Maybe should've added "don't use conditioner" to that step about washing. That shit will actually trap radioactive particles.

That's the point, I guess. You know what to look for in a good boot (although, having to wear it for a year is sort of...hard to pull off in a shop)...But, perhaps, most people don't.

And more amusingly; maybe there ISN'T much difference in most things between the "cheap" and the "expensive" when so much marketing is involved.

I remember watching a woman who was chemical engineer explain to another woman that P&G, where she worked, basically had the same chemical base stock for all its shampoos and conditioners and then differentiated them with coloring and scent to charge 2X, 3X, and 5X for the same thing lol

I'm sure I've fallen for the same thing in my world before. I mean, sometimes it fails; for some reason, I'm thinking of when GM re-labeled its benighted "J" class cars as compacts and was surprised they didn't sell. Not to pick on GM...

love shower vids. Wonder what conditioner and shampoo was being used.

Few points...

We have no options for serious load shifting to utilise all that solar power in the evenings when it would make a difference. And power companies refuse to trust it for baseload power, so they still generate what they estimate they need for base load,and pay for rapid generation to handle spikes. Most electricity generated from home solar in Aus is wasted.

Without battery backups, the best production of the day goes to the energy company for 8 cents, and we buy back power from them (generated by coal of course) at night for 36 cents. Our energy companies aren't going to pay a premium for power they really don't give a crap about.

Most panels in Aus face north/east, to generate the largest amount of energy. When most people aren't home to use it. Instead, panels should face north/west to generate the most power in the afternoon when we come home from work/fire up air conditioners/start cooking etc. And even then, the power than is generated is but a fraction of what is consumed during peak periods due to the setting sun.

Annnnd most people in Australia do not even check their systems to see if they're still doing anything... It's estimated 14% of all home solar systems are currently non-functional due to faulty panels, inverter or both.

Until the point in time comes when energy companies can create a way to load shift solar production to ensure continuity of power, or household power storage units pricing comes down enough to be viable, non industrial solar in Australia is mostly feel good propaganda.

And while a number of coal plants have closed recently, it's not due to lack of demand as solar take up reduces requirement for coal fired power... It's because the plants are not viable any more to run and owners do not want to run at a loss. Each one that closes represents a significant portion of our overall generation being lost, with no core plan for continuity (wind and solar are not being considered as a core strategy currently).

I'm all for saving the planet, but the science/facts on solar outweigh the feel goods. Perhaps instead of patting ourselves on the back, we should be thinking about a better plan.

You can hear him say he won't swim in it with all that "smoke," but he'll build a dry ice air conditioner and run it in a closed house?

And your first paragraph pretty much spells out why solar PV is a dud investment for small plant/home plant if it were completely unsupported by a plethora of mechanisms designed to make it viable financially (and that's before even considering whether the energy cost is significantly offset by the energy produced), not to mention trying to make time to do things when your PV production is high so that you're not wasting it.

I try to load shift as much as possible, even went so far as to have most of the array facing the west where we'll scrape out some extra power when we're actually going to use it (eg. in the afternoon, particularly for running air conditioners in summer), but without feed in tariffs that are 1:1 with energy purchase prices and government subsidies on the installation of the system, the sums (at least in Australia) just do not ever come close to making sense.

But as I said in the first paragraph, that is all financial dickering, it has nothing to do with actual energy used vs energy generated. There is no free energy, you have to spend energy to make energy. You have to buil a PV array, pay for the wages of the people who install it, transport costs etc etc. They all drain energy out of the system. And most people in places where feed in tariffs are either on parity with the cost of purchasing energy when your PV isn't producing align their solar arrays with the ideal direction for greatest generation of energy that they can get the best profit for, not for generation of energy when energy demands spike.

The consequences of this are that at midday, energy is coursing in to the grid and unless your electricity provider has some capacity for extended storage and load shifting (eg. pumped hydro, large scale battery arrays), it's underutilised. Come peak time in the afternoon when people get home, switch on cooling/heating, start cooking etc when PV's production is very low, the electricity company still has to cycle up gas turbines to provide the extra power to get over that peak demand, and solar does little to offset that.

So carbon still get's pissed away every day, but as long as PV owners get a cheaper bill, it's all seen to be working like a charm... ; )

The energy current efficiency panels return is only on an order of 2-3x the energy input, which is barely enough energy returned to support a subsistence agrarian lifestyle (forget education, art, industrialisation). There's a reason that far better utilisation of coal and oil via steam heralded the massive breakthrough of industrialisation, it's because coal has close to a 30 to 1 return on energy invested. Same with petrochemicals, incredibly high return on energy.

The biggest advances in human civilisation came with the ability to harness energy more effectively, or finding new energy sources which gave high amounts of energy in return for the effort of obtaining them and utilising them. Fire, water (eg. mills etc), carbon sources, nuclear and so on. Even if you manage to get 95% efficiency on the panels for 100% of their lifetime (currently incredibly unlikely), you're only turning that number in to 8-12x the energy invested compared to 25-30x for coal/petro, 50x+ for hydro and 75-100+x for gen IV nuke reactors.

Conditioner is better. It leaves the hair silky and smooth.

So we agree that the "valid reasons" for gendered marketing are to sell more things?

I think it's hypocrisy to balk at the idea of fem-pens but not his and hers conditioner. I think it's almost all exclusionist - that's how it works, no? Don't buy them pens girlie, buy these instead!

Modern inverter air conditioners can modulate the out going air temperature (they vary the compressor speed). Natural gas home heaters can also vary the out going air temperature (they burn more or less gas as needed).

So it depends on what sort of heater/cooler you are using.

Apparently adding a 1-ton 400 Megawatt air conditioner to a rocket engine improves efficiency. Who knew?

But it's just under 60% as efficient as a Boeing 747-400, so I hope this never happens.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABRE_(rocket_engine)#Performance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse#Energy_efficiency

@spoco2

Right, because no one ever uses the phrase "Thank God" just to express relief and gratitude without meaning it literally and subscribing to exactly the ethos/worldview you just described. Oh, by the way she did indeed thank the guy who saved her girl. So much for your theory.

You did get the "it's difficult to look after an autistic child" thing right. According to both the NY Post article and the one I linked to above, the mom took the girl's brother to the bathroom and during that time the girl managed peel off the partition that covered the narrow gap between the air conditioner and the window frame and squeeze herself through.

Commence tha jigglin', y'all!

(Was anyone else reminded of the air conditioner from Brave Little Toaster?)

Shampoo & conditioner in the one bottle "you can't explain that".

1) somewhere exists a group of scientists who know the precise temperature the earth is supposed to be.


Well, no. Precision isn't the issue, accuracy is. When building a climate model we don't need a precise answer for temperature at a location, we need accurate (though perhaps fairly imprecise) temperatures for many locations over time. This may seem pedantic, but you've wandered into discussing science so you might as well learn the terms.

Do you really think there would ever come a day when the alarmists concede they were wrong, especially after establishing a world climatocracy of near-absolute power?


Sorry, you're talking about some dystopian future ruled by environmentalists? Are you worried about this coming to be? Do you look around at the world and shudder at the enormous power environmentalists are getting? I mean, for whatever you think of climate change theory, surely you have to agree that the climate change movement has been pretty much completely ineffectual at getting anything significant changed or regulated. Near-absolute power, even imagining the passing of quite a bit of time and the world getting disastrously more environmentally conscious, is a bit of a stretch.

Look, I disagree with the "stereotypical environmentalist" on a lot of things - and I think many environmental programs and restrictions and whatever are pointless (recycling, random painful acts of conservation, etc..). But whether or not you like environmentalists or think they'd do a good job running things doesn't effect whether the proposition in question is true.

Me? I think the balance of evidence is currently on the side of global warming becoming a problem in the next 100 years. I think the evidence is strong enough to prompt further research and certain kinds of actions. And I don't mean cutting automotive emissions by 20%. That is really pointless. Cars burning gas is a turd that we need to flush completely and soon (burning oil at the current rate has enough problems, global warming or not) - not slowly polish.

In general, I think that good approaches to fighting global warming (mostly new energy sources) are net wins whether or not they're related to global warming. Nobody is going to regret stimulating the economy by spending on research, technology development, and manufacturing. And if it turns out global warming was happening for some other reason (or not happening at all) we'll be happy to have our Mr. Fusion powered air conditioners and holodecks.

I love how the human built UFO has a window-box air conditioner.