I haven't listened to any of them yet, but I am surprised by how few there are. There's only one Chopin-like piece, for instance. This causes me to worry: how many bad Chopin-like pieces did this thing spit out before coming up with a passable one? If there's still a human intelligence sitting there and sorting the good compositions from the bad ones, the program is significantly less impressive.
Sure, a Tesla Roadster can do 0-60 mph in four seconds, but it doesn't _sound_ as cool as a Lamborghini when it does so.
Seriously though, I would be very sad if internal combustion engine powered cars vanished. I personally suspect that the future of personal transportation is still gonna be based on liquid fuels (maybe cellulosic or even algae-derived ethanol) because they're so much easier to store and transport than anything else.
Hydrogen storage requires weird high-pressure containers and exotic materials. Electricity storage requires weird toxic metals placed in weird toxic solutions. Ethanol storage requires a bucket.
There's a lot of research funding going into biofuels right now, but unfortunately the basic numbers don't make sense for biofuels as the world's primary energy source. You can convert solar energy into carbohydrates, extract the carbohydrates and convert them into ethanol, transport the ethanol to thousands of gas stations (sitting on prime commercial real estate), and combust it to create pressure that's harnessed to rotate an axle. There's a significant percentage of waste at each of those steps, and you end up requiring, like, all of the Earth's surface area for growing biofuel crops. (Even with algae.)
Alternately, you can harness sunlight directly, distribute it across the existing grid (fairly unobtrusively), temporarily store it in batteries or capacitors, and directly power an electric motor with it. Electric storage also benefits from the same economies of scale as laptops and cell phones.
My opinion, a humble one, is that biofuels are better suited for niche applications where electricity can't be used.
Apparently not included in the plan: building new power stations, or even any discussion of it.
Anyone got any good numbers on questions like: if half of California's cars were switched to electrical over the next ten years, how many more power stations would the state require?
It depends on how much use they get out of each vehicle and which sort of vehicle they are. I calculated that about ten square meters of mirrors at a solar thermal station would power one average U.S. daily commute with an electric microcar. A low drag vehicle like the Aptera would require around 5 - 6 square meters, instead. Provided that we can get our drivetrain, engine, and regenerative braking as efficient as we think we can, then we can get that down to 3 square meters for a compressed air powered microcar, and less than 1 square meter for a compressed air powered scooter.
Thanks for pointing that out. The response was better than the original article, except for this one bit:
Because sexuality is so entangled with power in American culture, it's hard to talk about sex without getting political. The two are nearly inseparable to Republicans especially, as has been demonstrated repeatedly in their opposition to "non-traditional marriage" (only a near-complete ignorance of the history of marriage could lead one to think what we have now is "traditional"), Senator Craig's "wide stance" in the bathroom stall, and their glee in bringing down Bill Clinton over his "unnatural acts."
which is just plain odd, because that's the one and only time politics is mentioned in either article.
Most people have lower than average social value, and fewer than average # of sex partners. This is because both tend to be distributed according to a power law.
Certainly true, however most people also don't think their social value is something they can work on. Hence a feeling of helplessness that they project onto others.
Learning to work a crowd is like learning a programming language. Humans are individuals, but they tent to have the same basic needs and desires - to be entertained and sexually stimulated is among them.
Now we've got that out of the way, why is it that every writeup of some social science research must have at least one glaring factor that's been ignored? In this case it's:
There is a significant difference, however, on whether they have ever had sexual intercourse with men. Overweight (92.5%) and obese (91.5%) women are significantly more likely ever to have had sexual intercourse with men than normal-weight women (87.4%).
Is this primarily due to the fact that women get fatter as they get older and hence the overweight/obese group is overloaded with the women at the high end of the (15-44) age range? Probably.
Also this bit:
When a man propositions a woman, she can respond in one of two ways; she can say “yes” or she can say “no.” When a woman propositions a man, he can also respond in one of two ways; he can say “yes” or he can say “yes, please.” He has no realistic choice to say no.
thankfully is not true. Yeech!
It is probably true, however, that women at the low end of the attractiveness spectrum have a much easier time of it than men at the low end of the attractiveness spectrum, thanks to the relative abundance of non-picky men compared to non-picky women.
In all species in which the female makes greater parental investment into the offspring than the male does (including humans and all mammals), mating is a female choice; it happens when the female wants it to happen and with whom she wants it to happen, not when the male wants it to happen or with whom he wants it to happen.
Doesn't really justify such a strong statement. Especially if you consider culture & the fact that we are a loosely monogamistic social species with complex social & mating habits. But I think the author was magnifying a realistic point. The relative abundance of non-picky men is a more accurate, but less funny. Similar social effects.
Is this primarily due to the fact that women get fatter as they get older and hence the overweight/obese group is overloaded with the women at the high end of the (15-44) age range?
I don't agree with your premise, here. You need to show any study that would demonstrate that women (a) really get fatter as they get older and (b) they get so much fatter that they would increase their BMI to the point of jumping up in the classification.
Also:
When a man propositions a woman, she can respond in one of two ways; she can say "yes" or she can say "no". When a woman propositions a man, he can also respond in one of two ways; he can say "yes" or he can say "yes, please." He has no realistic choice to say no.
You may be grossed out by fat women, but rest assured that not all men are. Combine that to your following statement about fat women being less picky, and you have a formula where the available mate population is far more favorable to fat women than to normal-weight ones.
I don't agree with your premise, here. You need to show any study that would demonstrate that women (a) really get fatter as they get older and (b) they get so much fatter that they would increase their BMI to the point of jumping up in the classification.
Flagged for politics, but in the meantime you'll excuse me if I, as it were, stick my dick in the mashed potatoes.
I think it's a rather silly analysis. Firstly, for the whole premise:
This might be the key passage of my interview with John Ziegler on Tuesday, for it is, in a nutshell, why conservatives don't win elections anymore.
By "conservatives don't win elections any more" he means that they've lost two congressional elections in a row. And one Presidential election. That's not a death of anything, that's just a normal part of the political cycle.
Secondly, for his proposed reason:
There are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do. They have not just forgotten how to persuade; they have forgotten about the necessity of persuasion.
And that's supposed to be unique to conservatives how? Being unable to believe that others don't think the way you do is extremely common on both sides of politics. Working at a university as I do, the left-wing equivalent is almost ubiquitous among just about everybody I talk to on a day-to-day basis.
That the medium is shaping the message, and instead of realizing that and taking corrective action people are just accepting the new message as ordained and running with it.
I haven't listened to any of them yet, but I am surprised by how few there are. There's only one Chopin-like piece, for instance. This causes me to worry: how many bad Chopin-like pieces did this thing spit out before coming up with a passable one? If there's still a human intelligence sitting there and sorting the good compositions from the bad ones, the program is significantly less impressive.