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<p>Jochen & Other EV/Hybrid enthusiasts-</p>
<p>Do you know where you electricity comes from? <br>
</p>
<p> When I got my Volt (Ampera to you) I had to acknowledge to my
purist friends that I was driving a "coal fired" vehicle (since my
Electric Coop is still mostly coal-fired). Of course, free (or
not always so free) markets are driving them to phase out the
major coal plant in the 4 Corners area (where I apparently export
*my* fossil fuel pollution and cause the extraction of so much
groundwater to sluice the coal from mine to plant that the land
is literally settling). I shook my tiny fist at my Cooperative
only to find that they were constrained by a Public Regulatory
Commission form building and operating their own renewable sources
(yup, we have a lot of sun and wind) until 2025. MegaCorp
regional electricity corp has a monopoly on providing them (and
me) power through that date. <br>
</p>
<p>I had the option of buying salvage panels (originally from
Germany!) at $.10/watt ($30 for $300W) which is a *fraction* of
the new cost of such things, and at least doesn't drive the
extractive market, although it *does* relieve the burden on the
primary industry for handling a gigantic waste stream (for
operations and maintenance efficiency it seems commercial
installations of PV has a refresh cycle closer to 10 years rather
than the 20+ quoted to home users)).</p>
<p>- Steve<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 4/6/21 3:16 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:202104060921.1369LbqR052192@ame4.swcp.com">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<div dir="auto">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.</div>
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
<div dir="auto">-J.</div>
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
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<div>-------- Original message --------</div>
<div>From: Marcus Daniels <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:marcus@snoutfarm.com"><marcus@snoutfarm.com></a> </div>
<div>Date: 4/6/21 00:33 (GMT+01:00) </div>
<div>To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:friam@redfish.com"><friam@redfish.com></a> </div>
<div>Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation </div>
<div><br>
</div>
</div>
<div class="WordSection1">
<p class="MsoNormal">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>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">P.S. QuantumScape is an interesting battery
company. They’ve gone public but they have no product yet!
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<div>
<div style="border:none;border-top:solid #E1E1E1
1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in">
<p class="MsoNormal"><b>From:</b> Friam
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:friam-bounces@redfish.com"><friam-bounces@redfish.com></a> <b>On Behalf Of
</b>Steve Smith<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Monday, April 5, 2021 2:29 PM<br>
<b>To:</b> <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:friam@redfish.com">friam@redfish.com</a><br>
<b>Subject:</b> Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation</p>
</div>
</div>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p> </p>
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal">Marcus wrote:</p>
</div>
<blockquote style="margin-top:5.0pt;margin-bottom:5.0pt">
<p class="MsoNormal">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!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.
</p>
<p>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... </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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? </p>
<p> Deliberately misquoting Pogo - "I have
met the enemy and they is the Red Queen"</p>
<blockquote style="margin-top:5.0pt;margin-bottom:5.0pt">
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<div>
<div style="border:none;border-top:solid #E1E1E1
1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in">
<p class="MsoNormal"><b>From:</b> Friam <a
href="mailto:friam-bounces@redfish.com"
moz-do-not-send="true">
<friam-bounces@redfish.com></a> <b>On Behalf Of
</b>Steve Smith<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Monday, April 5, 2021 12:31 PM<br>
<b>To:</b> <a href="mailto:friam@redfish.com"
moz-do-not-send="true">friam@redfish.com</a><br>
<b>Subject:</b> Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation</p>
</div>
</div>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p>Marcus wrote:</p>
<blockquote style="margin-top:5.0pt;margin-bottom:5.0pt">
<p class="MsoNormal">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.)</p>
</blockquote>
<p><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.
</p>
<p>Is "life itself" and "consciousness" by extension, somehow
the urge (an inevitable self-organizing trend itself?)
toward a particular type of self-organization?</p>
<p></not snark></p>
<p>- Steve</p>
<p> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br>
<br>
</p>
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