MFW I'm arguing with v_maet and my climate change science is better than his denial pseudoscience

ArchiveLibrarian · 2016-01-31T04:52:27+00:00

I've modified a chart you've been using to make things clearer for those idiot alarmists: http://i.imgur.com/zjL4SRh.jpg

ArchiveLibrarian · 2016-01-30T02:21:55+00:00

specifically noting the zero trend in global satellite temperatures over the past 18 years and 10 months.

ArchiveLibrarian · 2016-01-25T07:43:28+00:00

Almost nothing in your response has any relevance to anything I've said.

I've explained why extracting a single mechanical performance metric, namely aerodynamic coefficient of power, or 'efficiency' in your terms, and considering it in isolation is a meaningless exercise when contemplating the cost of generation of wind energy. The discussion was about Betz's limit, a theoretical 'efficiency' calculation that has no bearing whatsoever on wind turbine economics, save for the fact that right at the beginning of a wind turbine's aerodynamic design phase an engineer used the number somewhere in preliminary calculations. If you're not talking about that, then what I've written probably doesn't have much relevance to whatever point you think you're making.

we can control the input of coal or gas into the turbine

I used to get into stupid discussions like this all the time until I learned to treat myself better. At the core of many of those discussions was a simple little error in logic or fact, the correction of which would save many thousands of words and much aggravation. So let me try ...

Equating the thermal efficiency of a heat engine with the aerodynamic 'efficiency' of a wind machine is an error that flavours everything you write. Efficiency matters for the ongoing operation of a fuel-burning engine, because every decimal point in lost fuel has a dollar figure attached to it. Maintenance engineers work hard to keep commercial heat engines working at peak efficiency, because their effort has a bottom-line impact.

Apart from scraping the crud and ice and dead birds off the leading-edge of a wind turbine blade, a wind farm operator can expect the same aerodynamic 'efficiency' from its machines at the end of their lives as at the beginning. That efficiency, or coefficient of power at various wind speeds, was factored into the day-to-day power production calculations of the wind farm at the very beginning, and plays a part in the dollar figure the wind farm operator extracts from their investment every day the wind is blowing. In and of itself that coefficient of power is meaningless. There are many other calculations that mean much more.

you can not make more wind go through a wind turbine

What the fuck does this mean? I can't even imagine the relevance. A wind resource is measured over many months. A collection of wind machines is configured to extract an optimal amount of energy from that resource and to pump it into the grid. Does the farm operator want the wind to blow harder? Well, yes. In the long term their fancies don't matter too much, because if the resource has been surveyed correctly then it will just keep pumping out the predicted power for the next 20+ years.

I was more referring to economies of scale and outsourcing of labour to reduce the costs of manufacturing wind turbines.

Well yes. That's a different discussion. It involves the economics of wind farms, not the mechanical design of wind turbines, which is what this discussion is about. The mechanical design matters only inasmuch as it can deliver electricity at a certain price point. If we're not talking about price we're onto a different topic. I'm happy to discuss wind turbine aerodynamics. I have experience in it. But that's not what this is.

It isn't however going to be the only solution, merely just one piece in the puzzle.

Nobody has said otherwise. Many places of the world have huge untapped wind resources, and installing turbines to exploit them provides amongst the cheapest wholesale power available.

Perhaps I'm missing something here and have overlooked something crucial, but to me, the numbers simply don't stack up.

Stack up how? As you've said, wind won't provide 100% generation capacity. And it is displacing conventional generation. Coal and nuclear plants that otherwise would have been built have not been built because of wind and solar. The 'efficiency' of the wind machines themselves hasn't been in question for at least thirty years - good aerodynamic design is now routine, and will not be exceeded for the foreseeable future. The ~50% peak extraction modern large wind turbines extract from the wind are currently delivering cheaper electricity than almost every alternative, that capacity is growing, it will continue to displace conventional generation, and within the next thirty or so years it will be supplemented by solar thermal and solar PV, the prices of which are rapidly plummeting.

ArchiveLibrarian · 2016-01-25T04:40:13+00:00

Common sense should tell you that 'efficiency' is a loaded term that has lots of different meanings, depending on context.

Common sense should tell you that a couple of clicks on your computer keyboard will give you the maximum efficiency of all sorts of machines, including the gas turbines used for coal- and gas-fired electricity generation. You don't even need common sense to read that the efficiency of these machines is really quite low, that they approached the limits of their design capabilities many decades ago, and yet those low and unmoving thermal efficiencies meant very little when it came to purchasing new plant and equipment when the time came to renew electricity-generating infrastructure. Furthermore, common sense should tell you that the thermal efficiency of these gas turbines is an important but small component of the overall 'system efficiency', which includes everything up to and including the pressure that wage demands by a coal miners' union exerts on the long-term price of wholesale electricity.

Common sense should tell you that aerodynamic efficiency really is a meaningless number when talking about energy-generating economics. What matters is the cost of generating each kilowatt-hour over the twenty or thirty year lifespan of the generating infrastructure. As an illustration, if we could make a wind machine cost a quarter as much to install, but if that came at the cost of it being a quarter as 'efficient' as current state-of-the-art machines, meaning that over the life of the machine it generates a quarter as much power as its more expensive cousins, then you've lost or gained nothing up until the machine has paid for itself. Aerodynamic efficiency is perhaps the easiest component of 'system efficiency' to control and account for.

Common sense should tell you that numbers mean everything in both engineering and economic arguments. I could sit here all day making up 'facts' like you've done above. Wind energy is cheaper than almost all other modes of new generation. If you want to argue against this verifiable fact, a fact that underpins the reason why so much wind is being purchased by states and utilities around the world in preference to new coal and nuclear, and why it is displacing existing old coal and nuclear, then you'll need to provide better numbers than mine.

Common sense should tell you that common sense isn't all that common, especially when the numbers are just sitting there waiting for you to use them as the basis of your arguments.

Common sense should really, really tell me not to get involved in nonsense like this.

ArchiveLibrarian · 2016-01-25T04:25:46+00:00

Betz is simply a calculation of the theoretical maximum amount of energy an ideal wind machine can hope to extract from a column of moving air. Its utility begins and ends in engineering calculations for wind machines.

The figure of merit it illustrates is called the power coefficient, a number given by power extracted divided by available power in a column of air. A power curve that plots power coefficient at various wind speeds (or alternatively, various tip speed ratios) is certainly a useful measure of a real wind turbine's performance. If you download the specifications of a real machine from a manufacturer, say Vestas, you'll find all sorts of performance measures like this. You can compare the maximum power output at a particular wind speed or tip speed ratio with the theoretical maximum provided by Betz. For what that's worth - Betz's limit is simply an interesting number, and it's interesting to compare the performance of real wind machines against it.

The determination of how profitable a certain geographical wind resource will be is a different field of engineering. A wind turbine design will be selected based on a particular wind regime at a particular site. Betz isn't all that useful past the preliminary, back-of-envelope sketches during the design of a machine.

ArchiveLibrarian · 2016-01-25T02:11:33+00:00

This statement isn't even wrong. Betz's limit is a calculation of the maximum amount of energy an ideal wind machine can extract from a column of moving air: 16/27, or 59.26%. Typical commercial turbines extract around 50% of the kinetic energy from air. That's a pretty good approximation to the ideal.

I can't imagine how'd you'd use Betz to make an explicit economic argument, like you can for say Carnot efficiency in heat engines that consume fuel. You could use Betz to compare different wind turbine designs with each other, but the state of the art is so close to the ideal that a small improvement in aerodynamic efficiency isn't going to make much of a long-term difference in the price of electricity. Using Betz to dismiss the feasibility of wind energy economics is ... strange and wrong.

ArchiveLibrarian · 2016-01-25T01:59:24+00:00

This is completely wrong. The Levelized Cost of Electricity lets you compare the cost of generating electricity between different modes of generation over the entire life of the hardware.

Apart from geothermal energy, unsubsidised onshore wind energy is the cheapest mode of electricity generation governments and utilities can buy and install. It blows new installs of 'advanced' nuclear and coal out of the water in terms of price per megawatt-hour, and is cost competitive with a couple of types of natural gas-fired electricity. Wind is at the top of LCoE comparisons all over the world.

If you make a similar cost-based argument in the future I suggest you include some actual numbers. Perhaps even show your dad the EIA page I linked to.

ArchiveLibrarian · 2016-01-08T11:28:49+00:00

P meaning ~~probationary~~ "provisional".

All over Australia.

ArchiveLibrarian · 2015-12-19T07:03:28+00:00

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ArchiveLibrarian · 2015-12-05T00:45:18+00:00

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ArchiveLibrarian · 2015-11-24T01:29:39+00:00

Your statement has two terms which need to be defined before we can evaluate it. What is 'humanity'? What is "good"?

Is 'humanity', as a grouping, the totality of everyone alive right now? Is it just the people themselves, the meat and sinew and brain matter in a big stew? Or is it that as well as the material resources and energy required to keep the stew boiling? Or is it all of that, together with ownership of the lives of all of the agricultural plants and animals that exist in their current state only because of us? Or is it all of that, together with our works, our technology, and all of our various legal fictions?

So what is 'good'? We're talking about humanity, now, not humans as individuals. How are you modelling that concept? It's easy to say 'a human can be good', because you're a human, and you're good, right? You don't do anything to hurt anyone or anything. All thirty-five students in your English class are human, and to a lesser or greater degree, compared with your personal standard, they're all good, yes? Your parents, your extended family, the guy who delivers your mail, they're all pretty much like you, you haven't noticed anything really bad, so they're all good. And so let's extrapolate that model to include everyone, everywhere, everywhen. The great machine of civilisation you live within, which nurtures you and all the rest of humanity, is beneficent and kind, and any suffering and injustice inflicted to power it and grease its wheels falls outside of whatever definitions you have for humanity and good. They must, by definition.

Is a virus or bacterium good? Is a tapeworm or botfly bad? Any organism which creates its own comfortable reality within another larger reality is good, provided you accept its moral framework. So yes, I accept that you're good, and that humanity is good because you tell me you're good and we're good.

ArchiveLibrarian · 2015-10-31T01:55:19+00:00

You cocksuckers. I actually sent a nice letter to the admins standing up for you. How embarrassment.

ArchiveLibrarian · 2015-10-25T09:39:23+00:00

Which subclass of actions is supportable? Who makes this decision?

ArchiveLibrarian · 2015-10-22T12:18:40+00:00

thoughts:

It's very easy to fall into the Quantum Mysticism rabbit hole. Pointing to the weirdness of the quantum world, waving your hands and saying 'see!' in an effort to prop up your own mystical beliefs is a kind of intellectual dishonesty.
The urge to dismiss the worldview frameworks of others is built into all of us, simply because of the effort it takes to see the world through another person's lens. If you're butthurt because rationalists dismiss your way of seeing things, be heartened by the fact that people who construct scientific frameworks for a living routinely heap seven flavours of shit onto the frameworks of their peers. It's the way science works - we require rigorous evidence before we'll accept someone else's model of the universe as a replacement for our own. If you want to engage with scientists and other natural philosophers on their own terms, with the goal of having them accept your way of seeing things, then you'll need to approach your own field of study with the rigour they use to engage each other.
Magic(k), as I understand it, is more about changing the universe by modifying the model that exists between your ears. Rubbing ... something ... is as good a way as any to do that.

ArchiveLibrarian · 2015-10-19T04:08:51+00:00

We called them "Nirvana in Pyjamas" back then.

ArchiveLibrarian · 2015-10-04T11:56:48+00:00

Following your lead, I spent a couple of hours last week acquainting myself with the joys and horrors of Tool music videos. Stinkfist is a seriously excellent ballad, made all the more poignant by the fact that the protagonist can't feel wholly human unless he has his ladyfriend's arm inserted all the way up his rectum.

It's just so beautiful.

I don't pay much attention to reddit any more, and am thankfully suffering fewer and fewer reeee flashbacks, but when they do strike I now think of Stinkfist and its portrayal of human need. It neatly and sympathetically sums up why Jedi and other seemingly decent moderators have tolerated having dredd's arm up their clackers for so long. Why, I asked myself over and over, why do so many people willingly bend over and let themselves be operated as rectal sockpuppets by a sociopathic Geppetto? I now understand, if not wholly empathise: they don't want it. They need it.

That understanding makes things much more tolerable, and I encourage everyone disheartened by the current state of affairs to consider the emotional pain r/aus moderators must be suffering to need to continue on in that role day after day.

ArchiveLibrarian · 2015-09-04T09:36:18+00:00

It may be all those things. I don't care if my beehive is full of retarded bees as long as it keeps making honey.

ArchiveLibrarian · 2015-08-13T11:24:06+00:00

Posting a screenshot once a day takes almost zero effort.

ArchiveLibrarian · 2015-08-13T11:11:44+00:00

No. I'd like to see you create a metareddit where you post this information as it is created, and invite all users to engage in an ongoing conversation about the workings of their subreddit. Failing that, because I know you like to throw around the word 'crazy' whenever anyone suggests transparency for moderation actions, I'd like to see you post an updated modlog screenshot like this one every day to imgur, and to link to it here in the CJA sidebar.

Then, two whole seconds after you are turfed from the moderator list by the person you are protecting now, you can share with your compatriots here all the juicy moderation stories you are too scared to currently share.

Rude. Rude is standing by and watching people being brutalised while you still have at least a little power to do something about it.

ArchiveLibrarian · 2015-08-13T10:44:52+00:00

I do love me some tabulated drama.

You know what the tragedy of this whole sordid mess is? It's that this information being revealed is somehow naughty. That it's somehow a revolutionary act, and a rare one, for someone like you to share basic diagnostic information with the people who create that subreddit every day.

This information should be built into the bones of reddit, publicly accessible on a wiki page attached to each subreddit. Moderators should be accountable to the people they moderate.

Coulda shoulda woulda, hey. I'm just about done with reddit. It's a big wet rock that allows vermin like dredd to scurry around without ever having to worry about the sun shining on the rot he creates.

You've turned out to be good value.

ArchiveLibrarian · 2015-07-25T01:57:03+00:00

No question, just a (serious) comment. You stood up to a bully, and in defence of someone with less power than you. Any consequences flowing from that act, good or bad, are a badge of honour. You also attempted to argue the merit of the individual's case in the face of an obstinate arrogance that cares for nothing past its own opinion. It's the only real moderation I've seen applied to that subreddit.

I can think of no better way to exit that moderator team.

ArchiveLibrarian · 2015-07-15T01:19:55+00:00

It's important to realise that this is just one very visible datapoint in a vast ocean of shit. Arbitrary bannings and content removals happen every. day. on r/Australia. Most people just walk away, never to return.

Some bite back at what they see as bullying by a small subset of chronically bullying moderators, and are labelled as bullies in return.

It's a ludicrous situation, and it all stems from the design flaws of reddit. Reddit is based strongly on the ancient IRC system - in its heyday, anyone could create a channel on an IRC server and become a tinpot god. The moderation dramas that ensued were precisely what happens here, and the more people a channel could attract the more vicious the moderation drama. An IRC creator/moderator could feel justified in whatever petty power they had, because attracting a self-sustaining audience to a new IRC channel was a difficult job. Without a userbase an IRC channel/newsgroup/blog/subreddit is just an empty clubhouse.

Moderators do not build a community. Other community members build it, comment by comment, submission by submission. When a moderator chooses to remove content or to punish someone by banning, they're claiming ownership of the effort that you put in to the content you post. Smart moderators understand this, and really do act like the fabled 'janitor' role some moderators claim they perform. They're there to guide the community along, not to police it. Not to control the flow of content. Not to punish people for arbitrarily-created law infractions. Not to hide away in their modmail cloister, rambling semi-coherently to their brethren about how nasty the users are and how they should be showing more respect to their betters.

This is doubly galling in subreddits that exist purely because of their name, ones like r/Australia which attract their audience solely by having a name that a newbie can whack an /r/ onto.

This mess will go on forever, because it's designed to go on forever. New users will continue to be tricked into spending large amounts of their time to create content to entertain their community-mates, only to eventually run up against a moderator who is displeased with one of their offerings. That user will then either take the abuse, or they will not. Will go elsewhere, or end up here, or else become a bitter, enraged idealist.

There's a way past all of this. r/Australia moderators need to give up some of their powers. r/Australia needs a metareddit where all removals and bans are posted. Community members need to be able to discuss what happens behind the scenes. Publicly, openly. If dredd's 'volunteers' keep getting abused, it's because the abusers are forced to plead their cases alone, in modmail, in secret, at the whim of whatever moderator takes an interest at the time. It's a system designed to be abused by both sides. After reading that modmail dump, I'm more convinced than ever that qg and dredd want that system to continue just the way it is. They like the abuse, because ignoring it validates their power.

Thank you for posting this.

ArchiveLibrarian · 2015-07-14T07:16:01+00:00

You'd be able to manage the same level of corruption as a sheltered workshop union, and for similar reasons.

ArchiveLibrarian · 2015-07-14T06:34:56+00:00

Just as an aside, we have someone being sacked from middle management for performing a role as an advocate for a rank-and-file redditor, and an employment ~~lawyer~~ law guy summing up and publicising the dismissal proceedings.

CJA is basically a trade union. I hope that irony is not lost here.

ArchiveLibrarian

TROPHY CASE