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Do you honestly believe that refineries directly use steam to power pumps and other equipment? Seems like you do. I'll calmly explain:

Coal, oil and Nuclear power plants heat liquid (water usually) to make steam which spins power generators. That's one of the reasons why they are near bodies of water.

https://www.explainthatstuff.c...

I picked 2000 years since that is about when it was invented according to https://www.explainthatstuff.c... I guess that's not the most accurate site. I also choose 2000 years since that's a decent bound on the number of years it should have taken to see the temperature change we've seen in the last 100 years. 2500 is also probably correct and might have been close enough to satisfy you nit pickers.

1883: Wellington Adams of St Louis, Missouri files the first patent for an electric hub motor, which he suggests will prove useful for the "propulsion of railroad-cars and to the operation of light machinery of various kinds—for instance, sewing machines and dental instruments."
1895: Ogden Bolton of Ohio patents an electric bicycle with a front-wheel hub motor.
1900: Professor Ferdinand Porsche develops the Lohner Porsche, the world's first hybrid electric car, with a hub motor in each of the front wheels. Each motor produces 2kW of power (2.7 horsepower).
1947: James J. Tooley patents an airplane landing wheel incorporating a hub motor.
1962: T.G. Wilson of Duke University and P.H. Trickey of Wright Machinery Co. unveil what they describe as a DC Machine with Solid-State Commutation (in other words, a motor with an electronic instead of mechanical commutator). This is the first brushless DC motor.
1971 and 1972: The Apollo Lunar Rover, the first electric car in space, drives across the Moon. Although not a hub motor vehicle, it popularizes the idea of vehicles whose four wheels are driven by independent motors.
1980s: Robert Lordo of Powertron is granted US Patent 4,453,097: Permanent magnet DC motor with magnets recessed into motor frame, a high-powered brushless DC motor.

Other than Porsche, all of this is USA. Tooley is from OK.

To this date, nobody has developed hub motors with decent torque. As such, only Honda and Rimac are using hub-motors. And they are not concerned about pulling loads or overheating.

To answer my own question, apparently it's both. It is a new atomic-scale technology, but marketing still used a stupid term to describe it. (I consider "Quantum" to be a completely destroyed, nonsensical term, like "Cloud")

from http://www.explainthatstuff.co...

"A quantum dot gets its name because it's a tiny speck of matter so small that it's effectively concentrated into a single point (in other words, it's zero-dimensional). As a result, the particles inside it that carry electricity (electrons and holes, which are places that are missing electrons) are trapped ("constrained") and have well-defined energy levels according to the laws of quantum theory (think rungs on a ladder), a bit like individual atoms. Tiny really does mean tiny: quantum dots are crystals a few nanometers wide, so they're typically a few dozen atoms across and contain anything from perhaps a hundred to a few thousand atoms. They're made from a semiconductor such as silicon (a material that's neither really a conductor nor an insulator, but can be chemically treated so it behaves like either). And although they're crystals, they behave more like individual atoms—hence the nickname artificial atoms."

LCDs don't work like that. They work by orienting two polarizers. The first is a fixed polarizer, which cuts the backlight's brightness to 50% and polarizes the light. The second is a polarizing liquid crystal layer whose orientation can be controlled electronically. Orient it parallel to the fixed polarizer and all the light going through the fixed polarizer is let through. Orient it perpendicular and it blocks (in theory) all the light going through. (In practice the polarizing is not perfect, so there's a little leakage. Which is why black pixels are not entirely black on an LCD.

However, adding a third polarizer does not help. At best, the same amount of light is blocked as with two polarizers perpendicular to each other. At worst, it allows more light to go through than two polarizers.

Whatever extra layer they're using, it's not a polarizer, so it can't be an LCD. It's probably some sort of electrochromic glass whose reflectivity (and thus opacity) can be controlled electrically. And they've figured out a way to divide the effect into zones which coincide with the pixels or groupings of pixels on the LCD. It probably doesn't have as much fine granularity of partial opacity as an LCD does (else they could just use it instead of LCDs since LCDs always block at least 50% of the backlight), LCDs have gotten good enough to where we can use them to generate 1024 shades (10-bit, though most panels are still 8-bit or 6-bit), while last I heard electrochromic glass was binary.

Perhaps you should read on how the Original Otis Elevator Break works

I'm not any of the above ACs; but, I assumed this was common knowledge of any ten year old. After all, if there wasn't a safety mechanisim, the car would fall to one's death above two stories. LD 50 for falls on concrete is somewhere between 10 and 15 feet (depending on study). Yes, there are survivors above 20 feet, but the odds are not in one's favor.

I asked my dad why all the elevators had "OTIS" printed on the threshold, and he told me about a famous elevator fall in New York City, which prompted Otis to demonstrate his "safety elevator" which had a tension arrested brake held open by the lifting cable. So apparently it is common knowledge, at least in the people who bother to learn.

For a human, using a sponge and squeegee combo is probably the most effective way to clean a window.

The high tech alternative to the sponge and squeegee isn't a robot, it's a chemical coating on the glass.

Titanium dioxide is a photocatalyst: it's a material that makes chemical reactions happen when the right kind of light shines on it. The right kind of light for titanium dioxide is ultraviolet (UV), the super-blue, high-energy part of sunlight that our eyes can't see, but that nevertheless can give us sunburn even on a cloudy day. When ultraviolet light hits the titanium dioxide coating of a self-cleaning window, electrons are generated. These turn water molecules from the air into hydroxyl radicals that make chemical oxidation and reduction reactions take place on the coating. In effect, the hydroxyl radicals attack organic (carbon-based) dirt and chop it up into smaller pieces that are much easier for rain to wash away. Since the reactions happen on the titanium coating, on the very surface of the glass, they attack the lowest layers of the dirt, loosening encrusted muck from the glass very effectively by chipping it away from the inside out (the opposite of normal window cleaning, where you effectively scrub the dirt from the outside in.)

Self-cleaning windows

There are two problems:

Rain will probably not reach every corner of the window.

The literal curtain wall of the early box like glass towers has gone out of fashion.

The coating can add maybe 20% to the cost of a window.

The Twin Towers had 43,600 windows --- 600,000 square feet of glass. 'Mind you, the architect of the WTC was notoriously afraid of heights and windows were kept as narrow as humanly possible and still allow some view of the outside.

or so the comment in the article says

"Father of Fiber Optics" is not Kao but Narinder Singh Kapany. http://www.explainthatstuff.com/fiberoptics.html http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=Father+of+Fiber+Optics&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=f&oq= I can`t believe news didn`t name him

From one of the linked articles,

1950s: In London, England, Indian physicist Narinder Kapany (1927â") and British physicist Harold Hopkins (1918â"1994) managed to send a simple picture down a light pipe made from thousands of glass fibers. After publishing many scientific papers, Kapany earned a reputation as the "father of fiber optics."

1960s: Chinese-born US physicist Charles Kao (1933â") figured out how to make a very pure fiber-optic cable that can carry telephone signals over long distances.