In German I’ve heard this referred to as Fremdschaemung, although I’m not convinced that it’s a real word…
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I’m not an expert on this, and my beliefs are based on my own experience of working with hydrogen as an industrial scientist.
Hydrogen is a pig to work with. I have seen “explosion-proof” hydrogen equipment explode. It dissolves in or reacts with some metals (NiMH batteries actually store hydrogen in this way when charged). It embrittles steel. When burned the combustion temperature is so high that a lot of nitrogen oxides are produced - if you want to use small hydrogen flames industrially precautions are needed. It is very hard to store, needing either extremely high pressure vessels or cryogenics. And current electrolysis to produce hydrogen from electricity is very wasteful of power and would almost certainly be uneconomic compared to nuclear baseload generation.
I know the problems are soluble but the cost of commercialising hydrogen for everyday use would be enormous. Experiments with hydrogen fueled cars are interesting, whether fuel cell or IC, but the cost of adding hydrogen to all those gas stations would be enormous, plus many of them would not be usable due to safety constraints.
And then there is the problem of whether there are sufficient reserves available of all the materials you would need to build such a hydrogen infrastructure - platinum, palladium, and a lot of others. I wrote above that Tesla batteries weren’t a solution; proven lithium reserves are insufficient to make enough.
Aluminium battery technology may eventually get there and aluminium is reasonably abundant. But we are talking a time cycle that we just don’t really have. We would need nuclear and wind on the way, and once built they need to be amortised.
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Then your physics lecturer is not only a bad biologist but a failed physicist. Because T2 applies to closed systems and the Earth is not a closed system; it accepts energy at around 6000K (approx. temperature of sunlight) and rejects it to space at around 300K (average surface temperature), so heat energy is available to provide the chemical and mechanical energy to drive evolution. According to the Carnot equation the energy efficiency available is about 1 - 300/6000 or 95%.
I need to reinforce this. Your physics lecturer was an [expletive deleted] idiot who should have been stood up against a wall and shot for crimes against science.
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Floridians? They’ms apoisoning our water supply and gittin’ int’ our toothpaste!
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And it’s a young word, too. It entered the dictionaries in 2009. Not even a decade after the local Pop Idol spinoff started airing. Coincidence?
Which raises the question, how does one become a science teacher in Northhampton?
I would have made “knowing more about science than I did as an eight-year-old” a requirement.
That is probably enough to pass my “eight-year-old-me” test. What are the requirements for college lectures in America?
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It scares the hell out of me that anyone would have to make such concessions in a college level course. I’d be pissed off hearing this kind of thing at any level of education, but when you can’t even excuse it by pandering to the most backward of taxpayers, I can’t imagine what the reasoning would be.
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Is there a German word for German having a word for everything?
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Yeahhhh . . . but that’s like saying your car and its gas tank comprise a closed system. A full tank of gas won’t last forever, and neither will the sun. Hundreds of millions of years might seem like forever to our short human lives, but forever is (by definition) infinitely longer.
One of the problems with the global warming debate is that hard-headed partisans have turned it into an argument about “whether it’s happening or not”, when the real argument boils down to “fossil fuels will eventually run out, so wouldn’t it be wise to prepare for that now rather than when our backs are against the wall?”
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Have to be a nitpicker here, since “Fremdschämen” is one of my favorite words. I’m not sure if “strangershame” ist such a good translation. It’s more “embarrassment” than “shame” and you’re perfectly able to feel “Fremdschämen” towards someone you’ve known all your life, so “stranger” isn’t quite apt. The most exact translation would be “feeling embarrassed on behalf of someone else”, or maybe the shorter “embarrassment by proxy”. “Fremdschämen” is when someone does or says something so stupid – often unwittingly – that simply imagining yourself in this person’s shoes makes you cringe.
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“Genauigkeit”
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No, they do not
What is so hard to understand about this? The Sun carries out various thermonuclear processes which result in radiation escaping at about 6000K. For the Earth and the Sun to form a closed system we would need a spherical perfect mirror that reflected all impacting particles elastically, just outside the Earth’s orbit! - or for all the radiation emitted by the Earth to go straight back to the Sun.
ALL the radiation from the Sun eventually merges with the cosmic microwave background because the Solar System is completely open. It is not a closed system partially or in any shape or form at all. It’s the precise opposite.
I’ve now got so irate about this complete misunderstanding that I’ve degenerated to using bold. What’s the German compound word for wilful misunderstanding by religious fundamentalists of basic science? Dummheit doesn’t begin to express it. [bangs head against wall].
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North Carolina town rejects solar because it’ll suck up sunlight and kill the plants
Just a reminder…
These people VOTE.
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Have the Manns appeared on Fox News as science experts yet?
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And own fire arms… maybe the one will cancel out the other?
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Maybe it actually helps solar plants?
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Just a conspiracy of cartographers, you mean?
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Plant some vinca, sweet woodruff, or similar under the panels. Problem solved. Good luck getting rid of the stuff.
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We could have a gun show on voting day. Free beer and wings for those who stay from 6am to 10pm.
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…not enough sunshine left over… That’s right up there with Fan Death where if you leave a personal fan on in your bedroom it can not only use up all the oxygen, but even even cause hypothermia - when it’s 28c/~80f out!
Ignorance at this level should be a punishable offense - but it never will be. For as long as we let people get indoctrinated into a cult where they are taught that belief == fact, stupidity is all but guaranteed to be pervasive.
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