Friam

The God Equation

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Hybrid cars

https://www.losalamosnm.us/government/departments/utilities/energy_resources

I understand there are periods where the county can’t draw all of their available power and has excess. I thought for sure the way to spend that was with on-demand SHA256 miners. I convinced no one.

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Tuesday, April 6, 2021 7:35 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Hybrid cars

Jochen & Other EV/Hybrid enthusiasts-

Do you know where you electricity comes from?

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.

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)).

- Steve

On 4/6/21 3:16 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:

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 [hidden email]

Date: 4/6/21 00:33 (GMT+01:00)

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]

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 [hidden email] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 2:29 PM
To: [hidden email]
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 [hidden email] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 12:31 PM
To: [hidden email]
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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Steve Smith

Re: Hybrid cars

On 4/6/21 8:41 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

https://www.losalamosnm.us/government/departments/utilities/energy_resources

I understand there are periods where the county can’t draw all of their available power and has excess. I thought for sure the way to spend that was with on-demand SHA256 miners. I convinced no one.

My CoOp (Jemez Valley Coop) used to promote (and sell at a discount) electric resistance heaters with a huge masonry mass built in as an incentive to get people to take time-of-day metering... the idea was to build up a big ole store of thermal energy during the nighttime (when it is also coldest) that would then seep back into the house during the high-demand daytime. A fair stopgap if your house was built without insulation and with all-electric heating (think 1960s when power was cheap and economies of scale suggested that more was always better).

I use (sparingly) a similar distant cousin resistive oil-filled electric heater to keep my bathroom (shadiest corner, least solar gain, etc) of the house at a welcoming temp for guests. If I were more diligent (and clever) I'd have a cryptocurrency rack in my laundry room with water-cooling and the radiator in the bathroom. It might pay for the energy in crypto output and give me "free heat". Now I just need to arrange for it to give me "free coolth" in the summer? I'm working on it.

I hear that cryptocurrency (Proof Of Work) mining is at best a break-even with power cost in most places, but a place like the remote ghost town at the end of a Fjord in BC that has it's own hydroelectric plant that *once* fed a paper mill, but shut down when the endless tracts of trees they were cutting down ended, seems to be the perfect place to churn negentropy out like candy in Willie Wonka World?

What is a cryptocurrency wallet filled with? Extremely low-entropy information? Is there any way to exploit it except by running it through *yet more* heat-generating/dissipating systems? Surely there is a free lunch in there somewhere? Libertarians like to mutter TANNSTAFL but I think it is more the case that *my* free lunch is someone else's "gone hungry" day. Synergy needs to be *real* not just obscured externalities and exported waste/pollution and constant expansion into new frontiers to exploit? Which is why I acknowledge that my Volt, when charged from the grid is "a coal burner".

- Steve

From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Tuesday, April 6, 2021 7:35 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Hybrid cars

Jochen & Other EV/Hybrid enthusiasts-

Do you know where you electricity comes from?

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.

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)).

- Steve

On 4/6/21 3:16 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
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 [hidden email]

Date: 4/6/21 00:33 (GMT+01:00)

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]

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 [hidden email] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 2:29 PM
To: [hidden email]
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 [hidden email] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 12:31 PM
To: [hidden email]
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
- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/