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The man who brought us the lithium-ion battery has an idea for a new one

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Re: The man who brought us the lithium-ion battery has an idea for a new one

#61

Post by deanclatworthy »

Gravityloss wrote: post #12
mschuster91 wrote: post #4

What I'm worried about is the waste of lithium and other battery/accumulator metals. In theory, people should turn electronic devices and batteries to recycling facilities, but a large part of the population ignores the rules and throws their gadgets into the trash when broken... I wonder if someday we will find a way to "separate" trash on atomar level (i.e. put arbitrary stuff in on one side, get raw atoms on the o…

One solution is to collect a payment when you buy a new gadget, then you get it back when you return it for recycling. At the moment recycling technology can already grind stuff into small particles and float it in salts of different densities to separate it. That doesn't go to atomic level of course... I think it's a fundamental outcome of the laws of entropy that separating always takes a lot more energy than mixin…

We do this in Finland for bottles and cans. Giving people the financial incentive to recycle has two effects: - For those who want to keep their money they take it back - If they don't care enough, they leave it somewhere and there are many "recyclers" who are happy to pick up your cans and bottles and get the money for them.

Re: The man who brought us the lithium-ion battery has an idea for a new one

#64

Post by giarc »

cauterized wrote: post #59
mschuster91 wrote: post #4

What I'm worried about is the waste of lithium and other battery/accumulator metals. In theory, people should turn electronic devices and batteries to recycling facilities, but a large part of the population ignores the rules and throws their gadgets into the trash when broken... I wonder if someday we will find a way to "separate" trash on atomar level (i.e. put arbitrary stuff in on one side, get raw atoms on the o…

Where I live, at least, I'd have to make a special trip between 9-5 on a weekday to a battery recycling facility. And when I'm free on a weekday I'm not spending that time schlepping batteries across town. If they included batteries in curbside recycling pickup, you'd get the same high rates you do with paper, plastic, glass, and metal.

There is a Penn and Teller skit where they go to people's home's and ask about curb side recycling. They ask the home owners if they'd be willing to have a x colour bin for y. They continue on and on and on until the home owners have 15 bins out front their house. Although most of the home owners agree to have that many bins, I think their point was to say, we can't have a rainbow of bins out front our homes.

Re: The man who brought us the lithium-ion battery has an idea for a new one

#65

Post by jbb555 »

Gravityloss wrote: post #12
mschuster91 wrote: post #4

What I'm worried about is the waste of lithium and other battery/accumulator metals. In theory, people should turn electronic devices and batteries to recycling facilities, but a large part of the population ignores the rules and throws their gadgets into the trash when broken... I wonder if someday we will find a way to "separate" trash on atomar level (i.e. put arbitrary stuff in on one side, get raw atoms on the o…

One solution is to collect a payment when you buy a new gadget, then you get it back when you return it for recycling. At the moment recycling technology can already grind stuff into small particles and float it in salts of different densities to separate it. That doesn't go to atomic level of course... I think it's a fundamental outcome of the laws of entropy that separating always takes a lot more energy than mixin…

NO! I own the battery. I can do what I like with it. I'm not paying for this. Ugh.

Re: The man who brought us the lithium-ion battery has an idea for a new one

#66

Post by IanDrake »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #61
Gravityloss wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One solution is to collect a payment when you buy a new gadget, then you get it back when you return it for recycling. At the moment recycling technology can already grind stuff into small particles and float it in salts of different densities to separate it. That doesn't go to atomic level of course... I think it's a fundamental outcome of the laws of entropy that separating always takes a lot more energy than mixin…

We do this in Finland for bottles and cans. Giving people the financial incentive to recycle has two effects: - For those who want to keep their money they take it back - If they don't care enough, they leave it somewhere and there are many "recyclers" who are happy to pick up your cans and bottles and get the money for them.

Yeah, we do that in most US states too. At our dump (disposal area) there is a station to donate your bottles and cans to local charities and schools.

Re: The man who brought us the lithium-ion battery has an idea for a new one

#67

Post by michael_h »

jbb555 wrote: post #65
Gravityloss wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One solution is to collect a payment when you buy a new gadget, then you get it back when you return it for recycling. At the moment recycling technology can already grind stuff into small particles and float it in salts of different densities to separate it. That doesn't go to atomic level of course... I think it's a fundamental outcome of the laws of entropy that separating always takes a lot more energy than mixin…

NO! I own the battery. I can do what I like with it. I'm not paying for this. Ugh.

You would still own the battery and you can still do what you like with it.

Re: The man who brought us the lithium-ion battery has an idea for a new one

#68

Post by alextgordon »

floatrock wrote: post #22
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #16

> Without it, we would not have smartphones, tablets or laptops, including the device you are reading at this very moment. Yes we would. All these things existed without Li-ion. The power/space budget would be more constrained but it was perfectly achievable. What wouldn't work is senselessly burning cycles running managed code in a VM with heaps of battery sucking DRAM. People today have no concept of how much compu…

> People today have no concept of how much computing power is wasted as excess heat because of modern software development practices. Or of how many new ideas are created because generous power/space ratios give us the luxury to develop quickly using abstractions higher than highly-optimized references and pointers. You can take a hit on optimal energy efficiency if it results in a larger ecosystem with more possibil…

But high level languages do not require VMs. Time for a rant.

We were lead down a collective rabbit hole by rabid VM and JIT enthusiasts. Notice the absence of those extolling the benefits of JIT compilation today. People used to claim that at some point Java would consistently outperform C due to the greater number of optimisations available to a JIT compiler. They've all become silent because it's quite obviously a load of baloney.

The irony is that we had the answer all the time, but nobody wanted to believe it.

Back in the day, languages like Haskell, early C++, early Objective-C and Scheme compiled to C. Compiling to C was great! No need to spend man-centuries building an optimising cross-compiler to compete with GCC (and fail), no need to screw around with GIMPLE.

In 2015, compiling to a mid-level language is back in style. Except we don't call it C, we call it LLVM-IR. If you squint it's the exact same thing we were doing 15+ years ago.

LLVM-based languages that look like Rust and Swift will eventually dominate, because they are universal. You can use Rust for the lowest level embedded programming. You can use Swift for the highest level architecture astronautics.

What is depressing is that we could have built them 15 years ago but we were too busy fannying around with a dead-end technology.

Re: The man who brought us the lithium-ion battery has an idea for a new one

#69

Post by patrickk »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #23
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #16

> Without it, we would not have smartphones, tablets or laptops, including the device you are reading at this very moment. Yes we would. All these things existed without Li-ion. The power/space budget would be more constrained but it was perfectly achievable. What wouldn't work is senselessly burning cycles running managed code in a VM with heaps of battery sucking DRAM. People today have no concept of how much compu…

We have devices nowadays that put effort into battery economy high up their list of priorities. Kindles are an example. Their common features: they tend to be single-purpose devices, they tend to have crappy displays like e-ink or black-and-grey LCD, and to the extent they are general-purpose, they aren't effective or much fun. So they would never have been tablets or laptops. They would have stayed as e-readers and…

> Their common features: they tend to be single-purpose devices, they tend to have crappy displays like e-ink or black-and-grey LCD, and to the extent they are general-purpose, they aren't effective or much fun.

I like the fact that Kindles have e-ink and are single purpose. When I read on a backlit screen, it tires my eyes and its easy to get distracted from your book with SMS etc. E-ink is perfect for me, for distraction-free reading.

Re: The man who brought us the lithium-ion battery has an idea for a new one

#70

Post by patrickk »

JDiculous wrote: post #48

Wish society would incentivize more smart people to tackle these important problems rather than go into finance, management consulting, working at the next hot tech startup, etc.

How would this work in practice?

Maybe some form of corporate patronage, like Facebook and Stripe did in this story, and giving the inventor a generous slice of the returns from the invention (I can imagine several downsides to this too, of course):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003791

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