I want my fuel-cell powered flying car!
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation
Flat screen TVs are an example of a technology that in our lifetime has gone from being an impossible incredibly expensive special effect in Stanley Kubricks "2001 - A Space Oddessy" to cheap consumer item reality. The Apple iPad is even better than their TV placemats.
Until LCDs the closest anyone had come was Sinclairs tiny flat TV - a friend won one in a TV Quiz Show. It was cute enough but it would deform your jacket pocket pretty badly much like their digital watch.
Ditto for the communicators off Star Trek and mobile phones. Arguably Scifi has inspired designers to make some of these things a reality sooner than would otherwise have been the case.
You need a futurologist for that or an ensemble of the critters.
It always amuses me when the popular press report that "experts" have decided that the common cold will be cured by 2034 (or whatever).
I have seen a hydrogen fuel cell powered motorbike that actually worked once at a major UK renewables trade fair (the one using dirty smelly noisy diesel electric generators to power the exhibitors stands).
-- Regards, Martin Brown
That one is, in fact, likely.
Ten years is such a convenient time frame for making predictions. Hardly anybody will remember, or care, about your predictions ten years from now. It's also an excellent time frame for climate simulation predictions. Well, maybe 20 years for that one; the models *do* keep getting better.
OK, here's my 10 year prediction: Most of Elon Musk's enterprises will go bust.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation
Maybe not quite yet flying, but there has been progress made in battery "refueling" by changing the electrolyte... unfortunately it's still at ~10% kWh/pound of a rechargeable LiIon battery.
But I suspect that's how we will ultimately have electric vehicles... not that I consider it rational... the electricity has to come from somewhere other than the tooth fairy... maybe the Obama fairy ?:-} ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Neural nets are fun, particularly as you watch them train, but the issue of a brain simulation a la Turing (or Beethoven) is another story.
Scientists have near zero understanding of consciousness, whether or not they can compute like a brain does. Nor can we conclude that a sufficiently complex machine wouldn't have emergent consciousness. (I doubt it, just a gut opinion.)
But I don't know, nor does anyone else.
Den onsdag den 18. juni 2014 17.43.21 UTC+2 skrev Jim Thompson:
not so hard to understand, it'll come from some kind of powerplant there are lots of ways to generate electricity, but you can't strap a nuclear reactor, windturbine, solar array, hydro etc. on a car And if you burn stuff like coal to generate electricity you have a lot better efficiency and filters on a powerplant
-Lasse
And the efficiency is better than gasoline? ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Den onsdag den 18. juni 2014 21.53.13 UTC+2 skrev Jim Thompson:
the coal fired powerplant close to here is 47% efficient when just making electricity, and when needed does district heating for a total of ~75%
and it has filters and scrubbers to remove fly ash, SO2 and NOx from the exhaust
with a gasoline engine getting 35% is pushing it
-Lasse
And the conversion efficiency to charge the battery, or make the electrolyte?
And the efficiency from the battery thru the motors to the wheels?
Lasse, You're talking like a leftist politician rather than, like you should, an engineer. ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Finding an unoccupied charging station in a big city will make finding a parking spot look easy.
And the electricity grid will collapse if half of the cars are electric.
Then there's range, and range anxiety, and battery lifetime.
Gas cars work great. It's not a problem that needs fixing.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Certainly a classic computer+software can't be conscious. It will produce the exact same results every run.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Den onsdag den 18. juni 2014 22.45.21 UTC+2 skrev Jim Thompson:
old school lead-acid something like 80%, LiPo in the 90's
A Tesla almost 90%
I don't see what politics has to do with it
I'm just looking at the numbers and they seem to add up, even if you still burn stuff to make electricity and the added benefit is just a moving the noise and pollution out of the city and better filters
and it means you can power a car with a lot of different power sources, not just a few specific components of oil
-Lasse
Agreed! 100% !! ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
e:
parking spot look easy.
That's easy. Make the parking spots recharging stations. In Canada they put power points on parking meters so that you can use local electricity to ke ep your radiator from freezing in winter.
It would if you all switched to electric cars overnight. That isn't going t o happen. The world's going to have to rework it's electricity grids to cop e with the problem of getting ahead of anthropogenic global warming anyway, and of course lots of battery-power cars sitting on charging stations can also sink a lot power when the wind and solar generators are pushing it out .
Give it enough time, and the necessary capital investment doesn't have to b e crippling. Keep on putting it off until climate change is happening rathe r faster, and it could become more difficult.
Batteries will probably get better. If you really need range, you will prob ably be able to swap discharged batteries for fully charged ones. And there are always inductive charging coils buried in the more heavily travelled r oads if you really want to get serious.
They work great now. There's only a finite amount of gas in the ground to b e dug up and burnt, and we are having to dig deeper to find it, so it's goi ng to get a lot more expensive before it totally runs out.
And people with a better grasp of physics and chemistry than you can manage have worked out that we can't afford to dig up and burn what's available w ithout dumping enough CO2 into the atmosphere to get a whole lot more anthr opogenic global warming than we've already got, and a whole lot more extrem e weather with it.
I could go on about rising sea levels and the chance of turning off the Gul f Stream for a thousand years or so, but that's well above your comprehensi on level.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Haitic certainly doesn't know - he doesn't know much, and a lot of what he does know is wrong. His opinion of what anyone else knows is equally suspect.
Maybe not. Certain matrix-inversion schemes can be shown to work best if the order of execution is genuinely random, and such a scheme is unlikely to produce exactly the same result on every run.
In real life, being totally predictable can be a lethal defect, and any computer program that has to interact with humans will have to include a random number generator to prevent some clown from gaming the system.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Randomise with a seed based on time of day if you like.
An actual real-life concious robot or whatever will have inputs with a random content.
Anyway, why is it a *requirement* that conciousness be non-deterministic? If you were deterministic, could you tell? Could anyone?
-- John Devereux
For a given seed, the results will always be the same. There's no consciousness there. It's just moving through states as the programmer designed it to.
The key is quantum uncertainty, which is inherently mystical. No dumb finite state machine is mystical.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Hi,
I think any "analog" system has quantum uncertainty, and some of the neural network IC's coming out are (unfortunately?!) wired as analog neurons, I think a recent one is 10,000 analog neurons per IC or something as a first prototype.
cheers, Jamie
They are getting there. Only time will tell if they are on the right track this time - there have been many false dawns in the AI field.
We will probably know that they have arrived when a computer can beat the top human Go player on a 19x19 board. To do that will require a level of pattern matching and problem domain understanding that no brute force approach can hope to deliver on present hardware.
I can no longer say drive a car since that is now a solved problem.
Indeed. For now it is a conjecture, but it is a testable one based on how relatively simple nearest neighbour rules can give rise to computationally complete cellular automata - Conways life for instance is Turing complete computer via the use of Gospers glider gun.
It isn't that great a leap to consider that a human brain consisting of
10^10 neurons each with 10^4 interconnects and so 10^14 synapses is a self organising cellular automata implementation.The distinct state space for a human brain is of the order of
(10^10/10^4)^(10^4) = (10^6)^10000 = 10^60000
To put this very large number into perspective the total number of hydrogen atoms in the observable universe is estimated to be ~10^83.
Williamette have a nice comparison of a 30W CPU against a brain.
Should appeal to engineers...
-- Regards, Martin Brown
Are you sure about that?
How do you know that given exactly the same starting point the human brain isn't deterministic. We do not have the God like powers needed to set up a human brain into a precisely known initial configuration.
-- Regards, Martin Brown
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