[FRIAM] Hybrid cars

Tue Apr 6 08:51:49 EDT 2021

Some households (like when I was bitcoin mining!) couldn’t allocate another 60 amps to a charging circuit.   Or because of on-demand electric hot water, baseboard heating, etc.

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
Sent: Tuesday, April 6, 2021 2:16 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Hybrid cars

We have leased a new BMW 330e "plugin hybrid" now which will replace our old BMW 1 series at the end of the month. There are not enough charging stations at the moment for a pure electric car like the BMW i3.

-J.

-------- Original message --------
From: Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com<mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com>>
Date: 4/6/21 00:33 (GMT+01:00)
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation

I have just a small Hybrid CMax now that gets about 45mph instead of my old Hybrid Escape that got about 30mph.   But the next will be all electric!

P.S. QuantumScape is an interesting battery company.  They’ve gone public but they have no product yet!

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 2:29 PM
To: friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation

Marcus wrote:
Humans might be capable of deciding how to allocate energy.  Or we might just infest the solar system and beyond, paving over everything.    With a HPC/complexity mindset, I tend to prefer big and direct approaches, myself.   I would be happy to drive around 1000hp electric hummer.   More motive to get fusion working!

I too have always been mildly attracted to Big Iron (why I came to LANL to work on the Proton Storage Ring and then on the (Super)Computing Division that became HPC), but in the bottom line I have always chosen my motorcycles (for example) to be ones I could stand back up if they fell over.

Regarding a 1000hp Hummer:   My 4000lb Volt already seems excessive (to me) for most purposes, but I am in the market for hub-drive motor or two I can swap in under wheels of my 1949 Ford Dump Truck (more big iron) and run with the (salvaged out) battery from my Volt (16KWh of Lithium mined from Columbia after Musk stated "we can coup anyone we want").  Maybe graphene or nanopartical solid-state batteries or hydrogen fuel-cell technology will overtake Lithium Chemistry fast enough to make a 1000hp GWh Hummer less egregious than my Volt or the Gen1 Insight I tooled around in before that one.

Re: Fusion energy plant proliferation:   There is one HUGE fusion reactor in the sky flooding us with a wide spectrum of radiation (albeit shielded nicely with an endogenous magnetic field and an atmosphere suffused with water vapor) which is fairly easy to harness for *heat* and even the ever-fungible stored electric charge...

A half-dozen (salvaged) PV panels are enough to fill up my Volt's puny battery in a day of good sunshine...   your Hummer is not going to get the same range (30-40 miles) from the same KWh input (by half?).   In the 1970s, a mega-giga-hyper solar project in the AZ desert placed thousands of mirrors in concentric circles with heliostatic controls to focus on a central heating tower (steam generator?)...  *free energy!* everyone screamed hysterically... but it had to shut down in just a few years (as I remember it) because heat isn't the quantity needed to generate power, but rather heat-flow, so they were dumping scads of low-grade heat into the nearby Colorado River (why they chose the location I believe, for the cooling) to facilitate the power-generation...   eventually they were shown to be destroying (disrupting badly?) the existing ecosystem in the river and even Baja CA with all this "low grade" and "waste" heat.    Thermal fusion power plants are not going to do any more-better on this count I don't expect.

Maybe direct electric-generation through fusion processes might get around that problem.  More tech is always the most obvious answer to the failings/exacerbations of the last round of tech.  Maybe Iron-Man class of miniaturization?

                    Deliberately misquoting Pogo - "I have met the enemy and they is the Red Queen"

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com><mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 12:31 PM
To: friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation

Marcus  wrote:
That was Glen.   (My explanation is just that we have limited short term memory and can’t tolerate any other representation than terribly compressed forms.   So it is hard to gain confidence in simulations because we can’t get them entirely in our heads, nor prove them correct, nor reason very effectively about how mutations will change their behavior.   The natural world has no such hesitation.)

<not-snark> I wonder if perhaps that "the natural world" *does* have such hesitation in the sense you cop to here...  and suggest that when this happens it is exactly what we call "life".   We fat-brained humans with elaborate language are just the (known) apex of this process that bootstraps itself up some kind of tower-of-babel style complexity (to increase our ability to hold more and more and more qualitatively and quantitatively "in our heads").   Clay tablets unto nanodots (and beyond)  and proto-abacii unto quantum computers (and beyond) represent our progress toward extending our phenotypes represent our attempts to expand (transcend?) the reasons for our hesitation.

Is "life itself" and "consciousness" by extension, somehow the urge (an inevitable self-organizing trend itself?) toward a particular type of self-organization?

</not snark>

- Steve

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