I haven’t started to read what they’re measuring, but that makes a hell of a screensaver!

You’re under constant cyberattack simply by being connected to the internet.

He was referring to this :

predictions range from one meteor every few minutes to 100 meteors an hour

No, I meant for human consumption :)

I believe the purpose of this is to produce methanol for use as fuel. When methanol is burned, it becomes water and carbon dioxide, released back into the air, resulting in zero reduction (but also zero addition, which is a worthwhile goal in itself). I guess if there’s a significant amount of methanol in storage…

I’ve been waiting for a chance to use this animated GIF.

Yikes... that’s less than 0.05 gallons. So we need 20 panels to get a gallon per day. At roughly half the energy density of gasoline (by weight, slightly less by volume). Assuming the fuel efficiency of a Prius, we’re looking at 25 miles of driving. By comparison, 20 * 1.2 kWh will get you about 70 miles on a Nissan…

Thanks for the info. Over here (Northern California) a good estimate is 6 hours of full production from a panel a day if positioned optimally (e.g. 1.2 kWh per day from a 200W panel).

I wish this had come out 2 weeks ago. Massdrop had a group buy for the O2 for $70, and JDS dropped their price to $100 and added batteries to match.

But one of the foundations of your claim is that “solar panels burn way more electricity being manufactured than they can every return in their lifetime”. If that were true, it will be better to just take that energy and feed it into the grid directly (or use it for electrolysis to produce hydrogen to produce…

Agree, it makes sense to use it immediately if possible. But sometimes we want it stored in an energy dense format for later use. Classic example is in cars. Batteries are not energy dense enough, takes a long time to recharge, costs a lot, and degrades over time.

I pointed out a few times that I felt “elemental” was superfluous. When someone said they have a tank of hydrogen, for example, I don’t assume they mean water.

The only way we can tour space in the foreseeable future is with VR. Even multi-millionaires looking for new thrills only get to go into low earth orbit. We’ll need a cheap way to get into orbit first, something like a space elevator.

Three words that brings back lots of memories for me : Crynwr packet drivers :)

Oh the humanity! :)

It doesn’t really help if it all goes right back into the air when it is burned. We can achieve stasis that way - assuming that no new sources of carbon dioxide goes into the air. But we can also achieve stasis by switching to hydrogen that is produced without carbon dioxide. Or by using the electricity from solar…

Actually in those days the binary newsgroups were pretty pathetic. I remember a highlight was Robert Lang posting postscript files of origami instructions. Porn is laughable compared to what’s available these days.

I was just going to mention Eudora. Never used gopher either, but I used to spend a lot of time in various newsgroups.

I guess my disagreement is that when I hear “hydrogen”, I take it to mean H2, not hydrogen found in some other compound. Thanks for all the information, as well as for why this process is different. Appreciate it.