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Tornado in a Can
geyser writes "What stuff matters more than a device that can tear things apart? Frank Polifka has a patent on his Windhexe device that creates a tornado force wind. Besides pulverizing concrete, it can pulverize small objects including jelly fish, and chicken feet without destroying the organic compounds. The chickens don't like it. Is this really a prototype Quake weapon? I could only find newspaper articles about the device. Has anyone seen it in action and can you give us a first hand report?"
Sounds like a good way to reduce land fill space. Just pulverize everything to the molecular level shake and let settle.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
Running that material through a drier and then through Polifka's machine could produce a powder form of those poultry byproducts that could be sold as a flavoring or nutritious additive to pet foods or fertilizers, Winsness thought.
"The single most important quality of the tornado in a can is whatever goes into it comes out with its nutritional value," he said. "You can get four times the price of nonedible waste."
With the population growth being what it is and the cost of burial plots skyrocketing, how long before Soylent Green is a reality???
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
From the patent:
;)
(b) a lower enclosure disposed below and in a tandem arrangement with said upper enclosure, said lower enclosure including a lower annular sidewall having a substantially inverted conical configuration and open upper and lower ends and defining a lower interior chamber, said lower annular sidewall of said lower enclosure being mounted at said open upper end thereof to said upper annular sidewall at said open lower end of said upper enclosure such that said lower annular sidewall and lower interior chamber of said lower enclosure are substantially continuous and in flow communication with said upper annular sidewall and upper interior chamber of said upper enclosure...
Ok, one, that's one sentence, and two, the word "said" appears there 11 times. I felt like I was listening to "Einstein on the beach" again.
But apart from that, it (and the rest of the patents) describes the thing, and it's not a tornado gun like most of y'all are hypothesizing. It's...well, it's basically a wind-powered coffee grinder - no blades, just wind. So you can forget about pointing it at someone and watching their molecules randomly rearrange themselves, k?
Triv
You know some guy down at the sewer treatment plant is saying "hey Larry.. I'll bet I could convince someone that its food.."
l ud ge.cfm
Actually, treated sewage sludge is regularly used to grow vegetables.
http://www.organicconsumers.org/Toxic/sewadge_s
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
There _is_ no "wierding module."
May David Lynch be cursed forever for adding such a stupid concept to an otherwise awesome movie. That, and the damn rain at the end.
Ya know, a friend of mine died of Jakob-Kreutzfeld disease not too long ago.
It's supposed that he got it from eating beef contaminated by BSE, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, which is a prion disease spread through the industry practice of feeding butcher's waste to cattle.
Cannibalism is bad, people. Ref. Oliver Sach's description of diseases among the descendants of cannibals. It's an unhealthy feedback loop, that optimizes disease organisms.
So, the poultry farmers have already spread salmonella through the entire US chicken industry with their unsound practices, now they want to do it better, cheaper, faster.
So much for chicken soup as health food.
Put your old printed circuit boards in here and pulverize away! You could reclaim copper and gold EASILY from this contraption, and reduce the remainder to a fine powder. You could probably refine even that at a later point.
Think of it! Go down to the corner Tornado-in-a-can and feed it your old motherboard, monitor, TV, anything! Its a geek dream: pulverize something to tiny bits, recycle useable hardware, get some money back at the same time!
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy, and taste good with ketchup.
I would love to see this used on process mechanically reclaimed meat. I understand that it breaks things up to the molecular level. This means it would break apart those nasty prions that survive autoclaving. Note that prions are organic molecular compounds, meaning that they consist of more than one molecule.
I can no longer donate blood due to the FDA's concern about nvCJ. All for being in the U.S. Army in Europe during the 80's when they imported their beef from the UK.
Strange as it seems, I remember reading about a WWII German Aiti-Aircraft weapon that was strangely similar to this. Supposedly, it could generate vortecies powerful enough to make an aircraft uncontrollable in flight and in some cases break up. As I remember, it never had the range they wanted (tens, rather than thousands, of meters) and was never deployed operationally.
Looks like another 50-year-old technology has found a use doing something it wasn't originally designed for.
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
Thats how things worked at my last job. The theoreticians(msce) would gather around the white board and babble for hours while I the practical bastard that I am would get busy attempting to replicate the customers environment and thus the customers problem and soon enough I would have the solution to the problem all worked out.
The plasma torch has a better potential of destroying
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dangerous compounds and generating energy at the
same time.
It's really interesting stuff.
http://gtalumni.org/StayInformed/magazine/sum02
Absolute statements are never true
Kuru (named after a people in New Guinea?), aka CJD (I think) came from the natives ritual of "eating the dead" - a relative would die, the family would "eat" the relative, then those members would get the disease, die from it, then others would eat them, and so on.
What I find odd about the whole thing, is why this has only recently (relatively) cropped up. In the case of Mad Cow, one can almost say "Well, it is only happenning now because we didn't feed animals to herbivores, or within the same species" - but that only makes limited sense:
You do have a point, rodgerd - chickens will (at minimum) kill other chickens, and peck at them, eating the kill to a certain extent (my parents raised chickens, I remember this happening since you mentioned it) - I am certain it is more common in the wild. Furthermore, human culture has practiced canabilism in the past, and the Kuru tribe certainly practiced their ritual prior to the discovery of in in the 1950's - so why is it only "now" (ie, since the 1950's) that prion-related diseases have come forth? If this was an issue that has occurred often in the past, why didn't the Kuru people get wiped out long before? They never thought that the dead relatives were bad for them to eat - they thought they died from being possessed by demons (or something to that effect from what I have read) - so why didn't the cycle continue until the very end, a long time ago?
The only answer I can come up with is that prions have somehow either been woken up, or have been introduced in some manner into human culture - most likely accidentally from some form of processing (I wouldn't doubt meat processing, but it could be something else). Anybody have other reasonings?
The scary thing is that it won't even matter if you go vegetarian or vegan - it has been postulated that prions exist nearly everywhere, and quite possibly that animals (including us) are born with them - and that something triggers them to make them into the crazy, murderous, pseudo-DNA/RNA that they are...
Frightening...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I would never confuse the two, but I'm just reminded of several relatives of mine.
1. Uncle who designed a Underwater electrical connector which works and doesn't ground out. Highest level of Education: Some Highschool.
2 Uncle who was one of the orignal programmers at Nasdac. Highest Level of Education: AA degree in Logic.
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien