Another one: even a lot of systems programmers have never coded assembly language and don't know how processors work. And, a lot don't need to.

Which is IMO too bad.

Another comment on "big grid."

Any time you go for very high availability, it costs. Big grid delivers that availability, an availability that is absolutely critical. Because it is geographically disbursed, it achieves more redundancy that microgrids or smaller grids. It does cost to build the power lines, but it doesn't cost much to use them unless you actually need the power that they transmit, and the fact that they do move a lot of energy suggests that they really are needed.

Small nuclear reactors are really the equivalent of building small fossil plants, minus the CO2 emissions. We already have those all over the place, and yet we still need the long transmission lines.

If we want to engineer a much smaller grid to have the same reliability, what we save in long-line costs would probably be offset by the spending for in a higher degree of required redundancy.

I agree on modular nukes.

The problem with all of this is twofold:
    -cost - electricity is the fuel of our civilization. Raise the cost and you hurt people, and hurt the economy
    -reliability ("grid stability") - we require highly reliable electricity

On wind/solar:

If you do the math, you'll see that batteries just aren't going to cut it, and I have little hope for dramatic breakthroughs - the trend has been more incremental than dramatic, and at a fairly slow rate. Batteries are just too expensive to do anything other than cushion minor load/generation shifts.

Other methods of storage don't seem to be going anywhere, and there has to be a reason other than big bad power companies (and I'm no fan of regulated power companies, *except* that their grid stability (reliability) is an incredible achievement upon which our civilization depends). One nation in Europe is building, at high costs, pumped hydro, by excavating a deep underground reservoir to put the water into. Again, if you don't mind the cost, things like that work.

There are "obvious" storage technologies: batteries, compressed air, hydrogen, pumped hydro. That they are achieving almost no success, other than for bragging, says that those technologies are just too expensive. If you are willing to spend enough money, you can make pretty much anything work
  But, if you want to not raise our power costs too high, then nothing works except, maybe, nuclear after first coasting along on CCGT natural gas.

What we see today is wind and solar starting to destabilize the grid. This happens due to a combination of their intermittency, and their low incremental cost (only when generating) that drives down the capacity factor of the more reliable power plants, causing them to be permanently shut down. It isn't that wind and solar are cheap (other than their fuel costs), it is that the true costs are being born by the grid, invisibly. As long as the penetration is low, this isn't a huge problem. But add more wind and solar and grid stability becomes a huge problem, which translates into a lot more cost.

BTW, the resource costs and impacts of wind and solar are immense. Each wind turbine is immense, and greatly impacts the area around it. If it weren't for the fad factor, no environmentalist would be for putting thousands and thousands of skyscraper sized concrete, steel and plastic wind turbines all over the landscape. I see these things when I'm storm chasing in the midwest, and they are hideous. A single wind turbine is pretty graceful. Put a line of them on a ridge ten miles away and they just look like unnatural clutter. They require special exceptions for the protected species that they kill.

You'd need to put a whole lot of stuff up there. You can't just boot up heavy, high-tech industry from a metal rich rock and some solar cells. There are lots and lots of interacting technologies that go into producing almost anything these days, and those technologies take place with a whole bunch of highly specialized equipment operated and maintained, to some extent, by humans.

The "big grid system" is a feature, not a bug. It takes advantage of economy of scale, and provides redundancy, which is critical. The vested interests - utilities regulated by the government - may indeed be a problem.

But yes, we do need to shore up (actually, increase) electric generation. The best short term solution is combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) for the US, because of its low cost and relatively low emissions. But if you are really concerned about CO2, then nuclear is the way to go. Unfortunately, regulators, unreasonably scared NIMBY's, and radical environmentalists have pretty much destroyed nuclear power advancements in the US,

Beyond that, I don't see a next generation of technology. Solar and wind are hitting their limits - to use much more of them will be extremely expensive due to their low quality power (i.e. intermittency). With intermittent power, you need either extremely expensive storage technologies, or you need to maintain the existing technology (nuclear, fossil) as backup. Batteries and other storage technologies are not getting better at any reasonable rate, which is not surprising, since they have been under intense development for over 100 years, with even more focus for the last 30 or so.

Nuclear is expensive, but less so than the equivalent solar/wind - because of intermittency. Also, beware Levelized Cost of Energy comparisons, which make intermittent power look really cheap. LCOE only covers the cost of the plant, not of transmission, and far more importantly, not the grid stability cost - i.e. the backup generation required. Throw that in, and things change a lot.

They were not "innocent bystanders" although some innocents were killed. Japan was highly militarized, and every civilian adult was expected to fight if Japan was invaded. Japan had been butchering civilians throughout it's "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" - the conquered countries. They used biological warfare on Chinese, and in experiments on prisoners of war. They tortured and murdered prisoners of war. Japan was a racist society that accorded no humanity to anyone not Japanese.

The allies were planning to invade Japan, as that was the only way to end the very real threat from their vicious regime. The atomic bombs were dropped to shorten the war and lessen the number of lives killed. (although my Japanese relatives still would disagree_. While saving Japanese lives wasn't the intent - in those days, the enemy was the enemy - the effect of the bombings saved millions of Japanese lives.

Also, the atomic bombs killed fewer Japanese than a single night's firebombing of Tokyo.

So no, the US was hardly morally culpable for nuking the Japanese, and we in fact did them a favor!

Traditional TB testing takes up to 24 days to get results in a petri dish.
This company has new technology that accelerates those results to as little as 4 days.

http://nanologix.com/test_results.html

Don't be silly, the legal regime in America has become a major issue for corporations. Mostly, it figures in the decision about where in the USA to locate, but it's absolutely an issue in overseas expansions. Take the new US banking disclosure regulations that demand that they change their operations even outside the US if they're to operate at all in the US. In response, many foreign banks are just closing down their US operations: the cost of implementing the changes isn't worth the revenue they get from American customers.

One of the biggest problems in US law is its sheer capriciousness. You can be sued for things that other companies did (it's called strict liability). There's any number of overlapping and sometimes contradictory regulations whose enforcement is totally up to the whims of the regulators in place at the time (and if a new party takes power, they can retroactively go after you for something that the previous regulators had allowed). The laws are constantly changing, so you can't plan your business.

With contingency fees, your customers can sue you for free, as you endure millions in legal bills. Punitive damages can go as high as a jury cares to pump it. Plaintiffs can go "jurisdiction shopping" to sue you in the area with the most favorable laws and to cherry pick the most plaintiff-friendly judge. Meanwhile, your executives spend weeks and months producing documents and affidavits, or cooling their heels in the courtroom instead of doing their jobs. It's often easier to settle, and how many times can you afford that?

If cars are this susceptible to microwave energy, then Iran will shortly have the ability to shut down much of our country, in an instant.

Exo-atmospheric nuclear EMP is easy to generate if you have a nuke (even a small one, although the area affected would be somewhat less) and can put it in a low orbit satellite. Iran has the latter (and is about to launch a couple more) and will soon have the former. Their nukes can be small (they have implosion technology).

They have also been testing an alternate delivery system - a SCUD launch with the warhead detected at the top of the trajectory - EMP is the only explanation for such tests.

So, if they are nutty enough (and do you want to bet your survival on the sanity of President ImANutJob?), they can kill tens of millions of Americans, with no warning at all. They can orbit a nuke in a satellite, to be detonated on command. Or, they could launch a few SCUDs from merchant ships hundreds of miles off our shores.

Imagine a US where a large area (say, 1000mi in diameter) suddenly has a destroyed electrical transmissions system,almost all telecoms down, and almost all vehicles unusable. It's not a pretty thought.

See US Gov report at http://www.empcommission.org/docs/A2473-EMP_Commission-7MB.pdf (pdf)

"Just out of curiousity, do you have pre-arranged meeting areas if there IS a big emergency? Do you have 72 hours of food and water at your house?"

No ... But our meeting place was gonna be at your house, so it sounds like we should be all set!

You are probably hearing aliasing. If your 19kHz has harmonic content (which can be introduced several ways), it will mix with the 44.1Khz sampling frequency, producing sounds at the sum and difference frequencies (for example 44.1 - 38 = 6.1).

I know, I meant that he actually visualized how that would be.

I didn't actually read your post that carefully, nor do I remember his article that thoroughly...

That being said, ye olde Dan, of dansdata.com has a good (great?) article on the memory effect.

And an unfortunate title as well, but alas.

You build it ... then I'll consider paying you for it.