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There is no need to physically attach solar panels to your car’s roof to determine if it will charge your car.  Of course it will while it’s in the sun.  Let’s do some math:

If:

The area of this Tesla’s roof is 2 square meters (being generous),

The efficiency of the panels is 25%,

The capacity factor of solar (depending on your location) is 20%,

The sun’s irradiance is 1000 watts per square meter,

The Tesla’s battery capacity is 100 KWhrs,

And we neglect the increased weight and drag of the array,

We’re talking about 100 hours, more than 4 days.

Doesn’t sound like a bargain, especially considering that if you overbuild the solar array on your roof and charge your car in your garage, you’ve achieved the same goal at far less expense and inconvenience.

Solar PV on a Car’s Roof

Renewable Energy

Are Our Brains “Wired” Differently?

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At left is something that theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said shortly before he was executed by the Third Reich for his protest against the fascist regime.

Most of us have had the thought he expressed here. We may be talking with an old friend who went to a prestigious college and showed when we were young considerable intelligence, who now, when it comes to world politics is now limited to the talking points of Newsmax and Fox News.

How did this happen?

Nobody knows, but, over the last couple of decades, this subject has caught the attention of neuroscientists who believe that liberals’ and conservatives’ brains are internally connected differently from each other.

As an example, tests show that the brain activity of self-identified liberals and conservatives are vastly different when experimental subjects are shown photographs of potentially threatening animals, like spiders and snakes.  Those who think of themselves as conservatives have brain activity that show fear and hatred, while self-described liberals’ brains suggest that they perceive such animals as simply members of the planet on which we live.

Maybe no one is to blame; perhaps we just live in different worlds of consciousness.

Those hankering for a great read on this subject, albeit fiction, should check out Ian McEwan’s masterpiece “Saturday.”

Are Our Brains “Wired” Differently?

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Renewable Energy

Science Is Not a Set of Facts; It’s a Process of Learning More About Our Universe

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At left is an interesting thought exercise.  Here’s everything I can think of, and it’s not much.  When I was in elementary school in the early 1960s, it was believed that:

The main types of rocks: sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous, had been in place and remained the same since the formation of the earth.  Now we have the “rock cycle,” where rock compounds are known to be continually changing form over very long periods of geologic time.

Every atom in our bodies and elsewhere on our planet is the result of the explosion of stars somewhere in the universe.  As Neil DeGrasse Tyson puts it, “You are in the universe, and the universe is in you.”

Science Is Not a Set of Facts; It’s a Process of Learning More About Our Universe

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Renewable Energy

Alberta Isn’t Going Anywhere

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The support for Alberta’s seceding from Canada is about 5%, according to a physician I know up there.

I know it’s hard to believe, but Fox News is a thoroughly dishonest organization.

Alberta Isn’t Going Anywhere

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