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 <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
Sent: Tuesday, April 6, 2021 2:16 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]>
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 <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Date: 4/6/21 00:33 (GMT+01:00)
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
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 <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> On 
Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 2:29 PM
To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
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 <[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]> On 
Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 12:31 PM
To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
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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