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Forget cheap plastic. I'm making a real one.

SharkJumper

The first CVT patents date to roughly 1886, based on concepts developed by Leonardo Da Vinci. CVTs in automobiles date back to at least the 1950's. See these pages for more info:

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/cvt.htm
http://www.sae.org/automag/techbriefs_01-00/03.htm

Using air conditioning is supposed to make a difference, but last autumn I drove the same route for a week and noticed that my MPG was higher during a week where I was using air conditioning compared to one where I only had the windows open or the fan on.

You may also want to check out How Stuff Works's site.

I haven't noticed any significant deviation in my gas mileage depending on how I drive. The two things that seem to make a difference are a) highway speeds and b) type of roads travelled on. Back when I drove mainly to school 3 miles away (with stops approx. 1/4 - 1 mi between eachother), I got 16-17mpg, but now that I drive to work 8 miles away (on streches of road mainly with 1-3 mi between stops), I get 19-20mpg. Driving agressively (not to the point where I floor it usually, but close) makes no apparent difference.

I drive a 1989 Chevrolet Cavalier with a V6 engine.

There are many references to "low cost" when talking about the solar sail. For anyone curious, the price is about $4 million which relatively speaking, is low cost.

I've only been a member of the Planetary Society for two years, but I'm proud that they're accomplishing this.

You know you want one, and so do I.

So what are you waiting for, go build one already! Sheeeesshh, and you call yourself a geek.

I doubt I will become incapable of determining the rare fictional articles from the real ones.

Seriously. I just sent someone a link to a howstuffworks article on wireless networking. They see this and they'll assume the whole site is bunk.

Still, fun article... especially this and this .

I doubt I will become incapable of determining the rare fictional articles from the real ones.

Seriously. I just sent someone a link to a howstuffworks article on wireless networking. They see this and they'll assume the whole site is bunk.

Still, fun article... especially this and this .

All in one page version of the article.

If you're looking for lightsabre photshop tutorials, there's tons of them out thre. Start here or here.

If you're looking for lightsabre photshop tutorials, there's tons of them out thre. Start here or here.

yeah... but it doesn't reflect!

If you think the howstuffworks doesnt have articles on non existant technology perhaps you haven't seen the articles on Time Travel

http://science.howstuffworks.com/time-travel.htm/

Doesn't burining PVC ( http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/lightsaber-8.j pg ) create some nasty chloride smoke? And melting a hole in a metal door? Shouldn't you wear a filter mask or safety glasses or something?

"However, many new owners are pleasantly surprised by the many domestic uses of a lightsaber around the home or office...[such as] lighting a cigarette..."

Do NOT do this if you feel a sneeze coming on!

http://stuffo.howstuffworks.com/a-team-finding.htm /

Though I've found some of their other stuff really interesting. It's obvious they guys/gals are just huge starwars fans and wanted to have some fun.

They actually have an article on Hoverboards too. At least I can read about how my two favorite fictional gadgets work in "theory".

http://www.howstuffworks.com/lightsaber.htm/printa ble

There is no mention of the little yellow sticker on the end that says: "WARNING: Point this end away from face!"

Yes there is:

A lightsaber is not a toy! Keep it out of reach of children at all times. Lightsaber locks are required in most states.

There are two ends to any lightsaber -- one end has the belt ring, while the other end houses the blade arc tip and blade emitter. NEVER point the blade emitter of a lightsaber toward your own body. NEVER look down the "barrel" of a lightsaber, even if you are "sure" it is in safe mode. If you accidentally activate the lightsaber, serious injury could result.

Whether you like this article for the fun of it, or hate it because of it's clear 'purchased' quality, you have to admit that the prospect of both cutting and toasting a bagle in one stroke is highly appealing.

Note how the glowing part of the lightsaber casts a shadow on the ground... another great science article by howstuffworks.com!

FTA: "The most common use, of course, is slicing." ~

There is a big difference between slicing/slashing and CUTTING. According to Miyamoto Musashi, perhaps the greatest swordsman to have ever lived -- it is the act of CUTTING, and not slicing/slashing that makes a great warrior. Siege your opponent -- and cut them in two. It's all in the follow through.

With light sabers, perhaps they allow slicing/slashing to be as effective as cutting? Let's examine this premise.

A jedi who does not perfect his craft is not a jedi.

A jedi who does not follow the way of great sword hands, falls in battle.

A jedi who slashes, slices, is off balance.

A jedi who cuts, falls like leaves on his opponents.

The jedi master will only cut.

So, please Mr. Lucas, when you are buying How Stuff Works adverts, keep in mind that the people at Slashdot will cut, and surprisingly we won't actually slash, after all.

Hmm... cutdot.org anyone?

But does a $200 19" CRT have enough "dots" to display all the pixels in a 1920x1080p picture? (I'm not sure. I really want to know.) My knowledge of display technologies is limited, but I think 19" CRTs in this price range don't have enough "dots" (calculated from dot pitch) to display all of the pixels and will not give a "true" 1920x1080p picture.

Example: I've been thinking about getting a Samsung 997DF, which has a max resolution of 1920x1440 (a resolution I'd only use for 1080p video). However, it also has a horizontal dot pitch of 0.20mm and a viewable width of about 14.4" (about 365.76mm). That's about 1829 viewable dots across the screen, which is less than the number of horizontal pixels in a 1920x1080p picture.

The ability to display 1920x1080p is the biggest reason I'd choose a $200 19" CRT over a $230 17" LCD. However, if the 1080p video is "messed up," then I'd rather get a 17" LCD and just convert everything to 720p.

This is a pretty good decrease in consumption, but according to http://computer.howstuffworks.com/monitor10.htm "CRTs are somewhat power-hungry, at about 110 watts for a typical display, especially when compared to LCDs, which average between 30 and 40 watts."

Why on earth would you need a straight line?!

First of all, if you remember your physics lessons, you'd also remember that light bends, or rather, is reflected off of the sides of the FO cable, and eventually reaches the end. 1 photon or billions, it matters not.

If you still want to review, check out this link explaining how FO cables work: http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/fiber-optic2. htm

As far as speed, 120 KMH is very good, especially considering those who want utmost security will not use conventional communications, but rather send courier or take it themselves.

Routing is not an issue. The army, the government, banks, whoever who wants a hotline, the lack of routing is not a problem. (Remember those red phones that went to the Kremlin? Imagine a secure line running under the ocean carring a message! The longest it could take is a week for a message, and that's if you are standing on the date line at the equator and want to send a message to the other side of the world (That name escapes me atm).

National communications (coast to coast) in slightly more than a day. Much more efficient than any courier with a secure message or even normal letters.

Of course, all this is moot if there are no such messages, in which case I will go and get a life and therapy.

I'm wondering if you really do know what you are talking about with the airports. Your the first one I have heard that says there is nothing that has to be done. Political gateway dot com seems to disagree with you. Here is one about the investment at Heathrow (London for those of us that don't know about Heathrow across the pond) airport business At Dulles Airport in Virginia, I understand that some construction going on over there is for the A380 to handle the 2nd deck. So do they have it wrong or do you? I can't seem to find anything that says nothing has to be modified at 747 airports. I dare say, you seem to be the one that is uninformed, or do those experts have it all wrong? I'm taking them for their word.

Comparing the fuel efficiency of the A380 to a 40 year old plane seems a bit odd to me. Update the 747 with the 777 engines and see what happens. Do you compare new cars efficiency to 40 year old cars too? Your comparison also assumes that the plane is fully loaded. The modern 747-400 seems to do better on fuel than the A380.

I'm still bothered that you think that every part of my argument is wrong. You don't think the SST was a white elephant? They would still be flying it if it was cost effective, especially after updating it after the takeoff crash. There was a conversion problem between the C-5 Galaxy and the A380 (darn metric). The two aircraft are very similar but the A380 is designed to take off with more weight. They are so similar (after I converted correctly) I wonder if they started with the C-5's plans and updated them (maybe they started with the 747's plans). By the way, if you take off in a fully loaded A380, one that weighs in at the max of 560 tonnes, the max landing weight is 386 tonnes. So you have to get rid of 174 tonnes to land if something goes wrong after takeoff. Seems that a C-5 could take more than 800 people, especially with 2 decks. There again, the C-5 has been around for decades. If there was a need, it would have already been put into service as a passenger plane. You would also have to update terminals to handle the C-5 as well. Top aircraft in the world - http://www.globalaircraft.org/50_largest.htm. The an-225 is still bigger than the A380. The spruce goose is larger, a prop plane that Howard Hughes built (a nearly 60 year old sea plane).

Well maybe I should be glad that someone is happy that Airbus with their big government subsidy has a new plane. Hurray for Airbus and the EU. I hope the US doesn't build something bigger.

Your post betrays a tremendous misunderstanding of fuel efficiency. Planes are almost *always* more fuel efficient than cars. While Jet Engines are pretty fuel hungry, they actually do extremely well in Miles Per Gallon Per Pasenger. Remember, the 747 may be burning 5 gallons per mile, but it's moving ~500 people plus cargo.

Here's an article I dug up using Google.

Your original question, while not related to nuclear reactors (yep, they can't detonate), is a good one. The sun is very big, but very far away. A nuclear weapon up-close can exceed the sun's apparent output for a short time. The radiation from a weapon is different, too - there aren't any nuclear reactions at the sun's surface.

Check this out for more info on what a nuclear blast in near space can do: http://science.howstuffworks.com/e-bomb2.htm/. People don't die, but computers do.

720p HDTV uncompressed:
8 bit @ 1280 x 720 @ 59.94field = 110.48 MB per/sec, or 398 GB per/hr.
10 bit @ 1280 x 720 @ 59.94field = 121.52 MB per/sec, or 438 GB per/hr.
1080i and 1080p HDTV uncompressed: 8 bit @ 1920 x 1080 @ 24fps = 99.53 MB per/sec, or 358 GB per/hr.
10 bit @ 1920 x 1080 @ 24fps = 109.43 MB per/sec, or 394 GB per/hr.

but is there a technical reason why you can't just make the little plastic bubble bigger

By the way, that wasn't off-topic at all.

I like the Penny per Page (http://computer.howstuffworks.com/penny-per-page2 .htm/) internet economy model, and think it could work. It would fix the ad problems and can generate much more revenue for content providers. It only costs obsessive web surfers more than they already pay for internet. The most casual surfers will pay less for internet access than they do now, if these numbers are to be trusted. Of course the link I provided is to a site that would stand to make millions more than they already do if everyone switched to this model.

For many reasons, institutional libraries should pay the page charges for their institutional users rather than pay proprietary publishers for a license to read a paper.

1. Once a library ends a non-open-access electronic subscription, it no longer can access articles published while it paid for access. Same if the publisher goes out of business. With a paper subscription, the library at least has printed copies from when it subscribed.

2. The page charge is a one-time cost whereas the license fee is paid by every library on the planet that subscribes to the journal. With digital rights management (DRM), it might be paid each time a user reads an article. Economists tell us that goods should, in a free market, sell for marginal cost. The marginal cost to allow someone to download a PDF file is nearly zero. Here is an estimate. A T1 line, in the US, costs perhaps US$1000/month and offers about 0.2MB/s of bandwidth (megabytes not megabits), figures I got from http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question372.htm. A month has roughly 20 million seconds, so the cost per megabyte is given by:

   ($1000 / month) x (1 month/20 million sec) x (1 sec / 0.2MB) x (100 cents / 1$)

   That comes out to (1/40) cents/MB. Being conservative, say that the full T1 bandwidth is only 25% used and that website administration adds another factor of 2 to the cost, so multiply the above cost by 8. The result is still only 0.2 cents/MB. For a typical 0.1MB pdf article, it is 0.02 cents per download. Even if an article is downloaded 10000 times (most authors would love to be so frequently read!), the total cost is $2. It is a tiny cost compared to reviewing articles, convering them to a decent publication format (e.g. converting to TeX/LaTeX or dealing with absurd figure formats).

   Along the lines of charging marginal cost, the open-access page charges are probably the publisher's marginal cost (or only a bit higher than it). Fine! Scientists would like helpful service providers, such as open-access publishers, to stay in business for a long time, and should be willing to support them.

3. Which brings up a third reason for open-access publication: archiving. All publishers (except perhaps the Royal Society in London, which has published for over 300 years) will go out of business. What happens to their archive of pdf (or whatever format) articles? With open-access publishing, other repositories can mirror all the articles (thereby also redistributing the already tiny bandwidth costs). Replication is the best way to preserve data. Similarly, if the files need to be converted to a new format (PDF version 25, SVG, or whatever), anyone can do so with open-access articles.

4. A fourth reason, related to archiving, is search indexing. If articles are freely available, auto-indexes such as http://scholar.google.com/ will pick it up. If the article is guarded by subscription passwords, it will not be indexed unless the publisher submits the articles to the index. And they may be too busy, or they may be out of business (see reason three above).

As an example of how proprietary publishers can act, Gordon and Breach (GandB), since bought by Taylor and Francis, sued the American Institute of Physics (AIP) in the US, Germany, France, Switzerland because the AIP published a price comparison, and Gordon and Breach's journals came at or near the bottom of the table (i.e. most expensive). GandB claimed that the table was false advertising under the Lanham Act. http://barschall.stanford.edu/ has trial judgements and transcript, as well as the original articles and pricing tables in dispute.

The AIP won the case almost completely, but it cost them millions of dollars. And that cost has affected the thinking of research librarians

If you increase taxation, the people will ask for more efficient cars.

No, if the cost of gas goes up, the market will lean towards more efficient vehicles. Raising taxes is only one way in which the cost of gas might go up.

20 years later you have a country with efficient cars and highly priced gas. That's what happened in most European countries and that's why europeans cars are more efficients than those in North America.

Are your cars so efficient that you now break even with us in terms of how much you spend on gas? Europe ans pay about 78% of the cost of gas towards taxes, versus 31% in the US. In other words, you pay 2.5 times what we do in gas taxes. Therefore, your cars better be going 2.5 times further than ours on a tank of gas, or your idea of how taxation really helps is kind of loopy.

Fuel cells need a fuel to produce electricity. I don't think they will be any good for electronics (unless the electronics are AC powered and the power plant is a fuel cell). They aren't a replacement for batteries.

Here is some info on fuel cells: http://science.howstuffworks.com/fuel-cell1.htm

first i dont really care of NMHD because they have have a charge memory.

-1 Wrong

Nickel-metal hydride does suffer from a memory effect; nickel-cadmium, however, does.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/battery7.htm

Oxyride Car

Oxyride Test

CC.

What is this sun of which you speak?

And, for the record, I do get plenty of natural light!

• Batteries have relatively low energy density (compared to gasoline). Gasoline stores about 36 kWh energy / gallon, or about 12 kWh/kg mass. Your best lithium ion batteries are currently around 150 Wh/kg.
• Batteries tend to have a relatively lower power density. They're happiest if they're discharged over the course of an hour or more. Push the current higher than that, and they tend to heat up, turning some of their stored energy into heat, which means less electrical energy actually comes out of the battery. Lookup Peukert numbers if you want more info on that.
• The amount of battery mass you have to add to get a decent range makes for a very heavy vehicle.

Race car fuel cells are built to take a very big impact without leaking (fuel cell is their name for a tank). They're made with a flexible composite bladder, internal foam baffling and aircraft quality fittings that seal automatically if disconnected. See here and here.

The problem with diesel in the USA is the lack of refuelling stations with diesel.

Otherwise there'd be diesel hybrids too. Think about it. Diesel engines are good with steady loads. Diesel-electrics are proven technology - e.g. trains see: http://travel.howstuffworks.com/diesel-locomotive. htm

Just found this delicious article on howstuff works:

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/firefox.htm/prin table

BTW - I keep forgetting the name of the service that provides automatic mirroring of websites. It is some stateside university that is behind it. Wouldn't it be a GREAT idea if either story submitters or Slashdot story posters browsed through the links in a submission via that service and then posted the alternate URLs as well as the original ??? Or am I commiting sacrilege by proposing something that could almost kill the slashdot effect ?

to stop people from transmitting you would have to restrain them but from what I have read DSS could help avoid jamming of your signal.
check here for a brief overview:
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/question326.h tm

Try Solar

You don't get the full 50 hp of a gasoline motor from 0 rpm.

Right; technically speaking, you even get negative horsepower below a certain engine speed, as there's friction and the engine isn't making any significant power to overcome compression. However, road speeds don't really have to have much to do with engine speeds when starting out, because of torque converters in automatic transmissions, and clutches in manuals.

Keep in mind that many hybrids are paired with continuously variable transmissions, too, which allow the engine to be in the powerband at much lower road speeds (which facilitates charging in stop and go traffic, as well as low-end efficiency).

So yes, there is some time involved in the motor spinning up, but it doesn't need to be proportional to the time spent accelerating in the car, and it's practically instantaneous. A better question is whether you have sufficent traction to use the 100 horsepower on the road from a stop.

From How SSN's work:

"statisticians say that the nine-digit SSN allows for approximately one billion possible combinations!"

Great stuff :)

As opposed to generating the torque right in the engine when it's needed. Sure, electric cars sound neat, but when you really want mechanical force it doesn't make much sense to generate the mechanical force hundreds of miles away in a power plant, transmit it through a lossy system, store it in a lossy system, and then convert it right back to mechanical force. Unless we get really, really cheap fusion soon, it won't be economical.

Simple solution: put the nuclear reactor in your car!

(yes, I know this is an April Fools joke from a couple years ago. It's still funny, and perhaps someday it will even be true :)

the government does NOT recycle them! There are only around a billion possible #'s though, so at some point they will have to be recycled. (SSN's are assigned randomly or sequentially, some of the digits mean something.) How SSN's work

Wonder how much juice you could generate if you were to mount a stirling engine at the end of this sucker. Seems like it'd be a lot cheaper/easier to implement than normal high efficiancy solar cells if you could work out a reasonable and reliable sun tracking system.

If the submitter had just linked to the printable version or you clicked on the link from thier link, you wouldn't have to!

There won't be enough corn to drive all the America around. It is just not very efficient. Besides it seem it is easier to mass-process petrolium than to mass-harvest and process corn. Here is a little calculation, that sort of explains.

I personally whish they would build more nuclear reactors, they are very safe and they can by used for hydrolysis to get hydrogen. I couldn't find a cost analysis of that, anyone have any idea?

For one thing, "optical audio" most commonly refers to a digital audio signal carried through fiber optics. But you're trying to describe audio visualizations; those have been around since at least July 1999, when I first saw the Geiss plug-in for Winamp.