I usually enjoy the website www.iflscience.com, but this time they've blown it. On a post labeled Top 10 Insane Unexplained Discoveries, I can find only 3 real mysteries of the 11 things listed. 5 of the others are worth pursuing but are not really mysterious and I don't think anybody deserves to be a considered a crank for the other three, just wasting time on something unlikely to be fruitful. The video is pointlessly long and conveys its largely incorrect message painfully slowly, exacerbated by especially irritating music.
Here they are:
10: Hastatic Order: There seems to be a mysterious force that occurs in certain Uranium compounds while cooled to superconductivity. This is a real mystery, worth pursuing.
9: Variable Constants: The speed light in a vacuum is a constant. Under poorly understood circumstances, the speed of light in certain far away galaxies can be observed to be changing. There are several completely plausible explanations: gravitational lensing, for one. What's not known is which it is. Definitely worthy of scientific pursuit.
8: Disappearing Europeans. They found a substantially colony of dark skinned, blue eyed paleolithic europeans that have died out. Lots of colonies have died out. Not really a mystery at all.
7: Tetra Neutrons. Irreproducible.
6: Ultra energetic cosmic rays. There are several mechanisms that might cause it. The leading candidate, a supernova, was incorrect. But there are others. Certainly a phenomenon worth pursuing. But it's unlikely to generate a new principle of physics or biology or something.
5: Placebo Effect: many people have shown substantial cures when given placebos. Clearly the mind can make you sick, and clearly it can quit doing it. No mystery at all. It's worth study--maybe it can be used in presently unanticipated ways.
4: Kuiper Cliff. There's a region of the Kuiper belt which has apparently been swept clear of the usual asteroids, etc. This would take a substantial planet, but no such thing is evident. This is not a mystery at all. Something happened to make the planet go away too recently for the asteroids to fill the space, but not recently enough to still be apparent. It might be another large object bulls-eying the planet such that the fragments spread far (probably from outside the solar system) or more likely, it might have been captured by another planet on the way through. Maybe it'll be discovered, probably not.
3: c-value enigma. the complexity of organisms was thought to be related to the complexity of the DNA that produced them. But it turns out that there's a lot of "junk" DNA in a lot of organisms and complexity of DNA doesn't correlate well with the complexity of the organism. If you understand what junk DNA is, this is not a mystery at all. There's a small mystery in why some simple organisms have simple DNA. My guess is that larger organisms (and their immune systems) tend to protect junk DNA, while single celled ones are much more susceptible to the junk causing problems and evolutionary pressure eliminates them. There might be a new understanding of DNA in there, so it's worth figuring it out.
2: Cold Fusion. This is an engineering problem, not really a scientific mystery. Some people think that nuclear fusion can be done in a context contained enough that we can get useful energy out and there have been suggestive experiments that it might be, although so far they've all been a bust or worse. But it remains an unsolved engineering problem, and it may for a long time. It sure would be great if somebody figured it out though.
1a: Dark Matter: Galaxies hold together in a way that suggests they have at least 20 times the mass that can be observed. Something that is presently unobservable is in there. It might be black holes, or it may be something else. Definitely a big mystery, but not as big a mystery as dark energy, which is unrelated, apart from having also been discovered by astronomers and given the term "dark"
1b: Dark Energy: The universe can be seen to be expanding in a way which contradicts inertia. Something is pushing. What it is is the biggest mystery of physics. There are several attempted explanations, none of which fit the "standard" model, which would require a substantial rewriting to fit it. (the last time we had such a rewriting of the laws of physics (by Einstein and others), the atomic bomb, the transistor and a lot more came out of it. the time before (by Faraday and Maxwell), most of what we know about electricity came out of it, including electric motors, radio, and more.)
31 May 2015
27 May 2015
Death Penalty
Nebraska has voted to ban the death penalty. This makes a lot of sense. The death penalty is cruel and unusual, it is irreversible, it is much more expensive than life in prison, and there is no particular evidence it deters crime.
Blackstone suggested that it is better that 10 guilty go free than one innocent be punished, and several of the founders expressed the same opinion. It turns out that that's pretty close to the rate of erroneous convictions. The Illinois Innocence Project exonerated 11% of death row inmates when DNA evidence became available. Other similar studies have found different numbers--few lower than 6%. Through incompetent defense, irresponsible prosecution, misuse and misinterpretation of evidence, and more, the criminal justice system is imperfect. It's the best we've figured out, but it makes enough mistakes that we should not resort to irreversible punishments.
Justice Blackman, when he was retiring, stated that he was opposed to the death penalty as a violation of the 8th amendment. It cannot, he said, be applied fairly in this society with various forms of discrimination.
Over the years, the method used has changed. During my lifetime, it switched from the electric chair, then to the gas chamber, and then finally lethal injection. Before that, hanging, decapitation and firing squads were used, among others. Each switch was made because previous methods were deemed to be cruel and painful. Lethal injection uses a sequence of drugs--one to render the subject unconscious, and then further drugs to kill them. The doctors of the world have decided that they are firmly against the death penalty and have banned doctors from administering lethal injections...and have pressed the pharmaceutical companies of the world to stop providing the required drugs to anyone who might use them this way. The botched lethal injections we've seen recently have been the result of medical amateurs using drugs that were not designed for the purpose they were being used.
Many people argue that capital punishment is more economical than life in prison. Not True! Because of all the necessary legal processing, capital punishment is as much as ten times as expensive as life in prison.
There is no particular evidence that the death penalty deters crimes. The deterrence effect only works if you're thinking rationally and suspect you might be caught. Killers either aren't thinking rationally or they are being very careful and don't think they will be caught--think of a mob hit man.
The one real thing that the ultimate penalty does is give some finality and retribution to the victim and their families. That's small consolation for the thousands who have been wrongly executed. The urge to vengeance is very destructive. Jesus himself spoke to this subject. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the lord. Not you or me and not the courts. Only god.
The goals of our penal system should be: #1: to get dangerous people out of society. #2: to deter crime. #3: to rehabilitate those who can be. Life in prison does this without the irreversibility of the death penalty.
I think there's one situation in which capital punishment is acceptable: When the criminal themselves want it. This is uncommon, but not at all unheard of. Gary Gilmore, Ted Bundy, and several others have concluded that their lives were not worth living. I am opposed to suicide for someone who is simply depressed, but if a person is objectively in a situation where their life is irretrievably no longer worth living, euthanasia is the most humane solution. This is appropriate for people with terminal diseases that kill slowly and painfully. And this is appropriate where the convict agrees that they did the deed and there is no possibility of them living a life outside of prison. Of course we should do it in the most humane way practical--unless the convict, as did Gary Gilmore, wants something more dramatic.
addenda 10 June 2015
Scalia's perfect capital punishment case-falls apart
Blackstone suggested that it is better that 10 guilty go free than one innocent be punished, and several of the founders expressed the same opinion. It turns out that that's pretty close to the rate of erroneous convictions. The Illinois Innocence Project exonerated 11% of death row inmates when DNA evidence became available. Other similar studies have found different numbers--few lower than 6%. Through incompetent defense, irresponsible prosecution, misuse and misinterpretation of evidence, and more, the criminal justice system is imperfect. It's the best we've figured out, but it makes enough mistakes that we should not resort to irreversible punishments.
Justice Blackman, when he was retiring, stated that he was opposed to the death penalty as a violation of the 8th amendment. It cannot, he said, be applied fairly in this society with various forms of discrimination.
Over the years, the method used has changed. During my lifetime, it switched from the electric chair, then to the gas chamber, and then finally lethal injection. Before that, hanging, decapitation and firing squads were used, among others. Each switch was made because previous methods were deemed to be cruel and painful. Lethal injection uses a sequence of drugs--one to render the subject unconscious, and then further drugs to kill them. The doctors of the world have decided that they are firmly against the death penalty and have banned doctors from administering lethal injections...and have pressed the pharmaceutical companies of the world to stop providing the required drugs to anyone who might use them this way. The botched lethal injections we've seen recently have been the result of medical amateurs using drugs that were not designed for the purpose they were being used.
Many people argue that capital punishment is more economical than life in prison. Not True! Because of all the necessary legal processing, capital punishment is as much as ten times as expensive as life in prison.
There is no particular evidence that the death penalty deters crimes. The deterrence effect only works if you're thinking rationally and suspect you might be caught. Killers either aren't thinking rationally or they are being very careful and don't think they will be caught--think of a mob hit man.
The one real thing that the ultimate penalty does is give some finality and retribution to the victim and their families. That's small consolation for the thousands who have been wrongly executed. The urge to vengeance is very destructive. Jesus himself spoke to this subject. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the lord. Not you or me and not the courts. Only god.
The goals of our penal system should be: #1: to get dangerous people out of society. #2: to deter crime. #3: to rehabilitate those who can be. Life in prison does this without the irreversibility of the death penalty.
I think there's one situation in which capital punishment is acceptable: When the criminal themselves want it. This is uncommon, but not at all unheard of. Gary Gilmore, Ted Bundy, and several others have concluded that their lives were not worth living. I am opposed to suicide for someone who is simply depressed, but if a person is objectively in a situation where their life is irretrievably no longer worth living, euthanasia is the most humane solution. This is appropriate for people with terminal diseases that kill slowly and painfully. And this is appropriate where the convict agrees that they did the deed and there is no possibility of them living a life outside of prison. Of course we should do it in the most humane way practical--unless the convict, as did Gary Gilmore, wants something more dramatic.
addenda 10 June 2015
Scalia's perfect capital punishment case-falls apart
26 May 2015
The Problem Isn't Immigration, It's Carrying Capacity
There are immigration crises happening in North Africa with people trying to get away from the catastrophe that Libya has become, from West Asia, trying to escape the civil wars in Syria and Iraq, from South East Asia with people trying to get away from Myanmar and more. There's an imaginary crisis of people coming from Latin America into the US and the very real one of cruel deportations back. These all reflect real problems in the regions these people are trying to escape. No one nation can hope to accommodate all the refugees, nor should they. Much of the hostility toward immigrants, in both our country and in others, is racist or xenophobic.
in the 19th and early 20th centuries, there were massive immigrations to the United States from nearly every part of the world. In hindsight, nearly all of these groups have been widely accepted, although there was certainly a large amount of intolerance when they were first coming over. Small amounts of this remains, especially towards groups who can't pass for Anglo-Saxon. These groups enthusiastically embraced American culture and added their distinctiveness.
It all went well, because America had wide open spaces. It had small cities wanting to become big ones. It had seemingly inexhaustible natural resources, including water, oil, coal, aluminum, iron and lots more. Perhaps most importantly, it had lots of places to dump the stuff you couldn't figure out what to do with. That included setting off atomic bombs in secret when you weren't quite sure what would happen and wanted to make sure nobody was watching.
Today, this is gone. There's basically nowhere that isn't feeling some pressure from overcrowding. Even the great barren places of the southwestern desert and the almost uninhabitable hinterlands of Alaska are seen to be somebody's back yard. There is really nowhere left, anywhere on the planet, if you truly want to be left alone.
I think this is all a symptom of an ecological phenomenon called Carrying Capacity. The carrying capacity of an ecosystem for any particular species is that which is stable, consuming only the resources that the rest of the ecosystem can produce. If it exceeds it, the population will crash, and won't recover until the resources are replenished. These crashes are very traumatic, and many ecosystems never recover.
There are ways to fool this: a small, well tended aquarium can support lots more fish than a much larger, poorly maintained one. The same is true for people. Sophisticated farming and transportation can provide food well beyond what a foraging culture could achieve. Well managed countries have much higher carrying capacities than corrupt or incompetently managed ones. If something bad is happening in your community, you will do what you can to get away from the problem.
I think the carrying capacity of the planet is somewhere between 1 and 2 billion people. We crossed 1 billion shortly after 1800, and 2 billion in 1929. Today we are over 7. Several countries have recognized that their excessive population is a problem and have acted with various levels of aggressiveness to deal with it. In many cases, this has left them open to the consequences of immigration from countries that have not done this. Immigrant populations always struggle to fit in, but if the whole society is struggling with the limits to the carrying capacity, the stress of this seems inordinately worse.
I think America's share of world carrying capacity should be about 10%: 100-200M people. (we arrived a little late, crossing 100M in 1915 and 200M in 1968). The infrastructure we have, which was mostly built in the 1940s through 60s, could handle this. Instead, we have about 320M, and we quit building and repairing infrastructure in the 1970s. We need to understand what we are doing to ourselves. I think we need to look at various incentives and barriers to get our population back to this sustainable level. And other countries must do the same. A lot of our problems--many of the civil wars, pollution, climate change, etc., can be greatly reduced if we do this.
in the 19th and early 20th centuries, there were massive immigrations to the United States from nearly every part of the world. In hindsight, nearly all of these groups have been widely accepted, although there was certainly a large amount of intolerance when they were first coming over. Small amounts of this remains, especially towards groups who can't pass for Anglo-Saxon. These groups enthusiastically embraced American culture and added their distinctiveness.
It all went well, because America had wide open spaces. It had small cities wanting to become big ones. It had seemingly inexhaustible natural resources, including water, oil, coal, aluminum, iron and lots more. Perhaps most importantly, it had lots of places to dump the stuff you couldn't figure out what to do with. That included setting off atomic bombs in secret when you weren't quite sure what would happen and wanted to make sure nobody was watching.
Today, this is gone. There's basically nowhere that isn't feeling some pressure from overcrowding. Even the great barren places of the southwestern desert and the almost uninhabitable hinterlands of Alaska are seen to be somebody's back yard. There is really nowhere left, anywhere on the planet, if you truly want to be left alone.
I think this is all a symptom of an ecological phenomenon called Carrying Capacity. The carrying capacity of an ecosystem for any particular species is that which is stable, consuming only the resources that the rest of the ecosystem can produce. If it exceeds it, the population will crash, and won't recover until the resources are replenished. These crashes are very traumatic, and many ecosystems never recover.
There are ways to fool this: a small, well tended aquarium can support lots more fish than a much larger, poorly maintained one. The same is true for people. Sophisticated farming and transportation can provide food well beyond what a foraging culture could achieve. Well managed countries have much higher carrying capacities than corrupt or incompetently managed ones. If something bad is happening in your community, you will do what you can to get away from the problem.
I think the carrying capacity of the planet is somewhere between 1 and 2 billion people. We crossed 1 billion shortly after 1800, and 2 billion in 1929. Today we are over 7. Several countries have recognized that their excessive population is a problem and have acted with various levels of aggressiveness to deal with it. In many cases, this has left them open to the consequences of immigration from countries that have not done this. Immigrant populations always struggle to fit in, but if the whole society is struggling with the limits to the carrying capacity, the stress of this seems inordinately worse.
I think America's share of world carrying capacity should be about 10%: 100-200M people. (we arrived a little late, crossing 100M in 1915 and 200M in 1968). The infrastructure we have, which was mostly built in the 1940s through 60s, could handle this. Instead, we have about 320M, and we quit building and repairing infrastructure in the 1970s. We need to understand what we are doing to ourselves. I think we need to look at various incentives and barriers to get our population back to this sustainable level. And other countries must do the same. A lot of our problems--many of the civil wars, pollution, climate change, etc., can be greatly reduced if we do this.
23 April 2015
Recharging While Driving
Electric cars are here, and are already having a significant impact on the roads. But they still have a problem with range. The small ones: the Leaf, the BMW i3, etc., have a range which is fine for the typical daily commute, and even for a lot of delivery services. But recharging in most cases can only be done at 20 miles of range per hour. But for occasional longer trips, they remain a problem, and you have to spend several hours on the charger for every hour you drive. Not adequate if you're taking a trip that's substantially longer than the range of the battery. So far, Tesla has the most complete solution: 1) a much bigger battery than the others, giving 250+ miles of range. 2) faster "destination" charging, as much as 60 miles of range per hour, so you can put those 250 miles of range on in only 4 or so hours, allowing two or three cars to use the same charger over the course of a night, and finally, the Tesla "supercharger", which can put 150 miles of range on 20 minutes. Presently, these are located about 150 miles apart on most of the big cross country routes in the US, but there are still a lot of gaps. Tesla has promised to get around to them, but it'll be a while.
The second best solution is to make some sort of fuel-electric hybrid. there are a number of plug-in hybrids available, but all have a very short range. If your commute is very short and you're careful to plug in every night, it may work for you, but for long range travel, you're just a relatively efficient internal combustion engine car.
My idea is to put power rails along the roadway. Whether these have inductive pickup or are actual physical rollers that run on rails is an engineering decision. I'd put these on the interstates--the same routes where Tesla is putting its superchargers--and reserve a lane for them. The new Teslas come with the ability hold lane, speed and following distance on their own (although lane following is still in alpha), and this is all it would take to have the car drive itself on an accurately delineated charger lane. Many other carmakers have similar features available. There is no particular reason that following distances couldn't be short and speeds high, as long as the computer is doing the driving. The car will arrive at its destination city fully charged, and the driver rested.
The Tesla Model S charging at 19.2KW, charges at 60 miles of rated range per hour, so this is what it would need to maintain steady charge state at 60 mph at the rated characteristics. This is probably all that's necessary. The car draws less than that while going straight and level, but more accelerating or going uphill. The battery can handle surges--the power rail is just for topping up. It needs to be arranged so that all the cars needing to be charged can have their own charger. Simplest would be for each car to tap into the same (say) 600VDC rail pair simultaneously and regulate itself so it never draws enough power to cause the voltage to drop more than a small amount. If more power is needed, it reduces its charge rate and draws from its own battery.
Issues:
The power rails would probably need their own substation few miles or so. Highly loaded, this would be 50 cars per mile or so. 19.2*50=960... a megawatt. Those big, 200+ foot wind turbines put out 1.5 to 3 MW at their peak, so having one every mile or so would work nicely when the wind is blowing. A strip of solar panels along the road 6 meters wide (20 ft) would do the same thing when the sun is shining. (there's a company that's trying to sell solar panels that work AS road surface...I think you could make this work by paving the special lane with such things)
If the power available is exceeded, the cars can run on their batteries, but they should probably be aware of what's happening. If it's a traffic jam, they'd probably need to slow down and this will automatically reduce the power drawn.
600VDC with the availability to deliver 1600 amps would cause major badness to occur to any conductor that happened to fall across it, including a person or animal. the conductors either need to be protected somehow, or buried with inductive pickup.
there should probably be some mechanism to keep non-robodriven cars out of the special lane. I think the double white lines and reflective bumps as used on toll lanes, are not quite enough. There is no real safety problem with illegal use of a toll lane. There is with power rails and high-speed robocars,
billing should be straightforward. the car would have a tamper-resistant meter which monitors the number, location and timing of watt/hr picked up and communicate it with substation, which would bill appropriately, and prevent incorrectly equipped cars from driving on the road. If it becomes a problem, substation can monitor load and correlate it with the traffic data to detect tampering. I suspect it won't be...once the roadside infrastructure is built, it'll last for decades and cost very little to maintain. It'll pay itself off in a few years.
heavy trucks should be able to use this. they'll obviously draw more power. the road design can handle this straightforwardly. more megawatts per mile.
because all the cars are robodriven, including the heavy trucks, all the vehicles will run down exactly the same part of the road, and rutting will be a worse problem than it will be on roads with human drivers. Since there's a parallel road and all the vehicles have batteries, repairing it will be pretty much the same as with present roads.
The second best solution is to make some sort of fuel-electric hybrid. there are a number of plug-in hybrids available, but all have a very short range. If your commute is very short and you're careful to plug in every night, it may work for you, but for long range travel, you're just a relatively efficient internal combustion engine car.
My idea is to put power rails along the roadway. Whether these have inductive pickup or are actual physical rollers that run on rails is an engineering decision. I'd put these on the interstates--the same routes where Tesla is putting its superchargers--and reserve a lane for them. The new Teslas come with the ability hold lane, speed and following distance on their own (although lane following is still in alpha), and this is all it would take to have the car drive itself on an accurately delineated charger lane. Many other carmakers have similar features available. There is no particular reason that following distances couldn't be short and speeds high, as long as the computer is doing the driving. The car will arrive at its destination city fully charged, and the driver rested.
The Tesla Model S charging at 19.2KW, charges at 60 miles of rated range per hour, so this is what it would need to maintain steady charge state at 60 mph at the rated characteristics. This is probably all that's necessary. The car draws less than that while going straight and level, but more accelerating or going uphill. The battery can handle surges--the power rail is just for topping up. It needs to be arranged so that all the cars needing to be charged can have their own charger. Simplest would be for each car to tap into the same (say) 600VDC rail pair simultaneously and regulate itself so it never draws enough power to cause the voltage to drop more than a small amount. If more power is needed, it reduces its charge rate and draws from its own battery.
Issues:
The power rails would probably need their own substation few miles or so. Highly loaded, this would be 50 cars per mile or so. 19.2*50=960... a megawatt. Those big, 200+ foot wind turbines put out 1.5 to 3 MW at their peak, so having one every mile or so would work nicely when the wind is blowing. A strip of solar panels along the road 6 meters wide (20 ft) would do the same thing when the sun is shining. (there's a company that's trying to sell solar panels that work AS road surface...I think you could make this work by paving the special lane with such things)
If the power available is exceeded, the cars can run on their batteries, but they should probably be aware of what's happening. If it's a traffic jam, they'd probably need to slow down and this will automatically reduce the power drawn.
600VDC with the availability to deliver 1600 amps would cause major badness to occur to any conductor that happened to fall across it, including a person or animal. the conductors either need to be protected somehow, or buried with inductive pickup.
there should probably be some mechanism to keep non-robodriven cars out of the special lane. I think the double white lines and reflective bumps as used on toll lanes, are not quite enough. There is no real safety problem with illegal use of a toll lane. There is with power rails and high-speed robocars,
billing should be straightforward. the car would have a tamper-resistant meter which monitors the number, location and timing of watt/hr picked up and communicate it with substation, which would bill appropriately, and prevent incorrectly equipped cars from driving on the road. If it becomes a problem, substation can monitor load and correlate it with the traffic data to detect tampering. I suspect it won't be...once the roadside infrastructure is built, it'll last for decades and cost very little to maintain. It'll pay itself off in a few years.
heavy trucks should be able to use this. they'll obviously draw more power. the road design can handle this straightforwardly. more megawatts per mile.
because all the cars are robodriven, including the heavy trucks, all the vehicles will run down exactly the same part of the road, and rutting will be a worse problem than it will be on roads with human drivers. Since there's a parallel road and all the vehicles have batteries, repairing it will be pretty much the same as with present roads.
22 March 2015
Tesla Supercharger
The various standards bodies have determined two levels for the J1772 electric car power supply, which has resulted in no standard for charge rates above that. Thus implicitly, Level 3 charging means anything above 19.2KW. There have been three L3 standards to emerge.
These are all loosely speaking "Fast DC" chargers but that oversimplifies what's going on. The car and charger need to collaborate cooling, current levels and more. The J1772 connector was really only designed for 10KW. So something else needed to be done.
The three conventions are TEPCO's CHAdeMO, the J1772 "Combo" connector (aka CCS), and Tesla. Functionally, they are all relatively similar, but they are significantly incompatible.
CCS responds to the weakness of the J1772 connector by adding an adjacent pair of high capacity conductors to the standard J1772 interface. Much of the J1772 protocol can be retained, and a regular J1772 plug can be connected to a CCS capable car, and it will simply charge at a Level 2 rate. It's a kludge, but it's compatible. Several European standards agencies are pushing for its adoption, so while there are not presently many installations, there likely will be soon.
CHAdeMO has much better market penetration. There are a bunch of chargers all over. Most of these are on one of the commercial charger networks, although surprisingly many of them are free. Nissan and several others are compatible, and others, including Tesla, sell an adapter.
The most interesting approach, I think, is Teslas. They use the same wires as J1772, but they made sure the wiring in the connector and the car itself are much beefier. Thus the exact same socket can serve both functions. By being electrically compatible but mechanically incompatible, they can hijack the J1772 wiring for L3 charging.
Most commercial charging sites have some billing system. Blink and ChargePoint are two that are popular here in the northwest...both have L2 J1772 and L3 CHAdeMO stations. But Tesla has gone a different way. Included in the price of the 85, 85D and P85D is free "supercharging" for life, and you can buy this feature for $2.5K for the 60. Unless you do a tremendous amount of long distance commuting, this is not too cost effective. But the high price is helping Tesla afford to build out the network of superchargers. As of this writing, Tesla has 403 stations around the world, almost half in the US. Many major routes are supported, but there are still a great many gaps, and for the time being, they have not built many close to cities, figuring that home charging will serve most of that need. (But that leaves gaps. For example, if all you have is L1 charging at "home" (e.g. a hotel or billet) but you have more than 70 miles a day of errands to run)
Last summer, in the leadup to the announcement of the BMW i8 and i3, Elon Musk widely dropped the hint that he was negotiating with BMW for them to be compatible with the Tesla supercharger. This would have been a terrific deal for both sides: BMW would get a widely installed base of fast chargers, and Tesla would have a partner for the very expensive and time consuming buildout of their network. For the time being, Tesla is being very generous with their installations, basically funding it from the high prices they can charge early adopters. But BMW made it clear that they would not participate in this and now that the i8 is available, it uses the CCS "Combo" connector. It's unclear whether this was because of pressure from EU politicos or what.
Tesla presently charges once for lifetime supercharger use, but there's no particular reason they need to. All the existing cars will continue to get free charging, but eventually they'll go away. If they want to bill, either by KW or by the month or something, it's easy to do. The car can identify itself to the charger and send a bill to the appropriate customer. This could easily be implemented over the "proximity" conductor, or even by some sort of RFID. This is exactly what the existing services, including Blink and ChargePoint, do. If Tesla is clever about it, they can sell a fast charging adapter that includes a supercharger license and allows you to plug your CCS or CHAdeMO vehicle into the supercharger. I can even imagine supercharger stations offering single use rentals of these gizmos.
If one of the other plug formats ends up winning, Tesla has a simple solution. They already have a CHAdeMO adapter, and they've said that once more than a handful of CCS stations are on line, they'll develop an adapter for those too. The stations themselves can be gradually converted over as demand moves. Most of the cost of these stations is in the real estate and preparation, including the wiring, which is the same for all. The charger and connector is probably less than 10%, and I bet even most of that can be switched over easily. Although if this happens, I suspect most Tesla stations will be sold to some other franchisor.
These are all loosely speaking "Fast DC" chargers but that oversimplifies what's going on. The car and charger need to collaborate cooling, current levels and more. The J1772 connector was really only designed for 10KW. So something else needed to be done.
The three conventions are TEPCO's CHAdeMO, the J1772 "Combo" connector (aka CCS), and Tesla. Functionally, they are all relatively similar, but they are significantly incompatible.
CCS responds to the weakness of the J1772 connector by adding an adjacent pair of high capacity conductors to the standard J1772 interface. Much of the J1772 protocol can be retained, and a regular J1772 plug can be connected to a CCS capable car, and it will simply charge at a Level 2 rate. It's a kludge, but it's compatible. Several European standards agencies are pushing for its adoption, so while there are not presently many installations, there likely will be soon.
CHAdeMO has much better market penetration. There are a bunch of chargers all over. Most of these are on one of the commercial charger networks, although surprisingly many of them are free. Nissan and several others are compatible, and others, including Tesla, sell an adapter.
The most interesting approach, I think, is Teslas. They use the same wires as J1772, but they made sure the wiring in the connector and the car itself are much beefier. Thus the exact same socket can serve both functions. By being electrically compatible but mechanically incompatible, they can hijack the J1772 wiring for L3 charging.
Most commercial charging sites have some billing system. Blink and ChargePoint are two that are popular here in the northwest...both have L2 J1772 and L3 CHAdeMO stations. But Tesla has gone a different way. Included in the price of the 85, 85D and P85D is free "supercharging" for life, and you can buy this feature for $2.5K for the 60. Unless you do a tremendous amount of long distance commuting, this is not too cost effective. But the high price is helping Tesla afford to build out the network of superchargers. As of this writing, Tesla has 403 stations around the world, almost half in the US. Many major routes are supported, but there are still a great many gaps, and for the time being, they have not built many close to cities, figuring that home charging will serve most of that need. (But that leaves gaps. For example, if all you have is L1 charging at "home" (e.g. a hotel or billet) but you have more than 70 miles a day of errands to run)
Last summer, in the leadup to the announcement of the BMW i8 and i3, Elon Musk widely dropped the hint that he was negotiating with BMW for them to be compatible with the Tesla supercharger. This would have been a terrific deal for both sides: BMW would get a widely installed base of fast chargers, and Tesla would have a partner for the very expensive and time consuming buildout of their network. For the time being, Tesla is being very generous with their installations, basically funding it from the high prices they can charge early adopters. But BMW made it clear that they would not participate in this and now that the i8 is available, it uses the CCS "Combo" connector. It's unclear whether this was because of pressure from EU politicos or what.
Tesla presently charges once for lifetime supercharger use, but there's no particular reason they need to. All the existing cars will continue to get free charging, but eventually they'll go away. If they want to bill, either by KW or by the month or something, it's easy to do. The car can identify itself to the charger and send a bill to the appropriate customer. This could easily be implemented over the "proximity" conductor, or even by some sort of RFID. This is exactly what the existing services, including Blink and ChargePoint, do. If Tesla is clever about it, they can sell a fast charging adapter that includes a supercharger license and allows you to plug your CCS or CHAdeMO vehicle into the supercharger. I can even imagine supercharger stations offering single use rentals of these gizmos.
If one of the other plug formats ends up winning, Tesla has a simple solution. They already have a CHAdeMO adapter, and they've said that once more than a handful of CCS stations are on line, they'll develop an adapter for those too. The stations themselves can be gradually converted over as demand moves. Most of the cost of these stations is in the real estate and preparation, including the wiring, which is the same for all. The charger and connector is probably less than 10%, and I bet even most of that can be switched over easily. Although if this happens, I suspect most Tesla stations will be sold to some other franchisor.
14 March 2015
Monocausality
Much of the bad thinking in the world come from monocausality: thinking that every event just has a single cause. Once in a while, this happens, but it's pretty rare.
Conservatives tell us that if we raise the minimum wage, unemployment will spike and the economy will decline--because if the price for employers goes up, demand will go down. Yet, in literally thousands of practical experiments, not only has this never happened, but in quite a few of them, the economy and employment situations have actually improved significantly. What must be happening is that some other factor--for example, perhaps, the extra disposable income of low wage workers that the hike provides--is stimulating the economy enough to overcome the downward pressure on low wage employment that the wage hike is causing.
Another popular example is the claim that the reparations after WWI caused WWII. While this is certainly a large factor, there are others. A big one that doesn't get much recognition is that large german businesses allied themselves with Hitler when they realized he intended to create a large mass of extremely cheap workers and violate the weapons limitations agreed to at Versailles. Hitler's policies were great for them...for a little while. There were lots of other factors too, of course.
Another example is that it is claimed that printing lots of "fiat currency" will surely cause hyperinflation. It did in Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, Argentina, etc. But it didn't in the US during either the great depression or the recent "great recession." It hasn't in Europe either. Non economists and "classicals" insist there must be something else going on, such as the currency being un-backed, for example by a Gold Standard. But this also has near perfect track record of failure. Keynes explained this: It's not the backing or the ultimate supply of currency, it's demand relative to supply. If there's very high demand for currency but not for goods and services, the value of the money will stay high while accompanied with little inflation or even deflation. Those who can, will hoard currency. In the recent recession, this is exactly what happened. Investors suddenly flipped from being hot on subprime and other high debt instruments, especially those based on real estate, to being terrified of them...including the ones they'd bet on heavily, and wanted to sell them and move into cash.
Another example is the so called Laffer Curve. The concept predates Arthur Laffer by at least a century but he advised the Reagan administration when it became very popular. Simply put, it's that taxes put a downward influence on the economy. This is surely true, but the empirical data that we have tells us the almost exact opposite. Reduced taxation almost always correlates with downturns and increased with upticks. What's probably happening is that the spending that's done with the tax money is significantly more stimulative than the taxation is de-stimulative. For most people and business, this seems to go right up to 70% taxation and higher...the 91% marginal tax rate they were paying didn't cause Howard Hughes or J Paul Getty or Henry Kaiser to pull out of business. The Laffer curve may well be correct, but conservatives seem to only look at the part to the right of the peak...the part that would justify their tax cuts...but we're not dealing with that part. To left of the peak says that taxes should be higher.
There are lots more examples. The causes of these events are numerous and interact in complex ways. In mathematics, we call these sort of equations "equilibrium" equations and they are generally not trivially solvable and tend to end up having several solutions or a solution which itself is a fairly complex equation. Simplifying models, such as Hick's IS-LM and the Phillips and Laffer Curves in economics can be very useful--provided you actually look at these curves correctly and understand them and their limitations. They're not a perfect answer by any means, but trying to solve these complex problems by ignoring important--perhaps dominant--factors is unhelpfu.
added 26 Apr 2015
Greg Mankiw argues here , astonishingly, that there is only one pertinent point of the proposed trans pacific trade agreement and that is that freer trade is is better. What if, for example, the freer trade causes millions of job losses (through, for example, outsourcing) and the new trade only generates a fraction as many new opportunities? What if the freer trade grants patent violators the right to sell cheaper products competing directly against those that funded the R&D with impunity? Of all people, Mankiw should understand that nothing is ever so simple.
Conservatives tell us that if we raise the minimum wage, unemployment will spike and the economy will decline--because if the price for employers goes up, demand will go down. Yet, in literally thousands of practical experiments, not only has this never happened, but in quite a few of them, the economy and employment situations have actually improved significantly. What must be happening is that some other factor--for example, perhaps, the extra disposable income of low wage workers that the hike provides--is stimulating the economy enough to overcome the downward pressure on low wage employment that the wage hike is causing.
Another popular example is the claim that the reparations after WWI caused WWII. While this is certainly a large factor, there are others. A big one that doesn't get much recognition is that large german businesses allied themselves with Hitler when they realized he intended to create a large mass of extremely cheap workers and violate the weapons limitations agreed to at Versailles. Hitler's policies were great for them...for a little while. There were lots of other factors too, of course.
Another example is that it is claimed that printing lots of "fiat currency" will surely cause hyperinflation. It did in Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, Argentina, etc. But it didn't in the US during either the great depression or the recent "great recession." It hasn't in Europe either. Non economists and "classicals" insist there must be something else going on, such as the currency being un-backed, for example by a Gold Standard. But this also has near perfect track record of failure. Keynes explained this: It's not the backing or the ultimate supply of currency, it's demand relative to supply. If there's very high demand for currency but not for goods and services, the value of the money will stay high while accompanied with little inflation or even deflation. Those who can, will hoard currency. In the recent recession, this is exactly what happened. Investors suddenly flipped from being hot on subprime and other high debt instruments, especially those based on real estate, to being terrified of them...including the ones they'd bet on heavily, and wanted to sell them and move into cash.
Another example is the so called Laffer Curve. The concept predates Arthur Laffer by at least a century but he advised the Reagan administration when it became very popular. Simply put, it's that taxes put a downward influence on the economy. This is surely true, but the empirical data that we have tells us the almost exact opposite. Reduced taxation almost always correlates with downturns and increased with upticks. What's probably happening is that the spending that's done with the tax money is significantly more stimulative than the taxation is de-stimulative. For most people and business, this seems to go right up to 70% taxation and higher...the 91% marginal tax rate they were paying didn't cause Howard Hughes or J Paul Getty or Henry Kaiser to pull out of business. The Laffer curve may well be correct, but conservatives seem to only look at the part to the right of the peak...the part that would justify their tax cuts...but we're not dealing with that part. To left of the peak says that taxes should be higher.
There are lots more examples. The causes of these events are numerous and interact in complex ways. In mathematics, we call these sort of equations "equilibrium" equations and they are generally not trivially solvable and tend to end up having several solutions or a solution which itself is a fairly complex equation. Simplifying models, such as Hick's IS-LM and the Phillips and Laffer Curves in economics can be very useful--provided you actually look at these curves correctly and understand them and their limitations. They're not a perfect answer by any means, but trying to solve these complex problems by ignoring important--perhaps dominant--factors is unhelpfu.
added 26 Apr 2015
Greg Mankiw argues here , astonishingly, that there is only one pertinent point of the proposed trans pacific trade agreement and that is that freer trade is is better. What if, for example, the freer trade causes millions of job losses (through, for example, outsourcing) and the new trade only generates a fraction as many new opportunities? What if the freer trade grants patent violators the right to sell cheaper products competing directly against those that funded the R&D with impunity? Of all people, Mankiw should understand that nothing is ever so simple.
12 March 2015
Gehry, Gaudi, and Logic
Two of the supposed greats in modern architecture live by the dictum:
"There are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature. Therefore, buildings should not have straight lines or sharp corners." -Antoni Gaudi
Everything about this statement is wrong. Lots of stuff in nature is straight and/or sharp. e.g.:
More importantly Gaudi's syllogism is missing its major premise, which I believe is "Architecture must mimic forms found in nature." Why? That's plainly not a requirement for many of the buildings that most of us think are beautiful. The Eiffel Tower is one of the most beautiful structures in the world. It has lots of curves, but they are smooth curves, which are fairly rare in nature, and lots of the straight lines and sharp corners that Gaudi so detests.
Frank Gehry seems to have been cut from the same mold--his theory is "deconstructivism", which is about breaking up the straight lines and conventional components of a building to make way for new arrangements and ideas. A few deconstructivist buildings are not complete disasters: the Sydney Opera House and the Seattle Public Library are among them. They are eye catching and fairly functional, even if they are not the most attractive. But Gehry has taken this to an extreme that I find appalling. I have nothing against experimentation, even when it is jarring. Once in a while, a good new thing comes of it. But I don't wish to be jarred over and over again by the same failed experiment. Gehry's buildings are ugly and stupid looking, every one. I wish people would stop giving him money.
Gaudi designed some nice buildings in the early part of his career, but he seems to have lost his mind about 1900...and the illogic above explains it.
"There are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature. Therefore, buildings should not have straight lines or sharp corners." -Antoni Gaudi
Everything about this statement is wrong. Lots of stuff in nature is straight and/or sharp. e.g.:
Frank Gehry seems to have been cut from the same mold--his theory is "deconstructivism", which is about breaking up the straight lines and conventional components of a building to make way for new arrangements and ideas. A few deconstructivist buildings are not complete disasters: the Sydney Opera House and the Seattle Public Library are among them. They are eye catching and fairly functional, even if they are not the most attractive. But Gehry has taken this to an extreme that I find appalling. I have nothing against experimentation, even when it is jarring. Once in a while, a good new thing comes of it. But I don't wish to be jarred over and over again by the same failed experiment. Gehry's buildings are ugly and stupid looking, every one. I wish people would stop giving him money.
Gaudi designed some nice buildings in the early part of his career, but he seems to have lost his mind about 1900...and the illogic above explains it.
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