Ask Slashdot: Can FOSS Help In the Fight Against Climate Change? 154
dryriver writes: Before I ask my question, there already is free and open-source software (FOSS) for wind turbine design and simulation called QBlade. It lets you calculate turbine blade performance using nothing more than a computer and appears compatible with Xfoil as well. But consider this: the ultimate, most efficient and most real-world usable and widely deployable wind turbine rotor may not have traditional "blades" or "foils" at all, but may be a non-propeller-like, complex and possibly rather strange looking three-dimensional rotor of the sort that only a 3D printer could prototype easily. It may be on a vertical or horizontal axis. It may have air flowing through canals in its non-traditional structure, rather than just around it. Nobody really knows what this "ultimate wind turbine rotor" may look like.
The easiest way to find such a rotor might be through machine-learning. You get an algorithm to create complex non-traditional 3D rotor shapes, simulate their behavior in wind, and then mutate the design, simulate again, and get a machine learning algorithm to learn what sort of mutations lead to a better performing 3D rotor. In theory, enough iterations -- perhaps millions or more -- should eventually lead to the "ultimate rotor" or something closer to it than what is used in wind turbines today. Is this something FOSS developers could tackle, or is this task too complex for non-commercial software? The real world impact of such a FOSS project could be that far better wind turbines can be designed, manufactured and deployed than currently exist, and the fight against climate change becomes more effective; the better your wind turbines perform, and the more usable they are, the more of a fighting chance humanity has to do something against climate change. Could FOSS achieve this?
The easiest way to find such a rotor might be through machine-learning. You get an algorithm to create complex non-traditional 3D rotor shapes, simulate their behavior in wind, and then mutate the design, simulate again, and get a machine learning algorithm to learn what sort of mutations lead to a better performing 3D rotor. In theory, enough iterations -- perhaps millions or more -- should eventually lead to the "ultimate rotor" or something closer to it than what is used in wind turbines today. Is this something FOSS developers could tackle, or is this task too complex for non-commercial software? The real world impact of such a FOSS project could be that far better wind turbines can be designed, manufactured and deployed than currently exist, and the fight against climate change becomes more effective; the better your wind turbines perform, and the more usable they are, the more of a fighting chance humanity has to do something against climate change. Could FOSS achieve this?
Unless your computer is powered by 100% renewable (Score:3)
Just before I turn off my computer... (Score:3, Insightful)
A massive carbon tax would do a much more effective job at accelerating our transition off fossil fuels and slowing global warming.
A massive carbon tax so that, to start with, Americans pay the same for gas as Europeans, who do just fine with that, and then keep increasing it.
That's the best thing that would work, because except for tilting the playing field the way we have to move, it lets the free market take care of how to achieve the change.
But unfortunately, an effectively large carbon tax would take p
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I agree we need more environmentally friendly energy options but...
The problem with any energy taxing scheme is eventually you price the cost of energy so high that slavery becomes a viable option again.
Cheap power did exponentially more to reduce slavery than all the historical do-gooders combined.
This is of course an extreme argument but you need to be aware of unintended consequences.
Re: price the cost of energy so high (Score:4, Informative)
The whole point of a carbon tax is:
Energy != Fossil Fuels
There are other ways we can harness solar energy, and geothermal energy. Our addiction to the drug of cheap fossil fuels is preventing us from getting to those other ways fast enough.
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In this case, the design of the blade for wind turbines is only a part of the answer and good vertical axis wind turbine, needs a far more complex design to achieve really good outcomes and the blade itself, whilst important does not the whole design create. A really tricky problem to resolve but human imagination always delivers in one way or another. I find it a interesting subject and have whiled away many an hour coming up with and investigating various designs. Always puttering around with one in the b
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Then just increase the slavery tax. Problem Solved!
Re: Rural America (Score:2)
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2... [arstechnica.com]
https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/se... [tesla.com]
https://nikolamotor.com/one [nikolamotor.com]
https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/mo... [tesla.com]
https://www.arcimoto.com/vehic... [arcimoto.com]
http://www.zeromotorcycles.com... [zeromotorcycles.com]
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Ferret
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It needs to be hand-coded by a team of artisans in assembly language.
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Virgin assembly language artisans... but I guess that's axiomatic.
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A massive carbon tax would do a much more effective job at accelerating our transition off fossil fuels
Because history has shown us that making an entire population poor greatly enhances care for the environment. Why, look t what a model for environmental protection East Germany was under communist rule [thefederalist.com]! A large enough carbon tax, and everywhere gets to be East Germany. Fun times!
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Re:Just before I turn off my computer... (Score:4, Informative)
Hmm, Germany is on 100% renewables now, so that argument kind of backfired on you.
1. Germany is no where close to 100% renewable energy.
2. East Germany switched to capitalism 30 years ago.
3. Even today the ex-communist east is is dirtier per euro of GDP than the west.
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Facts don't matter to the Klimate Kult.
Carbon tax doesn't make people poor (Score:1)
If you don't agree with spending the tax on R&D into new energy economy technologies, then you can just lower income taxes by the amount of revenue taken in by the carbon tax, or use it to start funding the universal basic income we're going to need soon because of automation and AI.
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Could you explain how a carbon tax, even one that isn't revenue-neutral [theguardian.com], would make everyone poor? What do you expect the people YOU elected would do with the money, burn it? If so, you need to be a little more careful how you vote!
Or maybe you're saying that we would be be poor because we wouldn't be digging up as much oil out of the ground and enriching ourselves at the expense of our children and grandchildren. This reasoning I could agree with.
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Can we please have just a little optimism? I hear there is a new technology using plasma that can cleanly convert common garbage directly into electricity! I think that solves both problems at once. /s
Re:Just before I turn off my computer... (Score:4, Interesting)
We know how to make cheap plentiful power, we lack the will to do so. The same people that are running around yelling global warming also hate it. Fission works it's got far too many regulations to do cheaply. It gots far to many court delays to finance. Everyone in the US is a bespoke design but all 70's level tech. This is all by design you need far to much political capital to get one put in.
Build them in factories with a design that's not 40+ years old. Hells we can use the spent rods as feedstock for modern designs.
Carbon taxes are crap it's just a tax and a regressive one at that. Want change put in sensible PV incentives and billing. The entire concept of taxing things you don't like people doing is broken, an end run around the constitution to allow nearly unlimited federal power.
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Revenue-neutral carbon taxes where the revenue is returned equally to everyone is highly progressive. If for example the tax were $1 per gallon of gasoline and the average person buys 500 gallons of it per year, everyone would receive a $500 check every year whether they purchased any gasoline that year or not. $500 may not seem like much to you and I but to a poor person that's a lot of money!
If you are truly opposed to regressive taxes, w
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Sure till you figure out that the poor person needs to use 750g a year because the drive a POS car or live in a house with poor insulation but would still not like to freeze. It's much like the PV buybacks it hurts anybody who can not put up PV ya know people like renters because you end up subsidizing the people that can.
I've got no issue with use taxes if they actually go towards what they are supposed to, yes they can affect the poor but they tend to be fairer. I absolutely hate when you siphon off the
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But unfortunately, an effectively large carbon tax would take politicians with brains, a conscience, and guts. So I'm not that optimistic given the garbage we currently have.
Unfortunately, an effectively large carbon tax would take an electorate with brains, a conscience, and guts.
Re: Just before I turn off my computer... (Score:1)
Global warming is a scientific fact. How we decide to deal with it may or may not be a money grab. Were you born a fucking moron? Al Gore has proposed potential solutions. What have you done other than
stick your head in the sand?
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The current rate of warming is about 50 times higher than any warming cycle detected in the geologic record.
So if we attribute the typical Milankovitch Cycle warming rate to be caused by natural orbital change, that would leave another 98% of the warming to be attributed to other, non-Milankovitch causes. Such as man-made global warming.
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50 times higher? That's a mighty bold claim there. Have some information to back that up?
Yes. Of course he has. And you know it (no, I'm not going to get caught into a stupid argument whether it's precisely 47.2 times or 51.7 times faster). The question is why, given that you know that there are plenty of books, courses, video series etc that show exactly what you want to pretend is a new dicovery, why do you try to pretend they don't exist instead of, I don't know, just giving a link to the relevant skeptical science article [skepticalscience.com]?
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Read up on this:
From a US court case where some big oil companies are being sued.
Keep reading/scrolling down this til you come to the numbered questions and answers.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and... [vox.com]
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Al Gore has proposed potential solutions. What have you done other than stick your head in the sand?
My goodness, such harsh language!
While Al Gore was dramatizing sea level rise to the world he was buying himself water front real estate more cheaply. Al Gore Buys $8.9 Million Ocean-view Villa [worldpropertyjournal.com]
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Or mining Bitcoin.
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This is... (Score:2)
This is a job for evolutionary software. Definitely.
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I have to disagree. The fact that Linux (and much other FOSS) exists is evidence to support my claim.
Back in the 1990s, there was no "market model" for FOSS. That came later than the products themselves.
No, because it's already done well enough. (Score:5, Informative)
There is no point in hunting for a more efficient rotor design for two reasons:
1) The current designs are so near perfect efficiency that there's little to be gained for a lot of effort.
2) Efficiency of the rotor, once it's "good enough" is not a big deal. When your "fuel is free" except for the cost of the equipment to collect it, the significant measures of efficiency become "power per dollar spent on equipment" and "energy per dollar spent on maintenance and site and equipment amortization".
As with the carnot limit on how much of the energy in heat can be extracted by a heat engine, there is a theoretical limit to how much of the kinetic energy you can extract from the air (or other compressible fluid) passing through a given swept area. It is called the "Betz limit". It is16/27ths, about 59.3%. It occurs because extracting energy from the wind slows it down, reducing the amount of air passing through the mill. It works like the laffer curve in tax rates: If you take no energy as the wind passes by, you get no energy. If you take all the energy you stop the wind, so you get no energy. Somewhere between there's a percentage of extraction that gets you the maximum. For wind, that's 16/27ths.
As you approach the Betz limit you reach a point of diminisihing returns. You can throw progressively larger amounts of money into the design of your mill to get progressively smaller amounts of additional energy. Or you can spend a little extra money to just make your mill a little bigger, which lets it sweep a lot more area and collect a lot more energy.
Modern 3-bladed horizontal-axis wind turbines (HAWTs), running at a tip speed ratio in the 6 to 7 range, get within a few percent of Betz perfection. (Higher TSR would get you a little more, but above 6 you're starting to get to where a storm could make the airflow near the tips go supersonic, which is a problem structurally.) Scaling them up gives you more power per unit cost, so the utility mills converged to giant 3-blade HAWTs.
Horizontal axis because vertical axis designs tend to be either FAR less efficient or have terrible issues with vibration (though the helical darrius seems practical for small mills). The main advantage of a VAWT over a HAWT for small (i.e. off-grid residential/farm/small business) mills is that HAWTs need to be made to track the wind but "furled" in a high wind to avoid damage, which makes them more complex and failure prone. (HAWTs may need furling, too, but they don't need tracking and they're easier to overbuild to reduce the need for furling).
Three blade because one blade (like a maple leaf) and two-blade have vibration problems when yawing to face a changing wind. Three or more do not. More blades don't buy you any extra efficIency so three is the least expensive to build.
If you want to improve wind turbines you'd do well to concentrate on less expensive construction methods, rather than trying to chase the tiny amount of efficiency that's left.
If you want to improve other aspects of renewable energy, there's more room for improvement in control, storage, photovoltaic designs, direct collection of heat, and cooling (including radiative coupling to the four-degree kelvin cosmic background temperature through the "infrared window").
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What about the Ugrinsky design, where it has both blades and channels?
Thanks. I hadn't seen that one.
It looks like a derivative of, perhaps an improvement on, the Benesh ("Sandia Savonius") rotor [googleapis.com], which claimed 37% efficiency in the patent, and (if I recall correctly) 39% in later research.
I once calculated that a Benesh rotor of the same diameter as, about 4% taller than the diameter of, a good HAWT, would collect the same amount of wind power. (A VAWT has a rectangular swept area, so for the the same di
Of course (Score:4, Funny)
FOSS can solve the hunger crisis, cure all disease, and anything else your imagination wants to believe.
Reality may be different however.
some assembly required (Score:1)
Genetic Algorithms (Score:5, Interesting)
You get an algorithm to create complex non-traditional 3D rotor shapes, simulate their behavior in wind, and then mutate the design, simulate again, and get a machine learning algorithm to learn what sort of mutations lead to a better performing 3D rotor. In theory, enough iterations -- perhaps millions or more -- should eventually lead to the "ultimate rotor"
You're describing Genetic Algorithms [tutorialspoint.com]. It's a fairly old technique. It shouldn't be too hard to implement it. The problem here is not FOSS, it's computational power. You need quite a lot of CPU time to run all the simulations and evolve the solution.
Some sort of distributed computing framework like INSERT_PROJECT_NAME@home would work. But then you'd have to convince everyone to use it....
Re:Genetic Algorithms (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a fairly old technique.
Yes. Back in the day we called it "trial and error". It is the most unscientific approach to solving problems that you can get. But computers have the advantage that doing it a million times to come up with something reasonable is feasible.
Re: Genetic Algorithms (Score:4, Interesting)
The actual problem here is "simulate the wind". Doing so requires a FOSS fluid Dynamics package that runs fast, and to my knowledge this doesn't exist. NASA opened up theirs a few years ago seeking speedup:
https://www.nasa.gov/aero/nasa... [nasa.gov]
But there's physics stuff computers can't simulate fast, else we'd have AI's designing robots now.
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Some sort of distributed computing framework like INSERT_PROJECT_NAME@home would work. But then you'd have to convince everyone to use it....
I wish @home would be folded into bitcoin, then at least all those CPU cycles would be useful for something, not just heating and generating fake money...
No ... (Score:1)
... unless it's GPL3.
Betteridge's Law (Score:1)
Can FOSS Design The Blades... (Score:5, Funny)
...Such that they slice the birds into easy-to-swallow bite-sized pieces instead of mostly just pulverizing them?
Summer BBQ season is nearly upon us, after all.
Strat
Re: Can FOSS Design The Blades... (Score:1)
Cryptocurrencies are open source (Score:5, Insightful)
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No, cryptocurrencies are open source and some of them are using tons of energy to create more coins to keep the cryptocurrencies networks running, other use no more energy than banks or credit card networks.
Once you have cryptocurrencies, only then can you exchange them for "funbux" to pay your landlord, your electric bill, your groceries, etc.
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Ah, but since Jevons paradox tells us that by increasing energy efficiency, we increase the demand for energy, surely cryptocurrency is a great boon for the climate by having absolutely terrible energy efficiency. [wikipedia.org]
Betz's law (Score:5, Interesting)
"Traditional" turbine designs are already up to 80% theoretical maximum efficiency. Trying to eke that last 20% is not really going to save the planet since we're nowhere near using that much wind in the first place.
That is - if you want to get FOSS to improve tech adoption, direct it to making things more affordable or accessible, not toward having more expensive higher-efficiency, higher-complexity devices.
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Ah yes, but what if we could find a turbine with much greater theoretical maximum efficiency?
Re:Betz's law (Score:5, Interesting)
No Betz's law is that the efficiency of a system that extracts energy from a free flowing windstream cannot be more than 59.3% . The reason is that if you take more energy than that out of the incoming windstream, it all piles up behind the rotor (as a sort of handwavy explanation). It doesn't matter what the configuration is you won't beat that.
The idea of using a GA to develop aero is of course not new, it is not hard to put a matlab or pythn program together to do this. Many years ago i had a GA script that optimised a structure using FEA that worked well enough.
However, you need to define a set of genes to describe your shape. That might be tricky.
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Perhaps GP was talking of 80% of that theoretical maximum of 59.3%. Your statements don't seem to be mutually exclusive to me.
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To be clear (I had to look it up) the second poster is right - Betz's Law caps the max efficiency of such systems at 16/27 or 59%.
The previous poster (turbines reach 80% efficiency today) is ALSO right, but that 80% is 80% of the Betz cap (so 80% of 59% = about 47% overall efficiency).
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The DIY "PowerWall" guys have done a lot to make recycling batteries easier and cheaper. That includes developing things like 3D printed brackets and open source power controllers.
It's time to start thinking about having every lithium battery tested and if possible re-used instead of being discarded or broken down. Most batteries that are "dead" are actually mostly fine, it's just one or two bad cells. Not only will it prevent those cells becoming waste, it will build up the grid's battery backup capability
Machine learning (Score:3)
That pretty much sums up machine learning/AI today. A million monkeys on a million typewriters will eventually write Shakespeare. Except it won't happen.
Who is paying Slashdot to post this propaganda? (Score:1, Insightful)
Slashdot was once a tech site for CS and EE news, operating systems, Linux, BSD, etc. It veered of course a couple times with the Jon Katz episodes, but was able to quickly restabilze.
These "glboal warming" stories have pretty much hijacked the content on Slashdot. It is political and completely off topic for tech news. It reeks of George Soros and other globalist one-worlders and fellow traverllers.
Please boycott the advertisers until Slashdot rights itself, if that is even possible. Slashdot is only a
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I hear ya. Now it's turned into a cesspool of pseudo-science... at best.
Re:Who is paying Slashdot to post this propaganda? (Score:5, Insightful)
These "glboal warming" stories have pretty much hijacked the content on Slashdot.
Slashdot has always done science stories. Anthropogenic climate change is science.
I remember when almost all Slashdotters respected science. That was a long time ago.
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I remember when almost all Slashdotters respected science. That was a long time ago.
I remember when science was respectable, before it made statements like "the science is settled" and "90% of scientists agree". That, too, was a long time ago.
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Science used to reserve language like that for astrology and creationism. Those were the days when pseudoscience was fringe.
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But catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is poor computer simulations fed with dubious assumptions, statistics manipulations, hand-wavery and hysteria. And a great taxpayer-funded income source.
Bitcoin == (FOSS && waste_of_energy) (Score:1)
True or False?
Not a new idea (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Technically yes, but that answer isn't useful (Score:3)
Fluid flow simulation is what one might call a military grade problem - efficient and accurate ways of doing it are either protected by commercial secretcy (because CAD software to design multimillion dollar yachts and aircraft is expensive) or actual military secrecy - because the problem you're solving is the same sort of problem that's being solved (for example) when designing SSBN propellers and hulls to minimize cavitation and make the ships run silent.
Technically you are talking through your hat (Score:2)
eg https://eawephdseminar.science... [sciencesconf.org] p33
in which he compares cfd results from the free software OpenFoam for a wind turbine in cfd and in reality. Military grade my arse.
Tux Racer (Score:2)
A free software package, Tux Racer, could help in the fight against Climate Change. No, I'm not talking about the Tux Racer game as we all, ahem, normally play it. This would be a version where the player moves a cardboard cutout 'tux' down the 'screen' (a big sheet of cardboard.)
The energy savings would be immense, though Steam would lose a lot of revenue.
Easy (Score:5, Interesting)
If you want to save the world through free and open source software, there's an easy way to do this: stop building systems that waste resources.
Don't use programming languages that spend 10 CPU cycles to do 1 cycle of work. Don't arrange things so a program is recompiled every time it is run. Write software that uses less RAM. Write replacements for spyware-laden crap. Do not support battery-burning DRM and tell them why. Encourage wired rather than wireless connections.
Stop thinking like a coder and start thinking like an engineer.
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It's a good question and it's something that should be studied. Commercial software from the big vendors is probably more power hungry than bazaar-style FOSS. But many FOSS projects (e.g. Linux, Chromium) are effectively made in a big vendor kind of way. And a lot of FOSS is written in Python and PHP.
Climate change is a fact (Score:2)
Just my 2 cents
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SolarNetwork (Score:1)
Archimedes screw (Score:2)
an Archimedes screw approaches theoretical maximum efficiency
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No, but it can cause it (Score:2)
https://github.com/bitcoin/bit... [github.com]
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Improved alternators! (Score:2)
Improved alternators(they are not generators!) and reducing bearing friction will will bring a bigger gain.
As far as that goes better bearings would improve energy use in many areas!
Storage, not Generation is the Issue (Score:2)
There's plenty of renewable energy out there and our technology to extract it is for the most part is pretty good as it is. The biggest problem is a way to store this energy efficiently and cheaply. We have no solution for this at the moment. Power grids for example need to match usage exactly with generation at every instant. Don't do that and you start seeing brownouts (causing problems with consumer devices) or worse the generator blows up. Fossil Fuels are used for the reason that they're highly c
software (Score:1)
is this task too complex for non-commercial software?
or is it too complex for commercial software?
In any case, commercial and FOSS are not mutually exclusive.
You have no hope (Score:1)
Already blew the 1.5 degree carbon budget. On track to blow thru the 2.0 degree carbon budget very soon (2024? 2027?)
Wind power (and other alternative energy) is still good as are batteries that would allow coal plants to run at more efficient levels as are electric cars as are LED lighting solutions to reduce consumption.
If you want to address climate change you need to either find a safe (switchable) way to block incoming energy in huge quantities or you need to find a safe way (i.e. again- you can turn
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It's relatively easy to make pancakes from scratch. Look up a recipe and be daring: make some and be proud!
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So what did he say about telling the truth enough times?