In a similar vein, and perhaps even more useful, here is a collection of probably 100+ useful concepts and thinking tools (make sure to read all comments and also the comments in the linked article at the top):
So wind and solar are currently the cheapest, but you can only get to about 50% penetration with those without storage[2]. The rest has to be "dispatchable".
Exactly. If subsidies are removed from the equation, solar in particular is quite a bit more expensive. Wind and solar also lack the 24/7 reliability of nuclear.
No, solar is about 100€/MWh without subsidies. Indeed, the one big problem remaining with wind and solar is constant supply over the day. But the larger the connected grids are, the better this balances out. While a nuclear power plant delivers a constant output 24/7 (this is also not ideal as we are lacking consumption in the late evening and night, thats why Belgium put lights onto their highways), nuclear power plants regularly get pulled of the grid entirely, if there is a technical problem. A new one should of course have less downtimes than an older one, but one needs to plan in a certain amount of replacement capacity.
The wikipedia article about Hinkley talks about the costs and guaranteed prices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
I am pretty sure, that does not even include the long term cost for the nuclear waste. The roughly 100€/MWh brings it into line with offshore wind, which is about twice as expensive as onshore wind, but more steady and reliable. Solar is roughly in the same ballpark too in middle Europe, in Dubai a new solar plant is being built which promises to be less than $30/MWh.
Hinkley point is an aberration. its doesn't make any buisness or strategic sense for the UK.
Its double the cost of grid power, in perpetuity, in exchange for some vague handwaving that the Chinese might try out some of their experimental reactors on british soil. Or perhaps a "free trade deal" which is equally moronic for UK manufacturing.
Is there any good cost estimate, what the final electricity price produced by the Olkiluoto reactor is going to be, with its construction cost ballooning from 3 to 8 billion pounds?
For example: most grids in the western world rely on constant/predictable supplies of power.
Nuclear/coal/gas/hydro provide a constant level of electricity with a clear spinup/spindown time.
That being said, in hot countries solar is a good option, as when its hot, its generally sunny which means the aircon demand can be serviced well.
But, thats assuming that the sun and the wind are constant.
They are not, so you have to store that energy somehow. Grid scale batteries are just not really feasible yet, unless you happen to live in wales[1] or scotland[2].
However they now are only really there to overcome British tea breaks(thats a bit unfair). But they are the product of a nationalised energy infrastructure that thought about doing things properly. (now its just be massive diesel gennies to deal with the comedically narrow line between blackout and working grid)
So actually the problem of generating electricity from natural sources is pretty much solved (barring costs) The biggest barrier is storing electricty for a stable grid.
There are likely multiple evolutionary factors behind the tendency to create mischief.
Several concepts are interconnected with the idea of mischief:
- Playing fair vs. ignoring the rules (following/breaking social norms)
- Playing for fun vs. purposeful goal directed activity
- Pleasure derived from antisocial behaviors
- Pleasure derived from eliciting reactions in others
- Strategic reasons to create disruption
- The role of anonymity
Most of these have been studied separately, and not all of them may be required for an activity to be considered "mischief." Each one has its own set of evolutionary stories.
Breaking the rules: There are evolutionary advantages to the species as a whole (e.g. stable organized societies) for having everyone predisposed to following the social norms. Similarly, there are advantages to breaking the social norms: personal advantage in a world where others are unwilling to cheat, collective advantage to having a society that isn't 100% conformist (if the norms are bad, that will only be discovered if some people start breaking them and succeed).
Playing for fun (not goal-directed): Studies on play behavior in animals suggest that play during development serves several functions. It develops practice with give-and-take social interaction for more harmonious social order later, and physical play develops coordination that can help in adult behavior later (puppies playing and becoming better at fighting as dogs).
Pleasure derived from antisocial behaviors: This may fall a little bit outside of mischief, however the desire for revenge has been studied, as has duper's delight (pleasure from fooling others), or pleasure from cheating. In general, any behavior that could have an evolutionary advantage for some individuals is likely to have pleasure associated with it somehow, since that ensures that the behavior will be expressed. In any competition, using a strategy that would not occur to the opponent is to the individual's advantage because the opponent won't be planning to counter it. So whatever rules the opponent assumes you are playing by represent opportunities for advantage by ignoring them. There is the risk of winning the battle but losing the war (getting caught and punished), however this is a risk/reward trade-off.
Pleasure derived from eliciting reactions in others: There are rewards on multiple levels (neurological, social, existential) from getting others to respond:
- Neurological: Experiencing perceptual feedback to an action is inherently rewarding, which may relate to why kids enjoy hitting things and knocking things over. It is part of experimenting with and discovering the causal mechanisms of the environment.
- Social: A displaced or repurposed desire for social interaction, for example when preteens chase and hit girls or boys they are attracted to, or when adults "play the victim" to elicit sympathy.
- Existential: Feeling that one has an impact on the world, that one exists, that one matters. This might relate to enhancing the feeling of personal agency: the sense of power and causal control over the environment.
- Curiosity and personal amusement: Finding out what will happen, and watching the predictable reactions of others play out can be amusing (credit Naman Kumar).
There are also strategic reasons to create disruption in the specific social setting of a dialog (e.g. "trolling"):
- The disrupter wins social points for being dominant, tougher, funnier, and less naive than other participants.
- The bad boy (or b* girl) is admired by peers for being immune to the judgments and approval of others. From an evolutionary perspective, being revered by peers makes one attractive to potential mates in a social species (credit Ernie Bornheimer).
- Humor can be a way of moving the discussion away from an uncomfortable topic (credit Marcus Geduld).
- Sarcasm, ridicule, and shaming can be a strategy for shifting the power in a dialog, silencing opposing viewpoints, and changing the official view in the disruptor's favor (as with political debates).
Lastly, there is also the role of anonymity in mischief. Acting anonymously can be a way of playing out a fantasy without consequences to one's reputation in society. It certainly resolves one of the inner conflicts to antisocial behavior, the risk to one's reputation, by eliminating that risk altogether. Anonymity also facilitates pleasure derived from superiority, power, or knowledge. If you know something that no one else knows -- who is behind the mischief -- then you may be getting pleasure from what would normally be a positive evolutionary behavior: acquiring more knowledge than the next person, understanding causal mechanisms in the world, accumulating power.
Research on the neural basis of breaking the rules:
Moll J, et al (2005) The neural basis of moral cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
Spitzer M et al (2007). The Neural Signature of Social Norm Compliance. Neuron.
Sanfey AG et al (2003). The Neural Basis of Economic Decision-Making in the Ultimatum Game. Science.
de Quervain DJF et al (2004). The Neural Basis of Altruistic Punishment. Science.
I think this is basically the major and effective meme/emotion that Trump plays into: Nostalgia. Thiel also voiced concerns about the state of the infrastructure at a GOP Convention. Nostalgia is a strong emotion and it is often based on false memories or weak comparisons. Sure, large parts of our infrastructure are worse than they were 50 years ago, but on the other hand we had very different problems back then. We used to consume goods that turned out to be toxic. Today almost everyone has access to extremely fast transportation via air travel. Almost everyone has access to the world's knowledge at any time. Medicine has improved a lot. "Make it great again" is the central lie and people are dumb enough not to question it and to believe his financial independence would make him a superior leader, when in fact he only displays characteristics that are opposed to the ones we should expect from a good leader, for example decency and intelligence.
> Famously, the only reason he went to seek fortune in the Silicon Valley was because he was denied a highly prestigious clerk position for a Supreme Court justice.
> It seems to me that Thiel originally wished to become a politician, and only stopped pursuing that path to seek his fortune in the Silicon Valley when he hit his first setback when applying to clerk for the Supreme Court.
I doubt it. Thiel's personality - in all his public appearances - has been hyper-rational, not exactly the sort who would hold onto a childhood dream for 20 years. And he's talked about how falling off that track was the best thing that ever happened to him - so much so that he now wants to help other talented college kids fall off the established track.
Also, he's not U.S. born, which disqualifies him from being president anyway. He could potentially seek some other office...but I really doubt that he would want any position that makes him just like 99 other or 434 other people.
But MCTS works in AlphaGo because the 'world' can be fully represented by a tiny state vector which fits a billion times into primary memory these days. The real difficultly of real world problems is the ill-defined, mutable, high-dimensional and partially observable state space.
Remember that arXiv is just pre-print and the last page if not the entire paper is probably nothing more than a lame/distasteful joke. Remember that any nutbag who knows a little English and LaTeX can publish on arXiv. It will likely not make it into a journal.
Seeing "LaTeX" (lay-tech) and "arXiv" together in your sentence made me finally realize that arXiv is pronounced "archive". I've been reading it as "arx-iv" for years.
Knuth, in his book, memorably decreed a pronunciation (and case mixing in the written form) for TeX, with a hard /ch/ at the end (literally, "your monitor should become slightly moist"), backed by a clever and erudite rationale involving the etymology of words like technique.
Leslie Lamport, in his book on LaTeX, decreed a case mixing, but (as you say) ok'd any reasonable pronunciation.
It is not entirely a free-for all (as in, anyone can submit papers), there is an endorsement system [1]. Of course, it's only networking and who-knows-who - but there is controversy, as in established contributors think that the endorsement system is too high a barrier.
Tom Scott
https://m.youtube.com/user/enyay
standupmaths
https://m.youtube.com/user/standupmaths
Cody's Lab
https://m.youtube.com/user/theCodyReeder
Matthias Wandel
https://m.youtube.com/user/Matthiaswandel
Primitive Technology
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA
Applied Science
https://m.youtube.com/user/bkraz333