swansont

It's not an opinion, it was a statement based on historical record, but you previously claimed it was the result of models. Were you mistaken then, are you mistaken now, or is it both?

But again, the current (as it were) limitation is not the battery recharge rate, it's the ability to deliver the amount of electrical power. A gallon of gasoline contains ~10^8 Joules of energy — if it takes 10 seconds to pump that, that's the equivalent of 10 Megawatts of delivery capability. Plug-in stations don't have Megawatt capabilities. Headlines about batteries that can be recharged in a few seconds or minutes have ZERO impact on electric cars. That's not the bottleneck.

Why is the mass moving but the planet not moving? They are at rest with respect to each other. Mass being a vector is one of the issues folks have with this definition of mass.

The burden of proof and requirement of rigor (in both the formulation and evidence) are upon the person with the new idea. If they cannot meet those hurdles, or at least move in that direction, then what's left is usually a game of distraction. At that point the topic is not worthy of discussion. Saying that a proposal violates known science is not preaching. It's an acknowledgment of the vast amount of data that exists in support of prevailing theories. The poster would do well to familiarize him/herself with said material.

"A prototype of new battery (a laminated lithium ion battery with 600mAh capacity) was discharged and fully recharged 1,000 times at a temperature of 25 degrees centigrade and lost only 1% of capacity during the test." 600 mAh is about a quarter of the capacity if a standard rechargeable NiMH AA battery available today. That's one of the reasons it could be recharged quickly. The requirements for a car system are about 100,000 times larger (~1Wh or energy vs ~100 kWh for a car to go 350 km) You save on the current required by going to a higher voltage, so at 120 V vs 1.2 V you only need 1,000 times as much current. 80% of 600 mAh in a minute is ~30 amps, assuming high efficiency (at 1.2 V, which is why you could do this at home; at 120 V this would be just 0.3 A), which means ~30,000 amps for that equivalent one-minute car recharge. Or ~3,000 amps for a ten-minute recharge to 80%. The bottom line is that at 120 V, you need > 800 Amp-hours for full charge for a 100 kWh system. There's no mention of how much the battery heated up, which is another limitation of charging time. The ability to dissipate heat goes down as you scale the size up, since volume grows faster than surface area. The limitation for cars is not the charging time inherent to the battery.

There are a bunch of materials that polarize light, and some are birefringent, like calcite. (list of these at wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birefringence )

So how can the readout give 1000N for the planet-bound observer, and 4000N for the moving one?

(emphasis added) Note the conditional. This is not a prediction of what will happen, it's what could happen if certain conditions are met. The fact that it has happened before means such conditions have existed and are thus achievable. I agree with the Cap'n. Your incredulity is not credible. Further, your use of this as an argument against warming models is incorrect.

That's where parallax comes in. But it makes it hard to detect, since you need to observe over time, and look for small differences in position.

Thermal noise in electrical components.

As a general rule of thumb, a "people like you" diatribe is probably never going to fall into the "proper scientific exchange" category, and this one clearly does not. Don't go in that direction in your discussions. I see no whining and grumbling here. "Dissenters" who point out flaws in a proposal are exactly the ones you need to listen to, lest you develop tunnel vision and think your idea has been perfected.

I'll need a citation for this. Where did he make this claim, and under what context? What I've seen is from The Threat to the Planet - The New York Review of Books July 13, 2006 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19131 "The Earth's history reveals cases in which sea level, once ice sheets began to collapse, rose one meter (1.1 yards) every twenty years for centuries. That would be a calamity for hundreds of cities around the world, most of them far larger than New Orleans." Which is not a prediction that this would actually happen in the next century, nor is it based on models.

What does any of this have to do with BECs?

Why does the mass of the object change but not the mass of the planet? How can you tell if the planet is moving?

I equate this with being useful, and that seems to be the use by almost everyone else, AFAICT. "Not accurate" an incredibly blunt instrument of criticism, since it's not quantified. What constitutes sufficient accuracy?

If someone's going to kvetch about it, it should be intentional. People have an amazing ability to read things into messages, just like we see patterns where there are none. Pixar isn't responsible for how people misinterpret the movie. I've seen this firsthand, when someone told me what one of my cartoons meant. "What they applauded was not some banal cartoonish triumph of good over evil but a gentle, if unmistakable, summons to remake the world before time runs out." is purely the authors interpretation, and IMO, crap. He doesn't know this to be true. He thinks it's true, and perhaps wants it to be true, but maybe the kids were just entertained.

Wouldn't g also double, from the mass of the planet doubling? But, more importantly, how does the scale readout change for different observers?

I would imagine s-shell electrons would be best at shielding. The other orbitals tend to be more localized and spread out.

I put a mass on a scale with a large digital readout that gives 1000N as the weight, i.e. the gravitational attraction between the two. Someone comes by moving at a large speed such that gamma = 2. Of course, to the observer, it looks like the planet and mass on the scale are moving at that speed. What does the scale reading appear to be to the observer?

I haven't seen the movie, but can't you portray a population as having become sedentary and overweight without it being a comment on society? It's not saying that because I'm overweight that I'm lazy, it's saying it about them. The ones in the movie. The fictional ones. "But the metaphor only works if you believe familiar myths about the overweight: They're weak-willed, indolent, and stupid." The myths only need to be believed if it's actually a metaphor. I will. It's pretty much a hatchet job. If you read the links, they aren't coming to the conclusions alluded to in the article, and they are mostly links to newspaper stories and blog posts, not research. "But there's little evidence that overeating causes obesity on an individual level and no real reason to think that anyone can lose a lot of weight by dieting. (Most of us fluctuate around a natural "set point.") We also know that children who watch a lot of television are no less active than other kids and that pediatric obesity rates are not the direct result of high-fat diets." Has four links, underlined here. The first is about starvation and has little to do with linking overeating causes obesity (and I've seen criticisms of the author that appear to be legitimate, in terms of cherry-picking data to make a point and other unscientific tactics) The second link doesn't really support the article, either. It points to the difficulties of dieting, not to the fact that you can lose weight if you change your caloric intake. The common theme of the first two links is that extreme dieting isn't particularly good for you. The third link is another Szwarc post, and like the predecessor, it focuses on one variable — activity levels — while ignoring others. The last link focuses on fat levels alone, not caloric intake or types of fat. Again, a single variable, and is the lone research abstract linked to. Later, there is the comment "Two months ago, the Washington Post compared childhood obesity to global warming." The comparison? Saying not to wait for more studies, i.e. start doing something now, because it's obvious there's a problem: "We don't have all the data yet, but by the time all the data comes in it's going to be too late," he said. "You don't want to see the water rising on the Potomac before deciding global warming is a problem." That's the entire comparison. Hatchet job.

Does the rest of the audience stare at the lone fatty as she waddles her way toward the theater doors? Statistically, there will be a lone fatty in a demographically average US audience only if 3 people or fewer are watching the movie. Is anybody from Pixar saying it's social commentary? It's not like this would be the first time that people read into a work symbolism that wasn't intended. There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know. E. Hemingway Sometimes fattie is just a fattie. It's a movie, not a documentary, for crimony's sake.

An object heading straight for us is harder to detect than one that will miss, because it won't move much with respect to the background stars. — It will look like one. Parallax is the tool you'd need to detect it (or perhaps a change in brightness), so it will take time for the earth's position to change and the luck that the right region of the sky is being watched and somebody's analyzing the data.

You could meet in the middle with incentives to make it economically advantageous.

Not if coupled with the common creationist argument that evolution can't explain diversity because all/most mutations are harmful, and consistent with observed mutation rates. There are genes with many alleles — HLA-B gene has 59. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16456786

I wonder how much of the yield is from faster growth, i.e. getting more crop cycles cultivated per year. I didn't see that mentioned in the article. Wasted but possibly not readily usable. One thing to consider is the structural strength of those roofs. I have some limited experience in issues of placing equipment on them; they probably weren't built with the idea of covering them with solar panels, because solar panels weren't anywhere near being a viable option when they were designed. So the cost of strengthening the roof and adding solar panels may leave you with a system that's still not economically viable.