Interesting Links for 24-06-2015

[andrewducker]

• Listening to extreme music makes you calmer, not angrier
  • (tags: music emotion )
• Some perfectly healthy people can't remember their own lives
  • (tags: memory )
• Parkinson's disease begins in the gastrointestinal tract
  • (tags: health disease brains )
• FactCheck: the truth about welfare cuts
  • (tags: welfare uk )
• Taylor Swift betrayed to Roman authorities by

Comments

Dinosaurs

[woodpijn]

I saw a different article on that dinosaur book, and it included some of the text, which was much funnier. The images aren't nearly so entertaining without it. It talked about how the hippopotamus was an apex predator that crushed cars in its teeth, and it made cows out to be very scary too.

Re: Dinosaurs

[resonant]

I read that as "drawn BY dinosaurs" at first.

[nojay]

That word "giant", (in the Japanese battery story) I do not think it means what you think it means.

Presuming the power storage quoted (in watts, not watt-hrs or even joules) is a 1-hr rating then the 250 million dollars US pricetag is paying for a total battery capacity of 90 MWhr, enough power to run a single shinkansen train for less than four hours. That's as much electricity as a single modern nuclear reactor (which operates 24/7 between outages) produces in about five minutes.

The Dinorwig pumped-storage station in south Wales has a capacity of 8GWh or ninety times that of these experimental batteries and it cost less than six times as much to build even with a lot of expensive protection of the environment by building most of the station underground.

The fact NGK is involved in this project makes me suspect what they are offering is their sodium-sulphur static battery design, assuming they have fixed the "bursts into flames, takes weeks to put out the fire" problem they experienced with their first-generation Na-S batteries.

[danieldwilliam]

I wonder if most of the money is going on R&D for low Technology Readiness Level stuff and the building of a 1st of N system.

I understand that battery storage is commercially deployed in California (which, if true, says a lot about how badly their Grid and energy markets are working).

SSE tried a pilot of a 1MWhe battery in Shetland (similar to Japan's island and islanded grid?) and decided that it worked okay but wasn't economic.

[nojay]

The Shetland battery was an NGK sodium-sulphur battery similar to the type that have caught fire in other installations. Molten sodium and sulphur at 300 deg C (the working conditions for a Na-S battery) does rather push the limits in terms of materials, containment etc. Positioning the Shetland battery within a couple of metres of a tank holding several hundred tonnes of fuel oil at the airport was really chancing their luck

[danieldwilliam]

Thanks, that's very interesting

US Civil War

[danieldwilliam]

Yeah, my conclusion about the causes of the US Civil War was that the South started it in order to protect slavery after working out that the North had worked out that you couldn't run a slave economy and free labour economy in the same political, economic and currency union and that had they not had to fight the North to keep slavery they'd have fought Spain and fomer Spanish colonies in Latin America to expand US slavery to other parts of the Americas

[kalimac]

At one point Miriam Margoyles cites Eric Idle as one of the worst offenders and then later she names him as an exception. Maybe he changed, even in those early days: in 1965, he was the president of the Cambridge Footlights who changed the rules to allow women to join. If I ever interviewed him, I'd ask about that.

Defenders of the Confederacy usually say that it wasn't about slavery, it was about states' rights. That's a nullity of a response. States' rights to do what? They didn't secede to be allowed to set their own speed limits or school-leaving ages.

(Also, the South didn't really believe in states' rights. When the topic was the Fugitive Slave Act, the South was all about the stringent enforcement of federal power against recalcitrant northern states, including impressing private citizens into posses to catch blacks accused but not proven to be escaped slaves.)

I'd find the article on Metal Deaths in Middle-earth funnier if I had any idea what "metal" (adj.) means. It seems to be roughly a synonym for "badass".

[andrewducker]

"Metal" in this case means "Heavy Metal", and refers to things being EPIC, with a capital EPIC, and thus like the events depicted in Epic Heavy Metal songs.

[kalimac]

I have even less of an idea of what is depicted in Epic Heavy Metal songs. I am just noting this, as I have insufficient interest to google lyrics sites to read up on it.

Some examples !

[davidcook]

Rhapsody - Unholy Warcry

Rhapsody of Fire - Holy Thunderforce

[alextfish]

Interesting post from the Economist about Ben Carson, the Republican presidential nomination candidate who's a black brain surgeon, and how the Republican party will pay attention to black Republicans telling them about racism when they won't listen to black Democrats.

[andrewducker]

Thank you, that was fascinating.

And it's good to hear that there are some voices that are being listened to inside the Republican party.