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From Making Light: A Japanese company, Genepax, has announced and demonstrated a new fuel cell system that runs on water..
Allow me to be careful for a moment. This is important enough - and I happen to be well-trained enough in the relevant field - to make strong statements about, and I do not want to leave a false impression.
*ahem*
It is impossible to make a fuel cell system that runs on water. Further, it is impossible to devise a process for separating water into hydrogen and oxygen that costs less useful energy than the fuel cell produces by recombining the two. Any person claiming to be capable of doing so is, to borrow a phrase, a lunatic, a liar, or Lord of the Cosmos.
I am not even joking. Of course, in this case, I'm betting it's (a) or (b), for a very simple reason: the machine described in these articles violates conservation of energy. To quote Sean Carroll's Alternative-Science Checklist:
Genepax is pulling a scam, intentionally or not. The only possible way their device could work is by annihilating the entire modern structure of physics and chemistry simultaneously, and destroy them far more thoroughly than general relativity and quantum mechanics destroyed their respective predecessors. Do not even dream of betting against those kind of odds.
One final note, for those who may be curious: it was not any special wisdom of mine that allowed me to come so rapidly to the above conclusion. It was a simple three-step process:
1. Diagram the claimed process - where the fuel comes in, where the energy and known waste comes out. (You have to have waste come out - that's the second law of thermodynamics.)
2. Add up the known outputs and subtract the inputs. (The inputs are always known. They're the things you have to pay for.) Compare to zero.
3. If the answer is greater than zero, it's a scam. Q.E.D.
If any part of the above is unclear, I will gladly explain in the comments. Thank you for your time.
Allow me to be careful for a moment. This is important enough - and I happen to be well-trained enough in the relevant field - to make strong statements about, and I do not want to leave a false impression.
*ahem*
It is impossible to make a fuel cell system that runs on water. Further, it is impossible to devise a process for separating water into hydrogen and oxygen that costs less useful energy than the fuel cell produces by recombining the two. Any person claiming to be capable of doing so is, to borrow a phrase, a lunatic, a liar, or Lord of the Cosmos.
I am not even joking. Of course, in this case, I'm betting it's (a) or (b), for a very simple reason: the machine described in these articles violates conservation of energy. To quote Sean Carroll's Alternative-Science Checklist:
Scientific claims — whether theoretical insights or experimental breakthroughs — don’t exist all by their lonesome. They are situated within a framework of pre-existing knowledge and expectations. If the claim you are making seems manifestly inconsistent with that framework, it’s your job to explain why anyone should nevertheless take you seriously. Whenever someone claims to build a perpetual-motion device, scientist solemnly reiterate that the law of conservation of energy is not to be trifled with lightly. Of course one must admit that it could be wrong — it’s only one law, after all. But when you actually build some machine that purportedly puts out more ergs than it consumes (in perpetuity), it does a lot more than violate the law of conservation of energy. That machine is made of atoms and electromagnetic fields, which obey the laws of atomic physics and Maxwell’s equations. And conservation of energy can be derived from those laws — so you’re violating those as well.
Genepax is pulling a scam, intentionally or not. The only possible way their device could work is by annihilating the entire modern structure of physics and chemistry simultaneously, and destroy them far more thoroughly than general relativity and quantum mechanics destroyed their respective predecessors. Do not even dream of betting against those kind of odds.
One final note, for those who may be curious: it was not any special wisdom of mine that allowed me to come so rapidly to the above conclusion. It was a simple three-step process:
1. Diagram the claimed process - where the fuel comes in, where the energy and known waste comes out. (You have to have waste come out - that's the second law of thermodynamics.)
________________________ _____________
water (fuel) -> | Genepax's MEA system | -> | Fuel Cell | -> water (waste)
------------------------ -------------
L----> energy2. Add up the known outputs and subtract the inputs. (The inputs are always known. They're the things you have to pay for.) Compare to zero.
(energy + water) - water = energy > zero
3. If the answer is greater than zero, it's a scam. Q.E.D.
If any part of the above is unclear, I will gladly explain in the comments. Thank you for your time.
Tags:
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I was trying to explain Dawkins' position to some youtube commenters the other day, and the lack of basic understanding was.. terrifying. There's something very wrong with the world.
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We are rich, rich beyond kings, just knowing the things we know.
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Thanks for the link! My dad was an economist and he went mad, so I'm a bit leery of the field.
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And you're welcome - Ms. McArdle is a pretty good blogger, and doesn't seem overly nutty so far; I'd say she's worth a watch. :)
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I know ever so few adults which are both educated and intelligent, and not many more which are either. (I'm not educated; I may be intelligent, but I'm not sure.)
The problems of education and intelligence aren't intractable. To a certain extent, it's a matter of perception: we are living, for the first time, in an age where it is possible to discuss any subject with an exceptionally large number of people from all over the world. If you happen to be on the right-hand side of the intelligence bell curve, you'll be left with the distinct impression that there are a lot of idiots out there. Whether that's true or not, you would've been far less likely to feel that way just 60 years ago.
Then, there's the state of public education in the United States. The combinations of World Wars I and II, followed by the baby boom, and coupled with an early 1900's illiteracy rate that most people aren't aware of, left public education in a state of emergency. To cope with a shortage of skilled teachers, teaching requirements were relaxed and some standards were lowered, but worst of all, some policies were adopted that turned public school systems into the brain grinders that we have today. Now, a couple of generations later, every teacher in the public school system was raised and educated by the same failed system, and few truly know any better than to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors.
And so on and so forth, blah blah blah. :-P
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Surely the only difference with 60 years ago is that back then you'd have met with a much narrower range of opinions?
I'm English and don't know much about American schools -- the whole system is too alien to get to grips with -- but lots of people seem to share your opinion.
By "brain grinders" do you mean just teaching kids to pass exams, rather than to think? Cos that seems to be a problem everywhere.
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Oh, OK. Since high school education is pretty much a given for most folks at this point, I usually take "educated" to mean someone who's finished at least 2 years of some kind of college. "Intelligent" is pretty subjective, but most folks can hold a coherent conversation on some subject or another; I figure they should have some critical thinking skills too, or the ability to figure things out for themselves.
| Surely the only difference with 60 years ago is that back then you'd have met with a much narrower range of opinions?
That's pretty close to what I was getting at, yeah. Not so much that you'd meet with a narrower range of opinions, but just that it was harder to hear from, say, a hundred average people from around the country (or the world) all at once. Nowadays, you can do that just by visiting Slashdot, Reddit, or Digg, or the like, and usually the experience isn't that inspiring.
| ...but lots of people seem to share your opinion.
Funny thing about that. This conversation prompted me to flip through one of my favorite Really Big Books last night, "Chronicle of the 20th Century". It's an indexed compilation of news articles from 1900 to 1995, ordered chronologically. It's somewhat Amero-centric of course, but it's still a really interesting kind of history book: in a sense, you get to read about history, as told by the people that were actually living it.
Anyway, there's an article in it that goes like this:
"Little dignity and low pay have resulted in too few and poorly trained teachers, falling below the standards of every other civilized country, claimed Joseph H. Defrees, President of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, in a speech to the National Educational Association today. Some 450,000 children have no or, at best, over-crowded classrooms. And of the 600,000 teachers in the country, 100,000 are under 21 years of age, 30,000 have no education beyond eighth grade and 150,000 lack education beyond the third year of high school. This situation must change, Defrees said."
That's dated Jan 16th, 1921.
| By "brain grinders" do you mean just teaching kids to pass exams, rather than to think? Cos that seems to be a problem everywhere.
Yeah. I try not to assume that's a problem everywhere, since I don't know as much about the way everybody else does things. :-)
I think I'm soapboxing a bit here, but the state of education is something that I get excited about pretty easily. I think that I can tie nearly all of the social problems that the U.S. has -- and probably any other country -- to the quality of education provided from kindergarten all the way through college or university.
If people really wanted to improve their society in a lasting way, they'd want to start with the educational system. Unfortunately, 80 years after the Scopes trial, people are still arguing over the teaching of evolution versus creationism. So, I don't think the system can be improved enough from within; I think I'd like to see a whole new, radically different system built from scratch, and offered to anyone who wanted it.
...Oops, there I go again. :-)
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I also know a secondary school Biology teacher and someone who taught English in Japan for a year, which is where I get the idea that training for exams is widespread. Then there's grade inflation -- I've seen an Ordinary Level Maths paper from 1980 (intended for 16 year-olds) which had some tougher questions than the Advanced Level Further Maths exam from 2001 (for 18 year-olds).
So! If you were tsar of education, what would you do? Privatization is a common sci-fi solution: have schools be corporations that receive a portion of the students' lifetime earnings. Of course the simplest plan (given that this seems to be a problem you can solve by throwing teachers at it) would be to raise taxes and hire more teachers, but social spending doesn't seem popular in America unless it will bring rapid results.
The Nordic countries seem to have the right idea: continuous assessment, early specialization (age 15 or so), and unstructured primary education with a high teacher/student ratio.
--
I think most comments on the internet are rubbish more because of Eternal September (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_september) than rampant idiocy. The anonymity doesn't help either.
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My dad's father often complained about the side effects of grade inflation. He'd learned how to do some pretty extreme maths on a slide rule, and the rest of it in his head, and so he really despised the helpless "calculator generation". I've also seen some of those old subject textbooks, and the difference with the crap taught today.
As to the new system: that's a tough question to answer. It's one thing to pinpoint schooling as the root of so many problems, and another thing altogether to come up with the ideal replacement, especially since there really isn't a broad spectrum of historical models to work off of.
The one advantage in coming up with some new system is that I don't see it as a complete, instantaneous replacement for public schooling. I'd like to see something established in a handful of communities, on a community-to-community basis, alongside the usual public schooling system. I'm not a big fan of privatization in this case.
I can think of three essential problems to be solved: funding; quality of teachers; and the basic structure and standards for the education.
Years ago, I worked for one of the best-funded school districts in California. The amount of waste -- and in some cases misappropriation -- of funds that I saw was staggering. The moneys spent on administrative overhead alone rivaled all of the teachers' salaries combined.
So, throw out the notion of the school "district" altogether. It's too easy to hide bad funding decisions in the budgets for a dozen schools. Set up each individual school with the entire range of student ages, instead of segregating them (I'll come back to this point).
Each school must make its complete quarterly financials publically available. Hold the schools directly accountable for the way they spend their money, and ensure that there isn't ever such a thing as a superintendent making a 6-figure salary. A little bit extra cash could be picked up from parents enrolling their kids in this system, with allowances for low-income families. Again, public schooling as it is now would still be available for anyone that wanted it -- this other system is supposed to be self-selecting for those people that actually want a better education.
Also, the usual notion of small classroom size is one way of solving some problems in education -- but it's not the only one. I was fortunate enough to be a part of an experimental classroom setup during my 3rd through 5th grades, in which there was a fairly large classroom -- 60 to 70 kids as I recall -- of grades 1 through 5, all mixed together, taught by two regular teachers and a handful of volunteers. It was amazing! It was ten times better than the usual way. Here we had this huge classroom size, but it worked great because it was very unstructured, and the use of volunteers helped to take care of a few of the problem kids. With a gentle hand from the teachers, the students did a fantastic job of policing themselves. The younger students would try their hardest to be all-grown-up like the older students, and the older students would act as mentors towards the younger ones.
(Cont'd in a second comment, 'cause LJ thinks I'm long-winded.)
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Y'know, there's a funny thing about the current system in the U.S.: there are all these people that really do care about education, and are themselves educated (or at least passionate enough about education to make up for it), and they'd be happy to spend some of their time working as a teacher. Ironically, the teaching requirements are set up here so that those are exactly the sorts of people that aren't allowed to do any teaching. Instead, prospective public school teachers are driven through this horrible, lengthy, expensive training, most of which enforces some of the latest nonsense in educational theory.
Throw all that out. It's idiotic. It's even worse because teachers don't train for specific subjects; instead, you simply train to be "a teacher", and then you get hired to teach history when you really ought to be teaching math.
I think there are just two things you must know in order to be a teacher: the subject material, and how to handle a room full of kids. Let prospective teachers choose which of the basic subjects they'd like to teach -- history, science, math, literature, "physical ed" -- and then test them on it. The testing process itself can be rigorous without becoming terribly expensive. Then, have them spend a short amount of time -- evening classes would be fine! -- getting some tips on handling a large number of students, and then get out of their way! Throw 'em in a classroom as an aide to a more experienced teacher at first.
The thing that makes this work is that any interested parent is allowed -- and encouraged! -- to volunteer in the classrooms as often as they want, and so they get to provide direct oversight on the teachers.
Finally, you have to come up with some standards for what the kids should actually learn in various subjects. School boards do this currently in the U.S., and you need not be in the slightest educated in any of the subjects that you're deciding course material on. Teachers hate that! Throw it out.
Instead, let the teachers themselves work out the course materials. Make it work by having the teachers for one particular grade level meet with the teachers for the two next higher grade levels, and let them work it out. This way, the higher grade teachers can say, "by the time they get to us, the kids should know this, this, and this".
There are a ton of other details that would have to get filled in to make the complete system work. There'd have to be incentives for those that are professionals or retired in various fields to spend some of their time teaching; there'd have to be some standards for evaluation and critique, not just of the students but of the teachers; precise classroom structure; and so on, but I think this basic form could work.
I would certainly pour several years of my own life into making sure it did. :-)
OK you really need to get a Philosophy of Education qualification ASAP, this stuff is excellent
Using social pressure to get the younger kids to want to learn is another stroke of genius. What were the results of the test program you were in? Why wasn't it widely adopted?
And I'm all for transparent accounting: Hackney borough (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Borough_of_Hackney) (where I am) is one of the most notoriously corrupt councils in the country.
| ...history, science, math, literature, "physical ed"...
Does the U.S. system have equivalents to PSE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_and_Social_Education) (aka Politics, Sex and Everything else) and RE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_Education) (religious education)? For the longest time I didn't understand the point of the Creationism-in-schools debate because I didn't realise that it was about wanting to teach that stuff as part of Science classes, instead of the humanities where I assumed it belonged.