Err... yes, that is what I meant.

Thanks =)

I wish I could find the original research done into these alternative systems, but I don't seem to be able to find the articles (and, well, don't care enough to try to find them).

My favorite concept from these was that as technology causes individual humans to be more efficient, there should be less labor requirement. For instance, if the use of a tractor makes a human 10 times as efficient in harvesting food, then you should need to employ 1/10th as many people. Ignoring the second-order correction from the tractor manufacturer (who is improved by more robots and more robots and so on), as technology makes us more efficient, it is *natural* that we would work less.

The failure of capitalism here is that if you *don't* work your 40 hours a week, you don't get enough money to eat. However, society doesn't actually *need* people to work that 40 hours a week to accomplish everything that needs doing. So what you end up with is people employed who are doing essentially useless tasks, and who essentially spend their time increasing the complexity of the bureaucratic system without adding efficiency. Quite literally, many of these people consume more resources in getting to work and "working" than they produce. I am sure everyone knows these people.

Wouldn't society be better off if these people just *stayed the heck home* and did something that they were even remotely passionate about, and might someday even become good at instead of slowing those of us who actually naturally enjoy being productive down? Maybe that's art, or music, or cooking, or caring for kids, or who knows what. But at least they'll be doing *something*.

So, the proposals to deal with this messy transitional period between an industrial and post-industrial economy was to basically provide enough of a welfare safety net that if people didn't want to work, they didn't need to do so in order to live a satisfying (if frugal) life. Meanwhile, people have a standard economy on top of that for other items -- so people can spend all their time being musicians and actually maybe even become good at it -- without having to worry about starving in the interim. I guess you could say it's sort of half way between socialist and capitalist? It's really neither. It's capitalist in the sense that the free market is clearly there and providing incentives to produce value. On the other hand, the free market is limited to "luxury" items beyond the base necessities that people need.

Now, I'm not saying I necessarily think this would work -- I, like many, am inclined to believe that people are not as good as I would hope. On the other hand, maybe that's only because we treat them that way? I'd certainly love to believe that if you give people security in their food and shelter, they'll be a lot more likely to adventure in doing more productive things with their time. Or maybe they'll just shoot heroin in the back alley.

BUT, the big issue remains. Our current system is designed to rapidly increase efficiency, but not give people more free time to balance it out. Certainly most of us feel that we are working as many hours as ever we were, even if the amount of work we can accomplish in a week hasn't really changed much (exceptions exist, of course, especially in computers). If our efficiency is 10 times higher than it was in 1920, then our EMPLOYMENT rate should be only 10%! Yes, 90% unemployment is a perfectly natural state for a post-industrial society! Why else do we have robot maids and trains if not to make it so that we can spend our time doing things we are more passionate about like.........

Anyway, just wanted to throw that out as food for thought. Capitalism is all well and good, but there seems to need to be some fine tuning at the unproductive bottom of the capitalist food chain if we want to improve the value of our society. After all, as John F. Kennedy said in 1968:

"Our gross national product ... counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."

Oh, we'll just engineer them to require lysine to reproduce. We'll control the supply, so if they get out of control they'll gradually die off.

Easy peasy!

And here is another example of transcendental numbers in music. This one was created in the early 1970's by Conlon Nancarrow, a composer who essentially created a parallel form of "electronic music" by using heavily modified player pianos instead of electronics. He was born just a little bit too early, but the concepts are extremely similar to what people do in sequencing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXFiq19-KSE

This one is designed to have two melodies, one in which each measure takes pi inches of player piano roll and the other which takes e inches of player piano roll. The result is two melodies which will never align after the very beginning, using a true e/pi relationship.

I do agree that Clinton is a bright guy... but...

Getting a Rhodes scholarship in college does not put you on the list of the smartest 50 people on the planet... if for no other reason than that there are 32 chosen every year. Assuming a modest lifespan for the recipients of 50 years, and assuming a Rhodes scholarship makes you smarter than anyone but another person with a Rhodes scholarship, you're still off by at least one order of magnitude! ;-) Maaaybe top .0001%, but not .000001%!

I've met a lot of very smart people. The ones who *I* would classify as true geniuses (and I'm actually probably just barely qualified to judge) never bothered with things like the Rhodes. They had better things to do than do yet more school in England when there's so much exciting science to do!

Actually, you're just demonstrating her point.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling

Quantum tunneling was first theoretically understood in 1927, and since then it's just been a matter of engineering to take advantage of it. I think her point was that if it's taken 80 years to develop discoveries experimentally evaluated using relatively primitive and low-energy techniques, how much longer is it going to take to every apply something which requires the LHC just to observe. I agree with her, both as a physicist, and as an engineer. There are intrinsic difficulties in applying physical principles which require energy densities which approach that found in the Big Bang.

I don't agree that it means we shouldn't do it, because inquiring minds want to know. However, I do agree that duplicating effort in an attempt to discover things a few months sooner is more about scientist/politician pride than about sane expenditures of resources. If the LHC is the better piece of equipment, then mothball the Tevatron since they're nominally collecting similar data, except that the LHC uses better equipment. All that matters, as there are unlikely to be any national security/interest in the results, is that everyone has access to the data.

The reforming process to convert long chain hydrocarbons into methane is counterproductive, loses energy, and costs money. Why would you ever want do to this just for fuel? Everyone is trying so hard to go the other way =)

Methane is extremely chemically inert. The only value it has is as a fuel, so it's super cheap already. Going from a useful hydrocarbon that can be used as a chemical as well to a molecule that can only be burned is never going to be economically favorable.

So I actually am working on the technology to make hydrocarbons from air and water (it's actually what the caltech research was based on, although I'm a latecomer to the lab that developed the technology). I think it's a great idea, although for other reasons I think that it's not great -- after all, CO2 is only present at 300ppm in the air.

But no, I wasn't thinking as long term as fusion. I meant replacing all cars with a combination of electric short range rental vehicles on a model similar to a cell phone combined with electrified rail for transporting long distances, combined with hybrid or electric trucking for transportation from rail nodes to the distribution grid (i.e. the grocery store). That model would work for a very long time, and trucking is easier to upgrade than anything else.

I realize that the compressing process isn't that hard, but you aren't going to build a car that can run on both gasoline *and* CNG. If for no other reason than because the CNG tank is pressurized while the gasoline tank isn't. It's probably not as bad for mixing as ethanol (at least before they upgraded the gaskets, etc), but it probably still requires some rebuilding. I've never seen a car that said "feed me CNG, petrol, or diesel", so I suspect you are oversimplifying it a bit.

In any event, so long as you can't use the same car with either fuel, the chicken and egg problem exists. Until you have alternative fuel stations everywhere, no one will buy the cars, and no one will built those fuel stations until there are customers. The only way around this is massive and painful government subsidies to convince fueling stations to carry the alternative fuel, and it's much better to do that exactly one time, with exactly one fuel. Doing a simultaneous transition to either electric *or* CNG in the US is extremely unwise. It will cost twice as much, and offer only a minor change.

CNG is methane. Am I misunderstanding your comment? The article is commenting that methane is very cheap now, making it no longer economically interesting to replace natural gas power plants with wind. At the 2008 prices, wind was cheaper than natural gas power plants, making it advantageous to replace them and use the CNG you can produce from that natural gas in cars.

Cars are extremely good when it comes to pollution, unless you are referring to CO2 generation. I treat CO2 as a different problem than "air pollution" that resulted in acid rain, smog, and so on. The majority of actual air pollution is from coal power plants. You can track it coming across the Pacific ocean from China even.

But in any case, the drive to wind power isn't entirely political. In my opinion, if we're going to switch to anything other than gasoline, we may as well be switching straight to electric cars for local travel plus hybrids for trucking plus electric rail for long distance travel. It's going to be a *very* hard transition regardless of what we go to, so we may as well go all the way.

That would be part II of his plan -- replace natural gas power generation capacity with wind, and use the saved natural gas to replace oil as a transportation fuel. 1 gallon of saved compressed natural gas is 1 gallon of fuel for a vehicle. It was fairly sane in that respect, I just don't think CNG stands a chance of taking off in the US. It's extremely hard to transition to a new transportation fuel due to the well modeled chicken/egg problems with fueling stations. And if we're going to try to transition to a new fuel, better to pick something more long term than CNG.

Okay. I'd buy 50-60 percent as a maximum theoretical, I guess if you assume a carnot cycle since this is done at 1200-1400C most often.

The fischer-tropsch process was developed in 1926. It is extremely mature, and was used by Germany in WWII to produce nearly all of their gasoline and diesel from syngas. South Africa did similarly. In both cases it was for the same reason; they wanted to take gasified coal and convert it to liquid fuels because trade embargoes prevented importing those liquids.

The reaction is very mature, more mature in fact than alcohol synthesis from syngas. It is costly, but it's very well understood.

I'm not aware of any systems that are robust enough to be used commercially yet, but they aren't terribly far away. I would be surprised if it goes more than 2-3 more years before at least someone is doing it.

I know that this company is doing something related, although non-catalytic. It's some pretty ninja chemistry though.

http://www.sundropfuels.com/

What on earth are you talking about? The process of thermochemical reduction is going to be:

CO2 -> CO + O* (where * represents O absorbed by the supports change in oxidation state).
O* -> O2 (oxygen released during temperature change and accompanying change in oxidation state).

Yeah, you can mix it with water as well, but why not just do them separately and produce CO and H2 in two tanks which can be combined to get whatever carbon number you want on average in your fuel after a one-step fischer-tropsch synthesis?

You have this thing going through methanol? Huh? These are all going to decrease your overall yield.

Next, you claim a 50-60% efficiency in converting to gasoline? Are you just making stuff up as you go along? The thermochemical cycle has a pretty decent amount of loss simply in the requirement that you cool down and heat up the precursors. Hard to move heat around without losses and all. Not to mention the chemical inefficiencies, plus regular thermal losses, plus mirror losses. 20% is an excellent estimate of the maximum photon to chemical conversion efficiency. Now, cost efficiency on the other hand... mirrors are way cheaper than PV panels, so in that regard you're talking about a 20-fold improvement to energy cost efficiency.

Disclaimer: I work on this professionally, so I'm biased.

Disclaimer: I work on this professionally, so I have a vested interest.

There are other well known cycles. Ceria is one of them. So is iron oxide, cobalt oxide, and a few others. Those are solids. I think the solids have a lot more potential than the gases. Ceria is actually what I did my PhD thesis on, and it's my favorite contender. We use it for water splitting and chemical reduction (the same thing they did at caltech), but I'm rather surprised their efficiency is so low. We get quite a lot higher, certainly far higher than solar PV + electrolysis, but the catalysts just don't last very long at high temperatures.

That said, I'm excited that if it's getting in the news, new or not, because it improves my odds of getting funding to use that tech. The more people working on it, the safer of a bet it will look like to funding agencies. It's a robust, efficient, and cheap technology that should be used everywhere. Just a question of who will solve the catalyst stability and reactor material problems first.