> in Bardufoss I was sitting on the dockside railing eating a bag of
> prawns fresh off the boat just below me. :-)
>

Heh, I was anti tenk division, carried malutka then on border patrol
evryday 12km up the mountain 12 km down the mountain :P
So after service I walked 250km no problem with 20kg backpack :P

> Terje
>

--

7-77-777
Evil Sinner!
with software, you repeat same experiment, expecting different results...

On 2021-10-13 11:15, David Brown wrote:
> On 12/10/2021 10:47, Marcus wrote:

snip

>> That's an obvious and huge drawback. I wonder what new doors would open
>> up if we stopped thinking that we need 100% energy efficiency, though.
>> E.g. with coal etc, we sure do not want to throw away 50% of the
>> produced energy - but with solar and wind? Does it matter if we
>> overproduce and/or have losses in energy storage solutions?
>
> Yes, it matters. It can be hard to get rid of that extra power.
> Sometimes in the grids in Europe, where there is a lot of wind power,
> the spot price for electricity goes negative - the generating companies
> will /pay/ people to use the electricity because it is cheaper to do
> that than to have a way to burn off the excess.
>

Well, yes, overproducing may not be wise, since you have to do something
with the excess power (teleheating and such can probably be used to some
extent). I was actually thinking more about having excess /capacity/.
Say that you dimension solar for 300% of the needs for direct-use +
storage during peak sun exposure. Then you'd be able to get 100% of the
needs during poorer sun exposure conditions (e.g. cloudy, morning,
evening).

I imagine that it's fairly easy to control the power output of wind
power generators, and I don't see any inherent problems with controlling
solar power output either.

Then again, it's a question about economy, but unlike big power plants
both wind and solar are relatively simple to expand incrementally, which
should be easier on the budget.

>
>> It seems to
>> me that even low efficiency/durability energy storage solutions could be
>> viable. And rather than thinking electrical batteries there are plenty
>> of other options, suitable at different scales (water + gravity (dams),
>> heating/freezing liquid/gas, kinetic/flywheel, etc).
>>
>
> This is a big area of research and investment. The idea is not new -
> the UK has two reversible hydroelectric plants that pump up water during
> the night, and can generate during peak times. (The speed of turnaround
> is impressive - they can go from 0 to 100% production in about a minute.
> They were built to handle TV football matches and Saturday night films
> in the days of two or three channel television, where half the
> households in the country would boil their kettles at half-time.)
>
>>> Wind helps even though it often blows less in the evening/early night,
>>> going offshore is better.
>>>
>>> Tidal power would solve the entire issue simply because there are huge
>>> phase delays between max tide over surprisingly short distances, i.e.
>>> the UK has more than a full 6 hour period around its coast.
>>>
>>> Nuclear is close to the worst possible night-time fill-in since it
>>> really wants to run at optimal power output day and night, but it is
>>> possible that more modern reactor designs are more amenable to a
>>> 24-hour output level swing?
>>
>> Another thing about nuclear is that it's a very centralized energy
>> source (unless someone comes up with super-safe mini-scale plants that
>> people are fine with having in their neighborhoods). E.g. in Sweden we
>> have traditionally had a ~50/50 split between hydro and nuclear (wind
>> is replacing nuclear in recent years, though), but we have >10x the
>> number of hydro power plants compared to nuclear power plants.
>>
>> Wind and especially solar are much more suitable for distributed energy
>> production, which in turn has benefits in terms of resilience and such.
>>
>> /Marcus
>

On 13/10/2021 10:42, Tom Gardner wrote:
> On 13/10/21 08:36, David Brown wrote:
>> The US is famous for taking election corruption to the extremes of legal
>> possibilities.  They don't have the honest corruption of some countries,
>> by jailing or assassinating your political enemies, but they have great
>> imagination for legal but contemptible and unethical tricks such as
>> Gerrymandering, passing laws to restrict or encourage groups of voters
>> that are likely to support whoever is currently in power, their
>> ridiculous voter registration system, and so on.
>>
>> The British system is more civilised - they stick firmly to the system
>> that was picked long ago, when Britain still had a right to the
>> adjective "Great", with no regard to how the control of the country
>> differs from the popular vote.  And most people vote for whoever Rupert
>> Murdoch's newspapers tell them to vote.
>>
>> (Not that I am at all cynical...)
>
> You haven't been following the news about Great Britain; BoJo
> is taking leaves out of the US's far right playbook :(
> Steve Bannon has had BoJo's ear in the past.
>
> The most obvious example is that they have declared they are
> going to stamp out (non-existent) postal voting fraud by
> introducing the need for photo id at the polling booth.
> It should take you several nanoseconds to work out which
> party that would benefit.

I knew that was a goal for some states in the USA (but of course voting
rules shouldn't be consistent or fair across the country, because of
what someone said several centuries ago), but it is news to me regarding
the UK. I heard Trump say that you should have a photo ID for voting in
the USA since you need a photo ID to buy groceries.

(In Norway, at polling booths you need either a photo ID or you need one
of the election workers to say they know you - we're a trusting people.
For postal voting, we mostly do it online, and everyone has online
digital ID access. We are also quite a connected and organised people.)

>
> "The government is twisting the rules of the game in their favour.
> Yesterday's Queen's Speech revealed that it is prioritising a
> discredited, evidence-free voter ID policy – the exact sort of partisan
> gerrymandering that is used as a tool for voter suppression in the
> United States."
> https://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2019/10/15/photo-id-govt-voting-reform-will-discourage-ethnic-minority-voting/
>
>
> Fortunately there is opposition in Scotland (and Wales)
>
> https://www.politics.co.uk/news/2021/10/01/holyrood-refuses-consent-for-elections-bill/
>