News on China's scientific and technological development.
- Thread starter Quickie
- Start date
broadsword
Brigadier
Vacuum is still too technically challenging as discussed here. I think it will remain on the back burner even if China got the maglev right and mature until there is a breakthrough in manufacturing and materials for the tunnel.
broadsword
Brigadier
The Conversion Efficiency of Sputtered CdTe Thin Film Solar Cells Reach 14.4%
2014-06-16
2014-06-16
Sankowski only talks about the financial side of the matter, very intelligently. But the Chinese leaders will have asked about the scientific and engineering side too. And they will have understood the answers as many of them are scientists and engineers. They will also be aware of the difficulty of storing electrical energy.
AssassinsMace
Lieutenant General
Innovation is also relative to cultural aspects. What makes one's life easier doesn't necessarily make it easier for someone else. A lot of people point to the big internet companies as at the forefront of innovation. All they're doing is exploiting new technologies to make life easier. They didn't invent the new technologies themselves. They using it to make an idea work.
I talked about this in the movie thread where Hollywood is in a dilemma over China. Chinese movies cost a fraction to make compared to their Hollywood counterparts and can make just as much money. Why is Hollywood so upset that they don't get more access to China? It's not about what's fair because Chinese movies don't get a chance at the American box office. China's movie industry is at its infancy. Hollywood wants access now because they want to dominate and instilled Hollywood tastes onto the Chinese audience. You already see other countries upset that Hollywood has dominated in their countries over domestic movies. Why don't American audiences watch more foreign language movies? The number one reason is it's in a foreign language. The original French movie La Femme Nikita was a great action movie. Why didn't it do well at the US box office for a great action movie? Because it was foreign and in a foreign language. They're not going to make a big deal about a foreigner doing something good when they had nothing to do with it. What's "innovative" is pretty much in the same way.
My bet is China will have a lot of great innovations to come... for mostly Chinese. But Americans won't recognize it because it doesn't do anything for them. What's "innovative" is not much different from how soft power is peddled. What you have to offer isn't power. It's all about how they get to decide if they like it is where the power is. It has to be accepted by them in order for whatever to be lauded and considered good. And that has nothing to do with encouraging one to have their own power nor to be innovative.
I talked about this in the movie thread where Hollywood is in a dilemma over China. Chinese movies cost a fraction to make compared to their Hollywood counterparts and can make just as much money. Why is Hollywood so upset that they don't get more access to China? It's not about what's fair because Chinese movies don't get a chance at the American box office. China's movie industry is at its infancy. Hollywood wants access now because they want to dominate and instilled Hollywood tastes onto the Chinese audience. You already see other countries upset that Hollywood has dominated in their countries over domestic movies. Why don't American audiences watch more foreign language movies? The number one reason is it's in a foreign language. The original French movie La Femme Nikita was a great action movie. Why didn't it do well at the US box office for a great action movie? Because it was foreign and in a foreign language. They're not going to make a big deal about a foreigner doing something good when they had nothing to do with it. What's "innovative" is pretty much in the same way.
My bet is China will have a lot of great innovations to come... for mostly Chinese. But Americans won't recognize it because it doesn't do anything for them. What's "innovative" is not much different from how soft power is peddled. What you have to offer isn't power. It's all about how they get to decide if they like it is where the power is. It has to be accepted by them in order for whatever to be lauded and considered good. And that has nothing to do with encouraging one to have their own power nor to be innovative.
Last edited:
I personally thought this before:
A new China dream: Beijing, a sea-port?
Like most of north China, Beijing is seriously short of water. The capital needs another 1.5 billion cubic meters a year for its more than 21 million people.
The answer that scientists and engineers of the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences have come up with is a massive canal that would link it to the sea. It would stretch 160 kilometers (almost 100 miles) and measure 1 kilometer wide. The water would be desalinized when it gets to Beijing, helping to quench the thirst of the capital.
Linking Beijing to the industrial city of Tianjin on the coast, the canal could accommodate 30,000 ton ships and make Beijing technically a new seaport. And the dew and mist along the waterway would also improve the local climate, pushing back the lurching threat of desertification. It is one of the many grand projects of a country flush with cash. It is also meant as a symbol of China’s ambition and risk taking. But its one problem may be a little too much ambition and risk.
The respected authorities at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics with the National Academy of Sciences have criticized the project as impractical.
Environmental issues have not been taken into account, such as the eventual salinization of the land through the canal cracks, making the surroundings unfit for any use, or such as the stench: depository of 200 million people’s industry refuses and agricultural fertilizers, the area around the Bohai coast has some of the most polluted waters in China.
Some press report suggests the water to be desalinated in Tianjin, at the canal’s intake. But this would be an enormous waste: part of the expensive, just reprocessed water would be lost, and shipping would pollute it again, even before Beijing’s population had the chance of bringing the cup to its lips. And finally, as notices Xia Qing, a former director at the Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, “those fine inventors are defying physics: the land is high in the west and low in the east in this country: they are asking water to flow uphill”.
Moreover, as a French professional quotes, this project that would cost billions of dollars does not address the problem upfront and as such, is a blind rush forward. There are more direct, less costly solutions to achieve this control of water-resource. One is to change the piping system in Beijing (and in all China for that matter: this may take decades), which currently loses over one half of its content on the way. Another one is the recycling of “grey” sullied city water. And possibly the most efficient way would be to make the users pay their water at its true cost, the price of production. In its socialist tradition, the Chinese society considers water, and other resources like gasoline or electricity as commodities that the state should provide at subsidized rates, and in unlimited volumes: an expectation that is less and less easy to fulfill.
One may have noticed, by the way, that all those alternative remedies suppose a new perception of water as a rare and valuable resource. This in turn suggests the need for an education of the user as a citizen, aware of his duties towards the nation as a whole. It means that China will not save water without first engaging a dialogue between citizen and State, i.e. starting the first steps into a new democracy.
Keeping this perspective in mind, this monstrous sea-canal starts revealing some of its secret rationales. One motivation is this society’s antic fight against streams and rivers prone to floods and droughts that even in recent years caused thousands to die. Over the dynasties, China always wanted to protect itself against hazards: in order to tame nature, it has been building gigantic canals, walls, dams for thousands of years.
Another motivation is a secret belief in the superiority of socialism: almost any Chinese, whether in favor of the regime or against it, keeps a blind faith in its capacity to achieve its goals and to pour enough means to break any opposing force, human or natural. Here again, a quest for revenge is also perceptible, however no more directed against winds or streams, but at those foreign invaders that, starting from the 19th centuries, threatened China’s sovereignty.
In other words, mammoth-projects like the Tianjin-Beijing sea canal or the Three Gorges Dam have been partly devised to impress us. And indeed, they do: never on Earth were such Behemoth projects launched, nor such large resources deployed!
A new China dream: Beijing, a sea-port?
Like most of north China, Beijing is seriously short of water. The capital needs another 1.5 billion cubic meters a year for its more than 21 million people.
The answer that scientists and engineers of the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences have come up with is a massive canal that would link it to the sea. It would stretch 160 kilometers (almost 100 miles) and measure 1 kilometer wide. The water would be desalinized when it gets to Beijing, helping to quench the thirst of the capital.
Linking Beijing to the industrial city of Tianjin on the coast, the canal could accommodate 30,000 ton ships and make Beijing technically a new seaport. And the dew and mist along the waterway would also improve the local climate, pushing back the lurching threat of desertification. It is one of the many grand projects of a country flush with cash. It is also meant as a symbol of China’s ambition and risk taking. But its one problem may be a little too much ambition and risk.
The respected authorities at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics with the National Academy of Sciences have criticized the project as impractical.
Environmental issues have not been taken into account, such as the eventual salinization of the land through the canal cracks, making the surroundings unfit for any use, or such as the stench: depository of 200 million people’s industry refuses and agricultural fertilizers, the area around the Bohai coast has some of the most polluted waters in China.
Some press report suggests the water to be desalinated in Tianjin, at the canal’s intake. But this would be an enormous waste: part of the expensive, just reprocessed water would be lost, and shipping would pollute it again, even before Beijing’s population had the chance of bringing the cup to its lips. And finally, as notices Xia Qing, a former director at the Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, “those fine inventors are defying physics: the land is high in the west and low in the east in this country: they are asking water to flow uphill”.
Moreover, as a French professional quotes, this project that would cost billions of dollars does not address the problem upfront and as such, is a blind rush forward. There are more direct, less costly solutions to achieve this control of water-resource. One is to change the piping system in Beijing (and in all China for that matter: this may take decades), which currently loses over one half of its content on the way. Another one is the recycling of “grey” sullied city water. And possibly the most efficient way would be to make the users pay their water at its true cost, the price of production. In its socialist tradition, the Chinese society considers water, and other resources like gasoline or electricity as commodities that the state should provide at subsidized rates, and in unlimited volumes: an expectation that is less and less easy to fulfill.
One may have noticed, by the way, that all those alternative remedies suppose a new perception of water as a rare and valuable resource. This in turn suggests the need for an education of the user as a citizen, aware of his duties towards the nation as a whole. It means that China will not save water without first engaging a dialogue between citizen and State, i.e. starting the first steps into a new democracy.
Keeping this perspective in mind, this monstrous sea-canal starts revealing some of its secret rationales. One motivation is this society’s antic fight against streams and rivers prone to floods and droughts that even in recent years caused thousands to die. Over the dynasties, China always wanted to protect itself against hazards: in order to tame nature, it has been building gigantic canals, walls, dams for thousands of years.
Another motivation is a secret belief in the superiority of socialism: almost any Chinese, whether in favor of the regime or against it, keeps a blind faith in its capacity to achieve its goals and to pour enough means to break any opposing force, human or natural. Here again, a quest for revenge is also perceptible, however no more directed against winds or streams, but at those foreign invaders that, starting from the 19th centuries, threatened China’s sovereignty.
In other words, mammoth-projects like the Tianjin-Beijing sea canal or the Three Gorges Dam have been partly devised to impress us. And indeed, they do: never on Earth were such Behemoth projects launched, nor such large resources deployed!
Equation
Lieutenant General
I just read that today, it's basically like turning Beijing into a Houston Ship Channel. But I don't think it's feasible as far as canal goes because it's bringing water "uphill" would be too costly. The Houston Ship Channel goes down hill into the sea therefore it's feasible.
Houston Ship Channel
broadsword
Brigadier
The only way to bring desalinated water to Beijing is to construct a pipeline, but that's not the immediate solution yet. A canal is a spur of the moment idea. The solutions are those mentioned in the article. Recycling of effluent is more economical than desalination.