By: Ireland (boh.delete@this.outlook.ie), January 28, 2017 12:13 pm
Room: Moderated Discussions
anon (anon.delete@this.anon.com) on January 27, 2017 3:09 pm wrote:
> Michael S (already5chosen.delete@this.yahoo.com) on January 27, 2017 7:22 am wrote:
> > Coal furnaces are not used in mass steel production for 150+ years.
>
> I guess I can't complain about pedantry because I nitpicked this unimportant in the first place!
>
> Coal is used "in" steel production of course. Input to most iron->steel conversion is liquid iron
> that was heated in a coal blast furnace. Iron ore -> steel production is an integrated line.
>
> > When they were used long time ago, they were not operated continuously.
> >
> > May be, you mean pig iron production?
> > Here, indeed, coal (coke, in fact) furnaces are operated continuously for very long periods - like
> > many months. Still, it's much shorter than lifetime, which tends to be several tens of years.
> >
>
> Not because they run out of coal, of course.
>
Whenever I see something like a 'super computer' appear in the midst of an organizational work process nowadays, I also imagine something the same equivalent as a 'super material', which that organization or process, needs to work with in order to do something. If one goes back to the dawn of computing, many of the engineers who were around back then, and had to 'invent' the first computers - would still have been living in a time - where they would have been familiar with the older, heavy-industry, 19th century type of industry. It was no surprise therefore, that the first computers built were things like furnaces or kilns, and were conceived in those terms - they were machines basically that were used to bake the equivalent of the super-materials of those times - or the electronic, information equivalent of a 'super material'.
As time went on however, we learned to do a lot more, using a lot less energy. To the point now, where we are doing computational benchmarking on things like phones. However, in some parts of science and/or media, there is still that need to create the computing equivalent of the super-material. The problem with all of these materials that are very modern and very sophisticated - the sorts of heavy duty, high performance materials that '3M' company and such, design - is they all have high embodied energies. Steel, back in the day, when it was first conceived as a material to create bridges that would allow north America to expand westward and across the boundary of the Mississippi river, was literally a super material. Back in those days, it was not uncommon for bridges to simply wash away in the floods, and need to get re-built again.
Some contributors here, have questioned the whole idea of a government funded research project, in order to put 'phone' microprocessors into a super computer system. However, one must ask the question, what kind of material is this array of super-computing designed to make? What kind of information, would need to be processed in such a way, as it would require a flock of phone micro-processors to work on it? I'm not one hundred percent sure - but maybe it's the equivalent of an electronic 'super material' that isn't like that which - one would use a fleet of Xeon processors to produce. But maybe something that needs to be heated much more slowly, over a much longer time. I'm thinking something more like 'diamond' or crystal, instead of steel or iron. Over and out.
> Michael S (already5chosen.delete@this.yahoo.com) on January 27, 2017 7:22 am wrote:
> > Coal furnaces are not used in mass steel production for 150+ years.
>
> I guess I can't complain about pedantry because I nitpicked this unimportant in the first place!
>
> Coal is used "in" steel production of course. Input to most iron->steel conversion is liquid iron
> that was heated in a coal blast furnace. Iron ore -> steel production is an integrated line.
>
> > When they were used long time ago, they were not operated continuously.
> >
> > May be, you mean pig iron production?
> > Here, indeed, coal (coke, in fact) furnaces are operated continuously for very long periods - like
> > many months. Still, it's much shorter than lifetime, which tends to be several tens of years.
> >
>
> Not because they run out of coal, of course.
>
Whenever I see something like a 'super computer' appear in the midst of an organizational work process nowadays, I also imagine something the same equivalent as a 'super material', which that organization or process, needs to work with in order to do something. If one goes back to the dawn of computing, many of the engineers who were around back then, and had to 'invent' the first computers - would still have been living in a time - where they would have been familiar with the older, heavy-industry, 19th century type of industry. It was no surprise therefore, that the first computers built were things like furnaces or kilns, and were conceived in those terms - they were machines basically that were used to bake the equivalent of the super-materials of those times - or the electronic, information equivalent of a 'super material'.
As time went on however, we learned to do a lot more, using a lot less energy. To the point now, where we are doing computational benchmarking on things like phones. However, in some parts of science and/or media, there is still that need to create the computing equivalent of the super-material. The problem with all of these materials that are very modern and very sophisticated - the sorts of heavy duty, high performance materials that '3M' company and such, design - is they all have high embodied energies. Steel, back in the day, when it was first conceived as a material to create bridges that would allow north America to expand westward and across the boundary of the Mississippi river, was literally a super material. Back in those days, it was not uncommon for bridges to simply wash away in the floods, and need to get re-built again.
Some contributors here, have questioned the whole idea of a government funded research project, in order to put 'phone' microprocessors into a super computer system. However, one must ask the question, what kind of material is this array of super-computing designed to make? What kind of information, would need to be processed in such a way, as it would require a flock of phone micro-processors to work on it? I'm not one hundred percent sure - but maybe it's the equivalent of an electronic 'super material' that isn't like that which - one would use a fleet of Xeon processors to produce. But maybe something that needs to be heated much more slowly, over a much longer time. I'm thinking something more like 'diamond' or crystal, instead of steel or iron. Over and out.