| Thursday,
July 6, 2006 Subject:
Globalization and IQ Distribution, In Effect Now
Dr. P,
Neal Stephenson and William Gibson are starting to
seem like psychics:
"Middle-class neighborhoods, long regarded as
incubators for the American dream, are losing ground in cities across the
country, shrinking at more than twice the rate of the middle class itself.
In their place, poor and rich neighborhoods are both
on the rise, as cities and suburbs have become increasingly segregated by
income, according to a Brookings Institution study released Thursday. It
found that as a share of all urban and suburban neighborhoods, middle-income
neighborhoods in the nation's 100 largest metro areas have declined from 58
percent in 1970 to 41 percent in 2000...
...Middle-income neighborhoods -- where families earn
80 to 120 percent of the local median income -- have plunged by more than 20
percent as a share of all neighborhoods in Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles
and Philadelphia. They are down 10 percent in the Washington area.
It's happening, too, in this prosperous, mostly white
middle-income Midwestern city where unemployment is low and a vibrant
downtown has been preserved. As poor and rich neighborhoods proliferate, the
share of middle-income neighborhoods in greater Indianapolis has dropped by
21 percent since 1970..."
Source: Washington Post
...this is actually a proxy for IQ distribution in a
globalized economy. Absent genetic manipulation, there is no solution. You
can but hope to be a winner in the Lucky Sperm Lottery, and end up on the
right side of the gated community...
http://www.mcarthurweb.com/archive.aspx?item=2030
Don
-- Donald W. McArthur
"While we are postponing, life speeds by." - Seneca (3BC - 65AD)
Actually, they merely took seriously data
that have been available for fifty years. IQ and heredity have strong
correlations; and IQ is a hefty predictor of success in a meritocracy. This
is disturbing.
We say we have free speech, but in fact
certain scientific publications can't be printed without the threat of
prosecution for "hate crimes". As Fred tells us, most of us know what we
can't say, and who we can't say it about.
You hope your children marry well.
=========
Subject: Electric Cars
Hi Dr. Pournelle,
Speaking as a refugee from the electric vehicle
business, allow me to make a small prediction. You will see no widespread
support, infrastructure or commercial development by the large auto makers
that does not in some way burn petroleum. That part of the problem is
political and must include the enormous control the oil companies have over
public poicies relating to energy production and usage. The situation will
be thus until all the oil is gone. But perhaps I am too cynical.
The little guys (I was one) don't have the capitol to
make the enterprise go. That said, most of the ideas being suggested have
been tried at some level. For instance some years ago I helped with the
mechanical design of a hybrid bus that used, in part, some NASA developed
super capacitors for its peak shaving type of propulsion system. That
particular bus used a Volvo diesel generator that charged the batteries and
capacitors, said genset running at a constant speed.
Hybrids in general have this problem: they convert the
energy several times, with losses at each conversion. The aim is to gain
back some of the conversion loss and exceed the base distillate engine
efficiency by optimizing the engine to turn a generator at constant speed.
You end up with a kind of electric transmission actually turning the wheels.
The batteries are used to peak shave by supplying temporary extra energy for
accleration. It is hard to do. The Prius and its ilk are being successful
because they work pretty well, but in reality don't do much better than a
regular small car with the same power to weight ratio. It doesn't hurt
anything to have Honda and Toyota doing the engineering, either.
The public has a wide spread perception that pure
electric vehicles aren't any good because they won't go 300 miles between
charges, so you can't go on a road trip at a moment's notice, or, heaven
help us, you might actually have to plan around the energy state of the
batteries. This mindset is ignorant generally of how far one drives on an
average day. GM research in the late 70s had the US average drive as about
25 miles a day. Easily done by electric cars with old fashioned flooded
lead-acid batteries. In fact, the vehicles I personally built had a range of
40-50 miles, running with power steering and air conditioning. The GM EV-1
would do about 90 miles with its more sophisticated systems and 0-60 mph in
8 seconds. The EV-1 test users generally had to have the cars pried away
from them. It was very probably the best car GM ever built. It once held the
EV speed record in the vicinity of 180 mph. No, it could not go 90 miles at
180 mph.
Electric vehicles are in fact quite successful, they
just do not match public perceptions of what constitutes a car. Reason
doesn't operate here, it's all perceptions, emotion and gut feels.
My personal choice would be a pure electric and a
nearby nuclear power plant. I drive 14 miles to work. Easy.
As Trader Joe says, "Thanks for listening".
John Witt
When back in the 1960's we were doing some
work on electric cars, we never considered hybrids for exactly that reason:
every energy conversion has a 50% or more loss. It's hard to make up for it.
And we did the math on trips, concluding that nearly every 2-car family
could easily have one electric car, if we had the kilowatts. In those days
we were still hopeful about nuclear electric power as a source of the
kilowatts.
There are many problems about an electric
car with a range of over 80 miles or so, but an 80-mile car with a few hours
to recharging, and a means of using small topping charges when available
(fancy restaurants would I am sure be glad to charge your car while you have
dinner, and many places of work would provide electric outlets, possibly
with an energy charge) -- such cars could have been built in the 1960's and
can certainly be built now. They have performance that will match the best
internal combustion engine cars, too.
==And Mr. Longman answers his critics:
Subject: More Capacitor-Powered
Car
Jerry,
Wow. My little back-of-the-envelope calculation has
stirred a lot of interest.
My purpose was to de-hype the claims made in the
article by putting some approximate numbers to see how possible it would be
to use a capacitor to power a vehicle with a reasonable range and re-charge
it in a reasonable time.
The claim in the article that really piqued my
interest is that the capacitor could be re-charged "instantly" (as opposed
to the long, inconvenient re-charge time of conventional batteries). This
claim is patently false as anyone who has taken an elementary physics or EE
course will know (an infinite current would be required). The question then,
is "how long would it take?". I calculated 6 Hours. Reader Hayward is
absolutely right that it is only 3 hours. I claim stupidity...arithmetic is
not my strong point. But this is certainly not "instantly", and is certainly
much longer than anyone would tolerate in practice. Imagine driving for 2
hours and having to stop for 3 hours to re-fuel.
Of course, it and electric cars in general, would be
useful for short trips and short commutes...but history says few buy such
things (there have been a few commercially available electric cars that
failed). I remember seeing charging posts in Swiss parking lots 20 years ago
(They did not even have any sort of metering)...a great idea, but they are
gone now.
Reader Z and to a less obvious extent, Reader Hayward,
point out that one could charge the thing faster if one used more current.
True. I used 100 Amps 'cause it is a large, but fairly practical value.
Consider the size of the cables required to plug into your vehicle at the
re-charging station that one would have to wrestle with. A pair of #2 wires
(each about 1/2 inch in diameter, insulated) is not very easy to bend/move.
Let alone the low-resistance connector (large) which would have to be mated.
If we could use 1000 Amps (which would reduce the charging time to 'only' 18
minutes, the cable would be un-wrestle-able indeed.
Reader Schaefer is, of course, correct that ultra-high
capacitance devices have been commercially available for several
years...with very low (a few volts) breakdown voltage as he mentions.
Unfortunately the massive amounts of energy storage required for a
reasonable range demand both high capacitance (20,000 Farads in my estimate)
AND high voltages (100 volts for my calculation). Perhaps most people do not
realize how incredibly large (both electrically and physically) a 20,000
Farad capacitor would be. I thought my estimate of a 34 foot cube for
sort-of-current technology) was fairly dramatic. The biggest capacitor in
most systems, is in the power supply and is a couple of thousand
MICRO-Farad...operating at a lot less than 100 volts. The work at MIT is
apparently an effort to further reduce the size of these devices. This would
be a Good Thing.
The article does not mention the maximum voltage, but
it is axiomatic that increasing the voltage requires greater electrode
spacing to keep the electric field below the breakdown value, which
increases the size of the capacitor. I used 100 volts for my estimate
because it is, again, a fairly practical value. Anything much higher would
be quite lethal...anything much smaller would seriously reduce the energy
which can be stored. For a capacitor, E= C*V*V/2. where E is the energy
stored, C is the capacitance, and V is the voltage to which it is charged.
Obviously the energy is very strongly dependent on the voltage (halving the
voltage stores only a quarter of the energy).
Reader Z takes issue my calculations 5 and 6 which I
included somewhat gratuitously (they are not really germane to the central
argument) to give the reader some practical scale and to illustrate that the
back-of-the-envelope calculation is not too far off from reality. Z points
out that because a gasoline engine has an efficiency of only 25% my
comparison to the electricity cost is faulty. I thought I covered that in
the note: "calculations...neglect any efficiency losses (which can be
substantial)". If pressed, I would have used a SWAG of ~30%...which would
have resulted in my theoretical vehicle having a mileage of ~36 MPG. Not bad
for a crude calculation from first principles.
At any rate, it seems unfair to apply efficiency
reduction to statement 6...and NOT apply it to the other side of the
"equality" (statement 5). If one would do so, one would have to include the
efficiency of the electric motor (lets say 80%), the charging circuitry
(80%), losses in the charging cables/connectors (how big/thick do you want
to make them? Let's say 95% efficiency), and then there is the motor's
power-control electronics (let's SWAG 80% for now). This gives an overall
efficiency of 49%, which brings the cost of running my capacitor-powered car
to ABOUT the same as running a gasoline-powered car.
If you think about it for a bit, you will find that
the power-control electronics for a capacitor-powered car become very
interesting. An electrochemical battery maintains its terminal voltage more
or less constant until it is exhausted and then drops like a brick. The
terminal voltage of a capacitor is directly proportional to the amount of
charge left. So our 100 volt capacitor, when half-discharged puts out only
50 volts. When it is 90% discharged only puts out 10 volts, etc. So our
power-control does not simply regulate the voltage DOWN (as in our
electrochemical battery car) to whatever the motor needs (which is pretty
easy to do). Over some portion of the capacitor discharge cycle (depending
on lots of stuff), it must BOOST the voltage (which is considerably more
difficult and hence more inefficient).
Several readers have brought up the subject of "what
happens to the energy in an accident?". Good question. Because the energy
stored is approximately the same as a gallon of gasoline (~1E8 Joules), the
explosion could be equivalent to setting off a gallon of 'gas', which
wouldn't be TOO spectacular. I suspect that it would be much worse, though,
because the capacitor, if physically destroyed would discharge much quicker
than gasoline would burn. A minute of web searching found the useful page
http://home.earthlink.net/~jimlux/energies.htm which says, among other
interesting things, that one pound of "high explosive" produces ~2MJ. If
true, that means our capacitor catastrophic rapid discharge would produce
the equivalent of exploding 50 POUNDS of high explosive. Hmmm.
Ted Longman
==
And while I don't usually print press
releases:
Subject: PODCAST: Mitsubishi Motors Exec. Slams
Hybrids, Defends SUVs
Dear Jerry,
We've just released an exclusive interview with
Mitsubishi Motors Corporate Communications Director Dan Irvin in which he
talks frankly about hybrids, SUVs and just how safe automobiles really are
today.
You can download the interview as an MP3 or via RSS at
the link below: http://www.ipressroom.com/cmp.asp?c=69594O484O4O468O954
Irvin also talks about the opportunities and threats
of consumer blogs. If you have a chance to listen, I hope you find it
interesting.
Sincerely,
Jennifer Dekel Schwartzman & Associates, Inc.
==
Subject: Range Extending Trailer for Electric Autos
AC Propulsion has made them:
http://www.acpropulsion.com/Products/Range_extending_trailers.htm
They also have an interesting, fairly long range
electric vehicle:
http://www.acpropulsion.com/ACP_tzero/SEMAtrip2003.htm
Mark
It certainly makes sense once you think of
them.
And see below
=============
Subject: Blue Origin's FAA filing
It's easy to find if people look for it, but you might
post the link:
http://ast.faa.gov/pdf/20060622_Draft_EA_As_Published.pdf b
Not a lot of technical detail, as the articles said,
but still interesting.
The weight of the vehicle is probably well under the
230,000-pound engine thrust rating. It carries only 120,000 pounds of fuel,
and the structure presumably weighs much less than that.
I didn't realize the Blue Origin launch area was so
close to the New Mexico spaceport and White Sands, only about 100 miles
away. (And about 40 miles from Carlsbad Caverns.)
The way the site is arranged, the buildings and pads
are not generally visible from the nearby highway, and Blue Origin says it
will not provide facilities for public viewing of launches. There will be
some visibility from the highway and other local roads several miles way, so
people who really want to see a launch will have the chance.
I also did not know there was such a thing as "the
Pecos County Aerospace Development Corporation-sponsored Pecos County West
Texas Spaceport at Fort Stockton, Texas." This was an another launch site
Blue Origin considered.
http://www.aerospacetexas.com/
. png
Much of this is covered at Henry
Vanderbilt's annual Space Access Conference.
==============
Subject: Why Johnny Can't Do Math
Mrs. Pournelle should be raking in the dough if
Kentucky is any indication. She just needs to throw some cheap furniture in
with the software. She can even have the program coded so badly it needs its
own machine where it can run in isolation.
http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/14974968.htm
Math aid program would be expensive
STATE WOULD PAY ABOUT $300,000 FOR EVERY 30 STUDENTS By Linda B.
Blackford HERALD-LEADER STAFF WRITER a.. POLL | Should Kentucky
spend the money on 'I Can Learn'? State education officials are
planning to spend $2 million to help middle school students with
math, but much of that money could be spent on a controversial and
expensive computer program that has not been approved by state math
specialists.
The I Can Learn program, created by a
private New Orleans company, has made headlines both for its
disputed effectiveness and for its political connections, which have
brought it millions of dollars in federal earmarks. It is also very
expensive, costing about $300,000 for every 30 students.
State legislators learned about I Can
Learn through Hunter Bates, a lobbyist in Washington and Louisville
who is the former chief of staff for U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, and
was briefly Gov. Ernie Fletcher's running mate.
The pilot program will try out two
programs at about six schools around the state, though it's unclear
which ones. The details of the program are apparently being handled
directly by Education Commissioner Gene Wilhoit, who declined to
comment for this article.<snip>
=
Subject: Re: Why Johnny Can't Do Math
Sweet holy ghost, thats more expensive then buying a
copy of Maya Unlimited for every student AND Office Professional AND Windows
Xp Professional AND a top of the line gaming PC AND a MacBook Pro laptop.
-Dan S.
=David Em adds:
Especially if you need to buy a separate
machine for each app.
=========
Subject: Endorsement?
Can I assume you were only touting the beautiful
comparison pictures on this site, rather than endorsing the site as a whole?
http://www.rense.com/general72/size.htm
http://www.rense.com/
Al Perrella/IDA
I know nothing of the site other than the
comparison pictures. Thanks.
=======
Subject: Kristol - All hell is
breaking loose!
Can't you give younger Kristol some sort of nickname
like the Egregious Frum?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
content/article/2006/07/05/AR2006070501634.html
Even neoconservative hawks who have been generally
supportive of the administration on Iraq and other issues said they are
worried about the direction of American foreign policy, and hope for a
muscular response from the Bush administration toward the latest North
Korean provocation.
"North Korea is firing missiles. Iran is
going nuclear. Somalia is controlled by radical Islamists. Iraq isn't
getting better, and Afghanistan is getting worse," said William Kristol,
editor of the Weekly Standard and a leading conservative commentator. "I
give the president a lot of credit for hanging tough on Iraq. But I am
worried that it has made them too passive in confronting the other
threats."
R
And all this after years of war in Iraq at
his bidding. Some people do not learn much from history. Washington warned
us to avoid entangling alliances, and not to become involved in territorial
disputes in Europe; he'd have added Arabia and Mesopotamia if he'd been
asked.
If we are to have Empire, can we not have
COMPETENT Empire?
==
Liberty over security?
I had a troubling discussion last night with a male
attorney I know casually. He resides in Ohio. It went along similar lines to
other conversations I have had with other 30-something males in the last
year or so. I am a tad older. A true blue Republican, he was willing to
surrender most of our rights, except in monetary matters, in order to
promote "safety" in the present "war on terror." I was reminded of
Franklin's quip about those who would choose security over liberty deserving
neither (my paraphrase).
He really didn't care about the goings on at Gitmo as
long as we were teaching people "not to mess with the U.S.A." Any discussion
of why we chose to invade the most secular satrapy in the "Muslim" world
when we were supposed to be fighting radical Islam was also irrelevant as
long as his personal safety risk could be somehow interjected into the
issue.
I have been voting for Republican Party candidates
since I reached voting age, although I have always considered myself a
limited government conservative. My core concern is that we may be at a
watershed in our nation when any discussion of the loss of our liberties is
trumped immediately by grown men in our population making emotional appeals
to safety.
Regards,
Paul D. Perry
Texas
===============
Subject: Super capacitors.
Are cars the wrong first application?
Jerry,
It strikes me that an electric car is an ambitious
place to first install high energy density capacitors as a replacement for
batteries. However, I would just love it if such a thing could replace the
battery in my laptop. If the stored energy were just double a battery, if it
would cycle 1,000+ times (or, really, just enough times to match the useful
life of the laptop), and charge in a time that is short (compared with li-ion
batteries), I would be very interested. Even some of those attributes would
probably give the capacitor power-pack commercial viability.
Actually, I think there are lots of areas where
relatively small batteries might be replaced with capacitors, _if_ the
capacitors have the energy density. Electric cars, and other large battery
devices should come later. However, the sudden all-at-once discharge remains
a serious concern.
Since fuel-cell-powered laptops always seem to be "a
couple of years away", it might be time to look at other options. Perhaps
the capacitors?
Chuck
Very good point. I think I'd carry a
capacitor-charged laptop. I think I would. Assuming one can be made:
see below.
===========
Subject: Don Lancaster on energy,
alternate energy, and cars
While you're on the subject of alternate-energy cars,
and their calculated efficiency, I wonder if someone has shown this to you:
Old computer hardware hacker Don Lancaster (still
going strong) has written "Energy Fundamentals." A PDF just a few pages
long, it has technical information comparing ALL the present and future
energy sources, their costs and trade-offs, and it's completely readable to
the layman.
http://www.tinaja.com/glib/energfun.pdf
By converting all costs to "petrodollars" and
comparing, he shows just how tough any alterative to fossil fuels will be.
(That hurts for me who's opposed to fossil fuels.) For instance, hydrogen
does have much more energy, but storing it is horrible! As for solar cells,
say to get the hydrogen, he says.
"Using photovoltaics [to get hydrogen from
electrolysis] is the same as coverting 1-to-1 dollars to Mexican pesos."
It's fascinating. Sometimes frustrating. There's still
hope, though.
Don Lancaster's site at
http://www.tinaja.com/ is just
full of fascinating and practical information. The real way to make a
successful business on ebay, hardware information, and PDF and Postscript
programming are all in there. (I'm pretty sure that he looked at new
capacitors earlier-- apparently the small ones work but won't scale up.)
John D.
==
Subject: r.e. Don Lancaster on energy, alternate
energy, and cars
Dear Jerry
>>Old computer hardware hacker Don Lancaster (still
going strong) has written "Energy Fundamentals." A PDF just a few pages
long, it has technical information comparing ALL the present and future
energy sources<<
An "Energy Fundamentals PDF" that doesn't contain the
words 'methanol', 'coal' or 'shale oil' as plug 'n play liquid fuel sources
(i.e. no new science needed, just start building plants) is not
comprehensive to me. Maybe this is because favorably cited Amory Lovins
deems these substances to be satanic ectoplasm. Ethanol is disposed of by
reference to everyone's favorite anti-ethanol researcher, David Pimentel of
Cornell. There are other studies from UCD and DoE available to cite if one
prefers to promote ethanol. I don't but this is for moral reasons.
Lancaster's discussion of hydrogen and solar PV is the
strongest part of the work. Toss in Global Warming and this pdf is a good
example of how the mirage of the irreplaceability of petroleum is inculcated
in the public mind.
>>their costs<<
Here is the frontier between hard number falsifiable
sciences like chemistry and fuzzy number social sciences like 'economics'
and 'Paleoclimatology'. Just about anything can be proven to be 'economic'
or 'uneconomic' depending on what assumptions about the future we choose to
use.
Best Wishes,
Mark
ps. Lancaster's pdf did remind me to check up on Amory
Lovins: http://www.rmi.org/ I cannot take people like Lovins seriously. Here
is a man who predicates his entire energy strategy on conservation and then
uses the word 'immigration' precisely once on the entire website.
pps
I think of all the energy prophets Dr. Teller will
have been closest. He said there would not be a single replacement for oil.
This is another point where Lancaster's 'either or' analytical approach
fails. If we accept Dr. Teller as having been correct, then it's past time
to start thinking seriously about what that means for the future in
implementation. 'Regional specialization' in alternates seems probable in a
diverse energy future. What's most 'economic' will vary from region to
region depending on climate, geography and available local resources.
Institutions that grew up on the universal availability of 87 octane
unleaded will have as much difficulty dealing with this diverse energy and
fuels future as the Baldwin Locomotive Works and the Pennsylvania Railroad
had adapting to the matured oil and internal combustion engine age.
===========
Subject: Climate modeling & the
Atlantic conveyor
Dr. Pournelle,
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/
AssetDetail/assetid/51963?fulltext=true
is an article on an investigation of the Gulf Stream and the weather in
western Europe. It shows evidence that the Rocky Mountains have more
influence on the mild climate in England than the Gulf Stream. Interesting
stuff.
Cheers, Frank D. Sauer
The Source of Europe's Mild Climate
The notion that the Gulf Stream is
responsible for keeping Europe anomalously warm turns out to be a myth
Richard Seager
If you grow up in England, as I did, a few
items of unquestioned wisdom are passed down to you from the preceding
generation. Along with stories of a plucky island race with a glorious
past and the benefits of drinking unbelievable quantities of milky tea,
you will be told that England is blessed with its pleasant climate
courtesy of the Gulf Stream, that huge current of warm water that flows
northeast across the Atlantic from its source in the Gulf of Mexico.
That the Gulf Stream is responsible for Europe's mild winters is widely
known and accepted, but, as I will show, it is nothing more than the
earth-science equivalent of an urban legend.<snip>
Now if they can explain why the Vikings
had dairy farms in Greenland from 800 to 1300, then they were all frozen
out...
========
The Pentagon discovers the joys of outsourced
manufacturing.
I've only been pointing this out for a decade or so:
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns
?id=mg19025576.100&feedId=tech_rss20
-- Roland Dobbins
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