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Making Ice Without Electricity
j-beda writes "Time Magazine is running an article telling us how Dave Williams is trying to make ice for third-world applications using the Hilsch-Ranque vortex-tube effect (first developed in 1930 by G.J. Ranque), where swirling air is split into hot and cold components." The method is horribly inefficient but Williams is hoping it could yield helpful results in areas where electricity is really not an option.
In Winnipeg we just leave water outside for a few minutes.
Trolling is a art,
Making ice for the third world? Heck, this could come in handy in a place like New Orleans, too!
to make that "high rate of rotation (over 1,000,000 rpm)." Better use the ice on your legs after.
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How about we try and ensure we give them clean water first. The only use for this is in refrigerators and keeping food fresh.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Like New Orleans?
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useful indeed. (10000000 rpm could be acheivd with mules and huge gears?)
I think that we all know that it's already been tried, and baaaad things happened as a result:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091557/
I don't respond to AC's.
The water leaves YOU outside for a few minutes.
From the Wikipedia link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_tube):
> The vortex tube, also known as the Hilsch-Ranque vortex tube, is a heat pump with no moving parts
> ressurized gas is injected into a specially designed chamber and accelerated to a high rate of rotation (over 1,000,000 rpm).
How can you rotate anything without moving parts???
Didn't Dr. Emmit Brown invent something like this back in 1845 or so? You know, shortly before Marty arrived...
TIME forces a subscribtion to read the rest of the article.
Dave Williams is trying to make ice for third-world
Turning the rare drinking water they've got into solid ice, eh?
... Time really needs to get its story straight with regards to scientific reporting. This method is a) not innovative b) not practical and c) REQUIRES SIGNIFICANT ENERGY INPUT. Vortex tubes have been around forever, and they are not some form of perpetual motion. It is a well-understood effect, and one which does not violate any of thermodynamics. You put in a lot of energy via compressed air, and get output in the form of a thermal differential. The key point is that you need a lot of high pressure input...where is this going to come from? Electricity. Unless you use a combustion engine to turn the crank on a compressor, in which case that's your energy source. What are villagers in rural india going to do? Blow really hard through the tube?
Because it's a Time subscriber only article. There's no really interesting discussion in the first ten posts because, well, noone can know anything or RTFA. Why do it this way?
My little site.
Where, oh where would it be more efficient to use this crazy scheme than to generate electricity by various conventional means, then make ice with it?
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
But I presume that the gas is injected into the side of the chamber at an angle, so that it rotates around due to collision with the rounded walls. Not too mysterious. I'm just wondering about that high rate of rotation.
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According to TFA, it uses 35x the amount of energy as an electric freezer. That's a lot of juice. And you need that juice to move the compressed air around (right?) You can't just hook a tube up to a windmill and magically have ice come out.
It seems entirely counter productive to me. This kind of phenomenon seems like it's usefull in situations where you aren't worried about energy cost, but mabe some other concerns (like rapidly cooling something?)
1. It is very inefficient.
2. You still have to have the energy to compress the air.
3. High pressure air systems do not take abuse well and can be very dangerous.
4. This thing will be noisy as all get out.
Yea he says that you could use wind, water, and or solar to power this thing but you could do the same with conventional cooling systems as well. Solid state cooling systems would be far more sturdy and a conventional compressor based system far more efficent.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
10000000 rpm..? My deskstar harddrive spins that fast.
If you can spin something at 1,000,000 RPM why not spin a copper coil inside a magnetic field and make electricity instead? Quite useful stuff I've heard.
In the few areas there are no eletricity you can always use a generator, powered by diesel or gas. That's the way people do here in the Amazon jungle and works fine.
This guy is basically clueless.
I read the article, and the wikipeda entry, and am left with a question. Without electricity and fule how do we get the compressed gas to run this thing?
We are the Borg...
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There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
- Sh!t
According to the article this method doesn't require electricity. Then where does the energy to generate the required volume of compressed air come from? Hand pumps?
Download my free songs!
Sounds like the sort of invention Jimmy Buffett (as opposed to Warren Buffett) might be interested in.
Margaritaville without electricity...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Ammonia based gas absorption refrigeration works well with heat source, such as kerosene or propane. I often thought about ways to focus solar radiation to do the trick, as well.
There was even a pretty cool movie made based on it.
Computational Chemistry products and services.
Time probably did it to cash in on the slashdot traffic. Post it for free until there is a decent amount of money to be made and then close it off to the public. Pigs
Want ice without electricity? Drive the compressor with a small diesel power plant.
Well clearly Tanqueray is fronting the cash, and as long as it costs less than fifteen locals on Gilligan generator bikes hooked to a Sub-Zero, they're going ahead with it.
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
Ancient Egyptians created ice by fanning wide shallow ponds of water in caves. The thin skin of ice that would form would be collected in insulating feather and run down to the Pharaoh.
Why try to develop something entirely new, with the resulting time and money requirements? A few solar cells + Peltier coolers + some insulation and an ice tray. Yes, Peltiers are inefficient... but they're solid-state, at least, which I think ought to do for remote areas as far as durability. I would think you could assemble a decent mini-freezer out of things portable enough to carry anywhere:
1) Flexible solar panels (less efficient but more portable than glass)
2) A handful of Peltiers... they're pretty small
3) A couple of cans of "Great Stuff" spray-in insulation, or cans of A-B component expanding insulation
One of my friends went to Peru to assemble a non-electric solar water purifier, and anything they couldn't carry on their backs on 30-mile-a-day hikes for a week didn't go. Now that's a design constraint!
This was mentioned in the book Fab by Neil Gershenfeld.5 027458/104-9198080-3099155?v=glance
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/046
1. Wind turbines used to create it and charge batteries at the same time.
2. Solar cells used to create it and charge batteries at the same time.
Inefficiency is in the eyes of the beholder.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Yea right, asshole. Let's go with this scenario, where we:
Take away all of your food, clothing, and money.
Take away your education and literacy.
Leave you starving in unarable land.
Now build a generator! Good luck!
Seriously. You are an asshole. Do you think people in third world countries have distinctly different brains? For the most part, their societies were either screwed by outside influences (see African colonialism), or they simply reached a point of equilibrium where technology was not required. (Native Americans.)
This doesnt make them stupid, but it sure as fuck does make you look that way.
Asshole.
Or maybe it does.
r
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Refrigerato
No moving parts.
Uses amonia, butane, and water...
This method requires a lot of compressed air, and ultimately, a lot of energy. If electricity "is not an option," (presumeably because of remoteness from a reliable grid) then where is the energy to make the compressed air coming from?
Because it would be far more efficient to just hook the energy source right up to a conventional refrigeration compressor, surely.
All in all, it sounds to me like the Sun Frost people have a better plan, as far as sunny places go, at least.
Is it just me, or does the fact that an alternative use for this process is the enrichment of uranium seem like a bad idea for the third world (read terrorist training ground)?
Clearly this still takes power, even if it's coming from a user turning a crank.
It is an inefficient system, so why not use the same power source for something more efficient like a peltier junction?
How inefficient is horribly inefficient? The gas motors that powers all our vehicles is only 30% efficient, but that's when it's at its peak output (pedal to the metal). Most of the time it averages 17% efficient (17% of the energy generated actually makes it to the wheels).
If one were, say, to be carting fish from the ocean to the market in the next town over, you don't need to make your ice from potable water. You can put the ice in the bottom of your cart, put down a tarp, and load the fish on top of that. The fish arrives much fresher than it would otherwise. Such uses of ice would vastly improve life in many parts of the world.
Not an option because ...? because theylack the basic intelligence necessary to do something that others have been doing for more than 100 years?
Um, no. Where in the world did you get that interpretation?
It's because generating electricity means you need to build a turbine, or dam a river, or something along those lines along with having enough copper wire and other necessities to store, transfer, and transform the current. And there are plenty of places on this wide blue ball we call Earth where those things do not yet exist.
No, because they lack the fossil fuels.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
Or perhaps they don't have the infrustructure or tools to do it. Couldn't be anything like that could it? Must be some prejudice on the part of the writer. Why don't you go up into mountains and make enough electicity to power a refrigerator. I'll even let you use the tools in your car. What? Can't do it? You must because you lack the necessary intelligence to do something everyone does with the flip of a switch.
"because theylack the basic intelligence necessary to do something that others have been doing for more than 100 years?"
:|
What exactly are you trying to imply the parent is saying?
Could it not be as easily assumed that the parent means it's really not an option because they don't have the capital to invest in the inftrastructure?
Do you own a jump to conclusions mat? You know, it's like a mat that has different conclusions on it that you can...jump to.
Sheesh.
You can tell the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
just fill up a ice tray and leave it out side in sub zero temperature ... ice without elecricity :)
Venetian Snares was right?
Couldn't read the full article as it is now "premium content" but if you can make compressed air you can make electricity, and use that electricity for more than refrigeration. The comments about the vortex tubes' inefficiency are correct, so even if you figure the inefficiencies of (solar/labor/water power) to electric then operation of either a freon or Peltier cooler, you are better off.
/ tpad.htm
If someone wants to do something really interesting for the third world, make an adsorbtion freezer using solar concentrators for the heat source. This article discusses some issues: http://me.sjtu.edu.cn/english/scientific_research
And I thought this was just a movie. Harrison Ford starred in a movie where a genius inventor makes exactly such a device that makes ice without electricity. Suffice it to say things didn't go to well for his character.
AccountKiller
The full article seems to be available in the print-only version here:, 1101299,00.html
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816
You're not missing much, though -- I'm guessing this one was a sidebar blurb, as it's only two paragraphs anyways.
The Romans used to make ice in the deserts of Palestine and North Africa. It seems to me they were around before electricity and Frigidaire.
5 40.Sh.r.html
http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/nov99/941723
Of course, the large temperature difference between the day and night in the desert it what drives it. That method probably won't work in tropical climates.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Perhaps they could do with this in LA
"because theylack the basic intelligence necessary to do something that others have been doing for more than 100 years."
Knowing how to do something, and having the resources to do it isn't the same. While it may seem trivial to those in technologically advanced countries, the production of electricity in useful quantities isn't easy. Not everyone has access to the same resources that some of us take for granted. This is especially the case in countries where there is a huge diachotomy between the rich and poor. And by resources I'm not just referring to physical machinery and fuel, but education as well. And on top of that you occasionally have oppressive regimes trying to keep the poor in dependent situtations so that the rich won't lose their labor force. okay, I'm starting to get off topic now.. All I'm trying to say is it would be fallacious to assume that the only reason that certain populations don't have electricity is because they're not intelligent enough.
The President leaves you in the water outside for a few days.
When he isn't snowboarding or volunteering for Engineers Without Borders, Dave Williams spends his days thinking about something most of us take for granted: ice. As he discovered on a volunteer trip to Haiti in 2002, ice can be a godsend to a poor village, keeping fish fresh on a journey to market or preserving vaccines. But how do you make it without electricity, without access to coolants like Freon or fuels like propane? Williams, 26, knew that forcing compressed air through a hole in the middle of a pipe causes hot and cold air to flow from opposite ends, a phenomenon known as the Ranque-Hilsch vortex-tube effect. No one is quite sure how the separation works, but feed the cold air into a container, he reasoned, and you would have an icemaker and a freezer, which would have zero operating costs and would be environmentally friendly, since it wouldn't require chemicals and the jet of air could be generated via a compressor powered by wind, water, man or animal.
At least that was the idea. Tinkering with heat-transfer equations, Williams tried to determine how much energy it would take to yield a block of ice. "It had been a while since I'd done real math problems. I had to break out the old textbook," says Williams, a product-development consultant with his own firm, Dissigno, in San Francisco. After eons of number crunching, he hit on the right formula and built a prototype. It isn't very efficient; his device uses 35 times as much energy as an electric fridge to make 1 kg of ice. But its simplicity could yield a killer app in Third World villages, where Williams hopes aid groups will distribute his icemaker as an economic-development tool. He aims to field-test it in Haiti later this year. --By Daren Fonda. Reported by Matt Smith/New York
This has already been dealt with in a semi-cost-effective manner:
h =solar%20ice
http://www.homepower.com/files/solarice.pdf?searc
The article is a bit dated, so the costs are undoubtedly off, but it's got to be one of the lowest cost solutions for this particular problem.
If I didn't know better i'd have sworn the pictures were coming from somewhere in Africa.
Looking at other areas in the US, It's interesting to note just how much of America is really poor.
Deleted
here is a picture of one. it makes it easier to see how it works.
Where would you get the compressed air?
This doesn't work with wind.
"Journalism": it's all about advertising.
Some people actually rely on the government instead of thinking and acting for themselves.
Soviet America, indeed.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
I'm sure you are correct that all 3rd world countries are the way that they are because they are not intelligent. What a strange species they are...
1) Power plants are built by companies.
2) The common man does not rise up to build power plants.
3) If they did, that group of common people would now be called a "company".
4) Companies also seek profits.
5) 3rd world countries are 3rd world because they are poor.
For those who didn't read TFA, and haven't ever read about the operation of these devices, Tim Cockerill wrote his thesis about them. He provides an excellent reference for the thermodynamic operation of these devices. You can put down your tinfoil hats, as they do obey classical thermodynamics perfectly well.
here is a picture of one. it makes it easier to see how it works.
HERE
How can you rotate anything without moving parts???
10000000 rpm could be acheivd with mules and huge gears?
To make that "high rate of rotation (over 1,000,000 rpm)." Better use the ice on your legs after.
If you press a gas into a cylinder with a specific angle, it starts to rotate at a very high rpm. Here is the construction.
Please RTFM first.
Create a 10 mile high structure. Send water to top. Bring ice back down.
... but I fear my team of trained Maxwell's demons would go on strike
yes, we have no bananas
I have friends who have run these things for years and they are trouble free. The main problem with them is that their thermodynamic efficiency is poor, so they end up producing a great deal more heat than cold. Therefore the fuel costs are higher than the electricity costs would be for the more common phase-change process used in ordinary everyday appliances.
There is nothing special about propane as a heat source. Kerosene is also used though other fuels are plausible. The caloric output of the heat source has to be fairly steady, which makes a wood-fired system more problematic, but still more plausible than a vortex system.
In reality a phase-change compressor driven by bicycle pedals would be more practical, if human-powered refrigeration is the goal. The technology is established and the efficiency has the benefit of decades of development.
We had a bunch of them around Disney when I was carving foam. We were cooking in the paper suits and working in a tent outside so it was like being in an oven. We had airlines so I strapped a vortex tube to my belt and ran the flex hose into my suit. I just had to hook up the airline when I was working. Everyone else was dying and I actually got a bit chilly at times. The joke was no one else would do it and they all thought I was crazy. If it comes to cooking or dragging around a hose I'll drag the hose.
They take a hell of a lot of air pressure so they are wildly inefficent. It'd make more sense to hook up a generator to whatever energy source you have rather than a compressor. Even if you're running a windmill you could power a good sized freezer for the energy a votex tube would take to operate. They're a lot of fun and have nitch applications but they are mostly a curiousity.
http://www.ggw.org/~cac/IcyBall/crosley_icyball.ht ml
GreasyBloater
If the article is correct, the important parts of this invention are: zero operating costs and no chemical refridgerants. The device is so simple that there are very few things can break. Consequently, it ought to be a good deal more reliable than freon based systems or Peltier systems. Further, without the chemical refridgerants, the device is much less hazardous to the environment.
I can see it now, the second generation freezer: It would be 35 times more efficient to crank a compressor. So for the Mark II freezer, instead of employing the whole village to crank one vortex freezer, with a compressor he would only need one guy ==> rampant unemployment...
Oh well, what the hell...
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Ive been wondering if I'd ever see someone try to find a practical application for this. Ever since I saw it used in my science class, Ive heard that screech in the back of my head and tried to think of a way to use it.
There is no spork.
I've already done that, it's called sex with my spouse.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Stirling engines work in reverse as well.
1. Create a temperature differential and get motion.
2. Create motion and get a temperature differential.
It seems that a requirement of the Vortex tube is compressed air - that's got to come from somewhere.
All the worlds indeed a
An ammonia cycle refrigerator can use a heat source to operate (the common gas or oil fired refrigerator). Would it not be better to focus sunlight on an ammonia cycle fridge?
Oh well, what the hell...
When exactly did they have food, clothing and money? When exactly did they have education and literacy? How is it that they managed to go to and stay in an unarable land when they were starving? Here is some evidence that people in some countries have distinctly different brains: This is Bruce Lahn's Brain on ASPM and MCPH1
The icyball refrigerator had no moving parts. It used about a cup of kerosene a day. It was developed in the 1920's based upon the notion that inexpensive refrigeration was very important for the world. It *still* seems like a good idea. See ahref=http://www.ggw.org/~cac/IcyBall/crosley_icyb all.htmlrel=url2html-9122http://www.ggw.org/~cac/I cyBall/crosley_icyball.html>
Your refrigerator doesn't require electricity. All it requires is something to spin the compressor, which includes water wheels, gerbils (a lot, one would suppose) or disembodied spirits (how many fit on the head of a pin again?).
Why use compressed air? One already compresses the refrigerant, so no advantage can be found by using compressed air.
If his goal is to use air instead fo freon for refrigeration, I suggest that he build Stirling engines.
Works in a desert envornment where night skies are clear and humidity is low (little water vapor in the atmosphere to absord heat radiation).
Dig hole and put water in bottom
During day cover and insulate (cover with a board and heap sand over) to reduce heat infiltration
At night remove the cover to expose to the sky and radiate heat into space
I'm not sure of the time scales involved but you
can make ice this way in the desert.
Dr. Frank J. Nagy Fermilab Computing Division Authentication and Directory Services Group
More Bad Science journalism. Scientists aren't superhuman tinkerers, or (as in this case) starry-eyed dreamers.
useless sig advice - Read Nabokov.
Solar cells and windgenerators is your friends :)
The article says that the device is 35 times less efficient than a normal freezer using a compressor and would have to be wind-turbine (or otherwise) powered. If you had a wind-turbine with at least 3% (1/35) efficiency in electricity generation from mechanical motion, you'd be better off using that and a normal freezer. Besides, his freezer requires moving air in and out of the freezer which means it must be constantly running as opposed to something with a good thermal insulation that can run in cycles.
Forget your wedding anniversary.
Works every time!
What?
First world oftenly is confused or don't know at all of what is a third world country. Usually people tend to think it's a huge jungle where people don't use shoes. There are rich people, and they live just like in the first world. There is a lot of energy in the third world. The problem is poor people there can't afford it.
... ice makes you!
~~par
This reminds me of "Mosquito Coast" with Harrison Ford. He went down into the Amazon and made a big ice maker to help out the natives. He ended up going nuts and polluting the place. It's a good movie. More cold storage could be very useful in the 3rd world - food storage, etc. It'd be great if this worked out. Better healthcare would be nice too...
For an interesting look at a time before refrigerators when ice was cut from lakes in North America and shipped around the world, read Gavin Weightman's book The Frozen Water Trade.
Wouldn't a (reverse) sterling engine be better
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine
I read someplace that a poor village set up a generator underneath the merry go round in the playground. This was used to supplement the meager supply they had. So the kids were encouraged to visit the playground on the way to and from school.
Back when I lived in an African village, 1989-92, we had a kerosene refrigerator. All I had to do was trim the wick occasionally and keep feeding it fossil fuel and it kept things cold/frozen for me. A co-worker of mine in another location converted his to burn butane by putting a bunsen burner in place of the kerosene wick.
Although we certainly used our fridge for food and ice, it was also very important to refrigerate meds for the clinic in our village.
Making ice without any electricity happens everytime I try to talk to a girl.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Maybe they should just reinvent the IcyBall.
Only takes heat to make it work, kind of like a gas refrigerator.
For those interested, vortex tubes that run on compressed air are commercially available. Search McMaster-Carr for 31035K11.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
...when he made ice in 1885.
I take it Hilsch had the patent?
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
There are already commercial "vortex tubes" available. they are apparently used often in manufacturing and other industrial applications. Here are a couple of links:
DISCLAIMER: These are COMMERCIAL links, I have no affiliation with these companies.
AIRTX
EXAIR - This one has a nice animated illustration of how these things work.
One of my questions is why have not these been adapted for use in automobile A/C - despite the fact that they are inefficient, it seems, the clean nature, and the fact that they would need little maintenane. Virtually every car I have ever owned has needed AC. Even if it only worked when moving, it would be useful. But it seems like they could be used to also cool the engine itself too so less toxic chemicals like anti-freeze would be needed.
-MS2k
i seem to remember having read something about a member of thor heyerdahl's team on the kon-tiki / ra generating ice with an air pillow ..
So how is it that they're supposed to download the plans for this if they have no electricity?
Dee dee dee
Was called The Mosquito Coast, with Harrison Ford. He played this semi-crackpot inventor that went into the rainforest in South America and built one of these machines that made ice without electricity.
Link is here: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0091557/
The "HOW TO" bas been around longer than our modern refrigerators, and is based on ammonia-based thermodynamic processes, adsorption or absorption (which are different, BTW). Both are magnitudinally more energy efficient than vortex tubes.
Problem is, the absorption systems are usually petro-chemical fueled (so why not use an internal combustion engine and gain the even more efficient method of electrical refrigeration), or (including the ad-sorption processes)solar, which requires large collectors and a higher level of system complexity to accumulate the necessary energy to drive the cooling process.
Bottom line is that there just ain't no such thing as a free lunch in the thermodynamic world.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=propane+refri gerators
Ice without electricity. Simple, well understood technology that could probably be made pretty cheaply, if made in any kind of volume.
I'm no expert on propane refrigeration technology, but I've at least *heard* of gas and propane refrigerators. Apparently this guy working on this vortex tube thing never did.
A "Shop" pressure of 120 psi will generate VERY cold temps.. the more air flow ... ie: intake pipe dia...the more chilled CFM of outgoing air.... a Very expensive way to use compressed air but we had to use it to spot cool a very specialized piece equipment... I'd be interested to how he generates this airflow without the use of technology. !!
*--- Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. ---*
"The method is horribly inefficient but Williams is hoping it could yield helpful results in areas where electricity is really not an option." Solar pannels are not an option, but this is? Where would this be a viable method?
MadOgre.com
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091557/
If one reads Tim Cockerill's theses it is clear that the tube by itself needs no electricity but you need a source of 600 kPa air which will not come wihtout electricity or a lot of work by someone. This is not the most efficient way of making a cooler. For those that wonder what happened to the second law of thermodynamics. From TC's thesis: "The Clausius Statment of the 2nd law of thermodynamics reads: It is impossible to construct a system which will operate in a cycle and transfer heat from a cooler body to a hotter body without work being done on the system by the surroundings." He then proceeds to show that the system MUST include the compressor, and the you have a cycle where the compressed air is used to establish the rotating vortex and you can get cooler air on one side and hotter air from the other at atmospheric pressure. The inlet to the compressor closes the loop by sucking the air back from the atmosphere and keeping this going. So no laws are broken but if you have a way to efficiently make compressed something without electricity, then it should be a lot more efficient to run an expansion valve like a regular refrigerator. If you have to burn paraffin (or kerosene) then use a regular paraffin or kerosene refrigerator. Those have been around for ages.
good timing on this article -- I'll forward it to all my friends in Los Angeles who are now without power!
Are we to really discuss how silly his idea is?
Are we to talk about how any science project makes it in to the standard news media if their lies are convincing enough?
Is it an observation that the next generation of genius is an excellent scam artist?
What? vortex heat pump for underdeveloped countries? what is this tripe...
Doc made a steam powered machine that could produce ice for his cold tea!
He also built a steam powered time machine! It's incredible what you can do with old tech this days...
.. to Dr. Emmett Brown
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099088/
Why not do that instead.. There are plenty of ways to generate small amounts of power in situations like this.
Be it from a petro generator, stream power, sun, or just plain muscle ( hand cranked generator )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Didn't anyone see what happened to Harrison Ford in "The Mosquito Coast"?
I think the point many are missing is that it is valuable to find ways to do useful things like refrigeration without elaborate industrial infrastructure.
People take for granted how complex (and ultimately fragile) are our first world networks for raw materials, purified materials, machine tools, energy for manufacture, skilled engineering and labor, transportation, finance and trade. A breakdown at any of these levels can make complex machinery impossible to manufacture.
And without spare parts and service skills, any complex machine can quickly turn into an inert lump.
Try to picture being stranded in the desert and finding a brand new Toyota Land Rover that is complete with everything except spark plugs. Not going to do you much good, is it?
Vortex coolers are useful in the chemical and process industries where is is easier to supply compressed air than electricity.
Imagine a gas analyser or particle size monitor hooked onto a reactor vessel on a 80-metre tower, prone to lightning strike. The instrument electronics enclosure must be kept below 50C.
You have a ~6Bar air supply anyway to operate all the valves. Peltiers take far too much current, other cooling systems have moving parts and thus present a maintenance burden.
In your car, you don't have air at high enough pressure to run a vortex cooler - all the ones I've seen run off pneumatics pressures (5-10Bar). Electric fan blowing over a conventional (refrigerant-based) heat pump is much more efficient.
Of course, if there's no wind, you're fscked.
can he make ice without water? Marvin the Magician
Is this article for the folks in LA?
The link gives you just a shaving of the article, this link give you the whole ice cube.
If someone wants to do something really interesting for the third world, make an adsorbtion freezer using solar concentrators for the heat source.
And while you're at it, a solar concentrating mirror (or foil arrangement), without a greenhouse-forming glass layer, pointed at a cloudless night sky, makes ice REALLY well.
The night sky (absent clouds and above the atmosphere) is four degrees absolute - and it's not THAT much warmer from ground level even with the mostly sub-zero greenhouse gas layers floating above. With mirrors or foil to redirect the light/infrared so that the container of water (or coolant) "sees" night sky on all (or most) directions and reasonable shelter from air currents, a container's black-body equilibrium temperature is far below freezing. It heads for that temperature quite quickly if it is painted a dark color.
People have been making ice on calm desert nights using this principle for centuries.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... why everyone is harping on about where the compressed gas comes from. i don't imagine that it would be very hard to design a steam based compressor to drive the thing. heck, you could use livestock to power it during the day and rely on really good insulation at night to keep things cold. near a source of flowing water? fantastic — use that current.
oh. wait. i'm thinking rationally again.
Everyone seems to be forgetting that Marty gave Doc Brown the hoverboard so that he could save himself and his sweetheart. I don't remember what powered the hoverboard, but obviously Doc Brown figured it out.
When you think about it, yep, it is really is the "Bill & Ted" system of temporal mechanics. Instead of you buying the components, you get a young kid to bring them back to you. Now if I could just find where Doc Brown hid/lost the components to the hoverboard...
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
propane powered fridges have been around for a ver long time. The method is not very efficient (you are heating stuff to cool other stuff) but because there are no moving parts in the fridge, it just keeps on going.
The trick to make it run on solar would be developing a technique to concentrate, collect and store solar heat. Next you use that heat to drive your absorption fridge where you'd normally use a propane or kerosene flame. If you're willing to introduce an electric pump in the system you could pump the amonia-water mixture through some solar-trough collectors on the roof of your icehouse and cool the condenser with air in the shade of your collectors. Such a system will use 30-40% of the incoming solar energy to freeze ice, which is not much, a few sqare meters are comparable to a domestic electric freezer.
But such a method would not use any sexy tech, so has little inventive for an ambitious engineer that will solve all the third worlds problems in one fell swoop.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Back in the day, they hung one of these on a side window for cooling. From the description, it sounds like it was a miniature swamp cooler, using ram air from forward motion instead of a blower. I suspect a car wouldn't normally go fast enough for ram air to build up enough pressure for a vortex cooler to operate properly.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Innovators
How to Make Ice Out of Thin Air
Cool Heat Transfer
By DAREN FONDA
Sep. 12, 2005
When he isn't snowboarding or volunteering for Engineers Without Borders,
Dave Williams spends his days thinking about something most of us take for
granted: ice. As he discovered on a volunteer trip to Haiti in 2002, ice can
be a godsend to a poor village, keeping fish fresh on a journey to market or
preserving vaccines. But how do you make it without electricity, without
access to coolants like Freon or fuels like propane? Williams, 26, knew that
forcing compressed air through a hole in the middle of a pipe causes hot
and cold air to flow from opposite ends, a phenomenon known as the
Ranque-Hilsch vortex-tube effect. No one is quite sure how the separation works,
but feed the cold air into a container, he reasoned, and you would have an
icemaker and a freezer, which would have zero operating costs and would be
environmentally friendly, since it wouldn't require chemicals and the jet
of air could be generated via a compressor powered by wind, water, man or animal.
At least that was the idea. Tinkering with heat-transfer equations, Williams
tried to determine how much energy it would take to yield a block of ice. "It
had been a while since I'd done real math problems. I had to break out the old
textbook," says Williams, a product-development consultant with his own firm,
Dissigno, in San Francisco. After eons of number crunching, he hit on the right
formula and built a prototype. It isn't very efficient; his device uses 35 times
as much energy as an electric fridge to make 1 kg of ice. But its simplicity could
yield a killer app in Third World villages, where Williams hopes aid groups will
distribute his icemaker as an economic-development tool. He aims to field-test it
in Haiti later this year. --By Daren Fonda. Reported by Matt Smith/New York
**Life is too short to be serious**
LA might just need this right now...
How can you rotate anything without moving parts?
The gas moves into the chamber under pressure. The chamber is shaped to send the gas into a whirling vortex. Then the hot molecules go one way and the cold ones go the other. But I think it takes very high pressures to produce the required speeds.?
this place sells them and they even explain the theory with neat diagrams. apparently, you don't need extremely high pressures, only 80-100 PSI, to produce temps of -50 deg F! a shop air compressor could easily supply that.
i guess that the attractive thing about the vortex tube is that it's extremely simple (ie. inexpensive) in it's construction with corresponding low-to-no maintenance.
Punk good! Fire bad!
Of course, the large temperature difference between the day and night in the desert it what drives it.
The linked article misstates what's going on at night. Actually it's not the low desert air nighttime temperature (though that helps), but the extremely low radiation temperature of the night sky, that cools the pit - to an equilibrium temperature far below that of the night air.
The pit shelters the conainer of water from air circulation, radiant heat from features at low angles (such as trees, mountains, and the rising/setting sun), and most conduction (dry dirt conducts poorly and holds temperature moderately well - after a day or two the pit, too, is very cold). And in a desert you don't get "warm" clouds between you and space - just a thin layer of "greenhouse gas", mostly at temperatures far below freezing.
The result is that the equilibrium temperature for the pit walls, floor, and the container of water is far below freezing - though not quite as low as the four degrees absolute of the night sky (excluding the sun) above the atmosphere.
Keep the sunlight (and moving air, warm, cold, or otherwise) out in the daytime with the reflective shields and you can make a lot of ice.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Somebody please paste TFA text....
Uhh question whats wrong with cured meets, and vegitbles? Humans lasted the better part of a melenia on that. Heck you can even get cured grain.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Or free ice.
suddenly I feel very tired
The Crosley Icy Ball creates ice using ammonia absorbtion. All you need is a heat source(fire will do nicely) and an ice box of sorts and you're fine. You could easily modify a metal cooler to be the ice box. If you follow the link you will also see a design for an icyball that you can charge up and halt the colling process for later use.
These things would be great for camping.
That is *exactly* what I had in mind!!
You sir are a
The last link is to an article published by the Washington Post that repeats lies from an anonymous senior White House source that the Democratic governor Blanco was slow to declare a state of emergency. But the Washington Post was forced to issue a retraction that you can see at the top of the page.
The White House total fucks up the disaster relief ( Google "golden 72 hours"), then publicly denounces others for playing the "blame game" while an anonymous White House source spreads lies blaming the local and state governments.
Now almost a week later you are trying to spread the same lies on Slashdot. Shame on you!
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I think you're a homo. The best government is no government at all. Quit your god damn whining. "Bush hates black people! FEMA is racist!' Suck my wang. (I tried to post this anonymously 'cause I know this'll be modded down as a troll, but Slashdot seems to think this IP posts a lot of "bad stuff" which is nonsense. Thus I am forced to post under my registered username. Oh well. What is karma good for if not for burning?)
What is your penile percentile?
I have a couple of issues with this. The first is that the issue in NOLA was about class more than race. The people who could not leave were the lowest classes, of all races. The people without the funds necessary to evacuate.
The _LOCAL_ government should have had a plan to evacuate the people. Read that again. LOCAL. The blame for NOLA being full of people when the disaster hit lies fully on the Mayor of New Orleans, and to a lesser extent the Governor of LA.
The reason the Florida performed so much better last year was not because the people were white (there are a lot of minorities in FL, more in total than in LA). Florida did well because the local and state governments coordinated very well with FEMA on the response.
In NOLA, for the first few days FEMA was trying to work with the locals, but the communication was not there. Eventually FEMA recognized that the mayor was a Loon and that the governor needed to be told what to do in very short sentences. FEMA eventually took over the situation, and within 24 hours things drastically improved.
The levies would have failed even if _every_ proposed project for flood control was initiated. None of them addressed anything over a class 3 hurricane.
At the end of the day, you should be looking to you LOCAL government officials. City, County and State. Those are the people who are going to evacuate people and manage the crisis for the first 72 hours.
The government is what it is, and we need to engineer around its limits.
Yeah like:
- maybe people should actually LEAVE TOWN like they were told to, when the government warned them a week in advance of a huge hurricane.
- in the spirit of working Smarter, not Harder, how about *not* building a large city in a location that's 20 feet below sea level?
Even a good government can't compensate for the level of stupidity that encompasses the South.
compete with what, disaster management? Where's the profit in saving the ass of 50,000 poor mostly black people?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I was thinking more along the lines of powering a small compressor from the engine (thus robbing it of a bit of power), and then using the compressed air to power the vortex cooler.
I realize that the simple forward motion, (especially at slow speeds) would not be enough to cool the vehicle in any capacity. But it does seem like powering a compressor and essentially storing up the air to be used for cooling could be useful at least in terms of reducing the use of expensive and harmful gases.
-MS2k
Cool!
Oh chill out; you knew somebody would say it...
Damn thas some fly rhyme..........
fo shizzle!
Fly Fish? Participate in our forum
Fine, let's say the first 72 hours of response should be up to the city and state... hell, let's say they should be responsible for the first WEEK of response time. It doesn't change the fact that it took 8 days for some people to be rescued. That's inexcusable across ALL levels.
In the end, it will be a great big blame game with everyone pointing fingers at everyone else, well choreographed to make sure that the viewing public gets their tax dollar's worth while keeping them in the dark about the fact that all of them are equally at fault.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
You say I am a homo, then you want me to suck your wang. You post a bunch of insane bigotry and Republican crybaby bullshit, and deny that your IP is the source of bad stuff.
Again, I'm glad you're posting, especially with an ID we can see in the future. Especially because you're obviously a zombie in the Anonymous Republican Troll Coward army, with your mask ripped off by even Slashdot's weak filters. You reveal the Republican agenda to destroy the government, which any sane person knows we the people establish to protect us by banding together. From natural disasters, from enemies foreign and domestic - yes, from sicko "drown government in the bathtub" (or New Orleans) Republicans like you.
FWIW, I note that you're apparently related to Republican MS Governor Haley Barbour, whose own antigovernment government left his own (mostly Republican) people exposed on the Gulf Coast without mitigation or rescue systems to save them - or zoning regulations to protect them in the first place. Did you ever notice that "Klan" rhymes with "clan"?
Thank you for stepping up to declare that you hate America. I'd ask why, but I don't care. You are the enemy, and I don't care about your motives. I care about stopping you. You and your kind have already gone too far, destroyed too much. New Orleans is only the destruction making it to the news this month. You've got a lot to answer for, you insane narcissistic bigot, projecting your guilt onto me. Usually I'd tell you to fuck off, but your self-incriminating batshit-craziness is too damning to miss. Please, tell me more about black people, the best government, and homos.
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http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/interapp/editorial/ed itorial_0566.xml
"When an incident or potential incident is of such severity, magnitude, and/or complexity that it is considered an Incident of National Significance, the Secretary of Homeland Security initiates actions to prepare for, respond to, and recover from the incident." (NHP, 15)
"The President leads the Nation in responding efficiently and ensuring the necessary resources are applied quickly and effectively to all Incidents of National Significance." (NHP, 15)
"Standard procedures regarding requests for assistance may be expedited, or under extreme circumstances, suspended in the immediate aftermath of an event of catastrophic magnitude." (NRP, 44)
Something to look at for a design piece for next year's Beverage Cooling Contraption Contest
There is certainly accountability waiting for NO Mayor Nagin for his failure to ensure that his 500 buses would have the drivers who fled. And his failure to ensure that his police force would have retained the 30% of officers who fled, and some of whom joined the casual looting (even in uniform).
But FEMA, and Bush, have responsibility to step in when a disaster strikes. It's in their charter, their plans. The Mayor's failure to ensure evacuation before the storm wouldn't have killed nearly as many if FEMA had arrived to evacuate after the flood. As for the LA Governor, I'm tired of posting all the evidence that her early calls for Federal assistance (before, during and after the storm) were ignored. The Federal failure is blatant and has been obvious all across the media, right from the (Chertoff, Brown, Bush, etc) horses' mouths for weeks.
Personally, I'm much more anxious about FEMA, because I don't live in a city protected by Mayor Nagin. I am, however, concerned about living in a city protected by (Republican) Mayor Bloomberg. Who already flees the city on weekends for the Caribbean in his private jet, and would certainly be out of here, to "a safe, undisclosed location", as soon as a F5 hurricane (we get them, too, here in NYC) threatened the kind of damage it did in New Orelans. Especially now that Bloomberg has seen what happens with FEMA. Because we're all dependent of FEMA. Including you. Are you satisfied that your local "Homeland Security" is protected by them? What makes you so sure?
Half of the voters reelected Bush, who created Department of Homeland Security from scratch, promising to protect us from exactly this kind of "national disaster". If terrorists had blown up the levees, we'd be in just as bad shape, but without even the days of advance warning and assurance that another "attack" wasn't coming for at least weeks, if not a year or more. There really is no excuse for the Federal failure. You can parse responses, look for other people to blame - and find them. But that doesn't exonerate the Federal government's total failure to do their job in this catastrophe. Which they have done elsewhere, even recently. As far as Florida's "minorities", the percentage of Floridians damaged by those 4 hurricans last year who were Black doesn't come close to the percentage of New Orleanians, and any such comparison is selfserving in the extreme.
It really boggles my mind when I consider how depending on such a denial of racism AND classism to defend Bush exposes his defenders to the same risks. None of us are as rich and "white" as the Bush family. The closer to them you get, the more absolute the defense from any threat, no matter how deserved. The further, towards poor Black New Orleanians, the more abandoned you get. Every one of us falls somewhere in the middle. If you're going to defend that, you'd better hope you fall close enough to the winner's circle to be included in the defensive ring. Because rain falls on everyone's parade someday.
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Ok, here's a thought. Your mayor just told you to leave town but you don't have any transportation or money, or a place to go, what do you do? You go to where your mayor told you to go (super dome) and wait for help. Leaving town is easy for those of us with options, suck for those who don't. But what does it matter, those people were never going to vote republician anyway.
I don't know if it'd be a good choice but the tech was certainly simple enough.
The tropics don't exactly lack energy. In most cases, the lack of infrastructure is far more of a barrier than an actual lack of energy. A device with few (if any) moving parts, no hazardous chemicals and no sophisticated circuitry probably has a greater benefit than a highly efficient device that is far more temperamental.
I used an old refrigerator compressor to pump up a small tank (~2 cubic feet), taking about two hours to do so. Then I released the compressed air through a hand-carved lucite chamber in the correct spiral shape. Got about 50 C temperature differential on the two output arms, for about 30 seconds. This was in 1962.
What I've often wondered about adsorption cooling is if you can make it work with a lower-grade heat source - specifically, could you make an ammonia based adsorption cooler run from a water-antifreeze mix heated by a normal solar collector like you would use for hot water and heating?
I am not a chemist, mechanical engineer, or refrigeration engineer, and my Thermodynamics courses were twenty years ago, but as I understand it by varying the pressure within the closed-loop ammonia tubes you can vary the boiling point of the ammonia, and thus the temperature needed to run the regenerator. I would think you could set it so that the ammonia boiled at the 60 degree Celsius that you can get out of a normal solar array - it might not be very efficient, but so what - the energy you are getting is pretty much free.
Removing the complexity of solar tracking (needed for the concentrators required to get really high temperatures for things like molten salt solar power systems) and reducing the power needs to a simple recirculating pump and you could possible set such a system up for anybody in a climate where the sun shines a fair amount.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Why use this method when there were more efficient methods that don't require electricity OR a compressor? See, for a vortex tube cooler to work well, it needs a relatively high pressure gas supply (a few atmospheres). I don't see how you're going to get that without electricity? I'd RTFA to see if this is discussed, but it's become "premium content".
As for the existing methods, there are gas absorption refridgerators. These also require no electricity and have no moving parts. All they need is a heat source (fire).
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
I hate to sound cynical, but I don't think it's the federal governments job to provide evacuation before a catastrophe. If mayor ray is so in touch with the plight of the common man, maybe he should've actually provided a way out of the city for people who could not come by their own transportation. He could use school busses and what not.
But besides that, the super-dome was engineered to withstand a hurricane, and had food and supplies for thousands of people. What they didn't count on was that levies would breach and people would be stuck there for a long time. That means they had no plan to get people out of the super-dome once they were there.
And no, the government can't just pick them up and move them at a moment's notice. When the military deploys overseas, it is the result of months of planning and preparation. Not to mention that a large scale deployment requires access to at least a well developed airfield, and preferably the ability for ships to dock and deploy equipment and personnel. New Orleans had neither at the time of the emergency.
In the face of a lack of necessary planning and preparation we were left in a situation where thousands of people were left for days to fend for themselves while several levels of government made an uncoordinated attempt to provide aid.
To say that this disaster had something to do with how some people might vote is disgusting, offensive, and ignorant. You should try-thinking for yourself once and a while instead of just reading and regurgitating what you read on BBC.
Simply stated, you cannot rely on government or anyone else for that matter. The ONLY person truly trustworthy is yourself. Even your children and significant other may betray you at times. Think for yourself and rely on yourself.
Personally, I am tired of government getting into everything 'cause they suck at everything. There are many things that could have saved the people of New Orleans the heartache they are experiencing now, but government was too short-sighted at all levels to manage the risk properly.
Blah.. I've lost my train of thought thinking about my plans for the night. And no, I'm not related to Mr. Haley Barbour. Maybe distantly, but He certainly isn't an acquaintence of mine.
Homo...
What is your penile percentile?
1.) the levees were underbuilt
who owns this problem? George Whitey Bush? No. The Mayor of New Orleans and, perhaps, the Governor of Louisiana. It was their city and the people there were under their charge. They were told many, many times the Levee wasn't going to stand up to CAT 3+ storms.
2.) you compare Florida to Louisiana
Two different states with different state level crisis management teams. Apples and oranges.
3.) most New Orleanians are black, most Floridians are white
Yeah, where is your proof? I want census statistics. Also, New Orleans is a city and Florida is a state. Again with the apples and oranges. Finally, was New Orleans the only place hit? What about my friends in Mississippi that are complaining bitterly about the situation there? They are white and GWB didn't show up in the Presidential Limo and hand them any MRE's.
4.) Blanco means white, doesn't it?
I mean, doesn't it? (tongue in cheek of course)
Your posting is exactly why I don't take slashdot seriously anymore and haven't for years. I find such extremist views as repelent as those of terrorists or Nazi's. Yours is just one example of what this place has become and this off-topic thread is an example of how this site can't even relish in the accomplishment of science to help the disadvangaged.
So, cheers to science for helping people in very hot places have ice and boos to people who'd rather fix the blame than the problem.
I'm betting if Newport Beach, CA was going to be hit with a tsunami you'd see Camp Pendleton light up in about 5 minutes with hover landing craft, helicopters and Condi's private yacht all going full bore to the OC.
~S
When Hurricane Charley hit last year, I was without power for three days. It may be inefficient, but I could have saved a couple hundred bucks in groceries easily.
If I wanted to leave town, I would. Back in the olden days, before cars and buses, they had these things called feet. You filled up a "backpack" with fuel in the form of "food" and "walked" to your destination. This archaic method of transportation has proven surprisingly effective in the past.
When given the choice of getting drowned at home, walking out of town, or going to the Superdome, I probably would have chosen the Superdome, since it was closer to home and would have seemed less risky. However, if I knew that the town would flood and I would be stuck in the Superdome for days with half-crazed people, I would head for the hills.
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
FEMA and the federal government can not just decide to basically invade a state. This is a very good thing. The local governments direct the federal resources in a coordinated effort. That coordination was completely missing in this example. I agree with many of your points though and believe that all parties share a bit of blame. The good thing to come out of this is that the issues have been brought to light and that those issues will eventually be resolved.
And which 'hills' would that be. When is the last time you walked with your family more than one mile? Tell me, how much 'fuel' would you carry for you and your family. What about everything else you need to survive? Cloths, diapers, medicine, etc. How about a tent, sleeping bags, and everything else you would need to survive for MONTHS?
I agree with you 100%.
One of my favorite stories is attributed to the Greek raconteur, Aesop (circa 620 BC - 560 BC). From the web:
Aesop knew about this aspect of human nature in 500 B.C.
We live in a democracy
:(
Really? what planet?
I live on earth, we don't even have one country run by democracy
I'm actually trying to start a democracy in a country right now, its called the United States of America. The USA is a republic - it used to be a democraticly run republic - but that system was based on horses. We don't need people to ride horses to share ideas anymore, but the guys in charge won't quit and they are making a bunch of new laws to hold on to power. It's getting kind of scary here, lots of people are dying, most don't even know who runs their lives, but some are starting to learn.
What I dont get is that New Orleans knew they were in for a world of hurt. Enough people have said in the past few decades it was just a matter of time.
This City is 15ft below sea level. The walls protecting would only survive a cat3 storm (and we all know we need cat6 these days. sorry...). The only major roads in and out of the area were also below sea level and not designed to survive a disaster. The ports were also damaged. The two airfields in the area were also below sea level. This place had *NO* contingency plan for a worse case senario!!!
And this is before everyone cocked up the evacuation and recovery...
No roads, no air support, no port makes it damn hard to do anything. Sure the port was going to get damaged... Roads might also get damaged, but there is no reason to not have at least a major artery that isnt under water for a week. Same for the airport, it should have been built up or protected so it could survive in a disaster situation...
All i can say is i hope noone tries to invade the continental US... the only defence you guys would be able to muster would be nukes... on your own soil...
Clearly American Southerners are to blame for where the French chose to place a city almost 60 years before the Revolutionary War. Anyway, it's not like we really needed that major port at the mouth of the largest river in the nation, which happens to run through the Midwest, where the major products all have low price-to-volume ratios requiring bulk transportation preferably on a barge.
As for your first point, New Orleans has seen enough near misses to be somewhat inured to evacuation warnings. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you can't afford to just leave town for a week, especially if you expect to have a job when you return, on the possibility of a hurricane.
Am I ever relieved that a soldier is telling me that I can't rely on his troops to do what I pay them to do: protect me. I don't know what comforts you when the bullets fly past you - you are *that* kind of soldier, right? But when the soldier next to you has got your back, that's your government at work.
I guess I can rely on you to project your gay fantasies on me. Too bad that doesn't comfort me at all. Especially when it's soldiers that Americans expect we are paying for, to protect us from hurricane destruction, terrorists, foreign armies, and armed killer closet fags who know nothing but nihilism.
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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816, 1101299,00.html
3 -4bf2-bf5b-49cc34ba850a.aspx )
( credits to: http://www.sketchy.ca/PermaLink,guid,3da4e3a8-f00
So tell me, what day would you have started walking? Friday, when you don't yet know where the hurricane is going to hit? Saturday, so you'll be caught out in the open on Sunday when the hurricane hits, somewhere between 15 and 25 miles from New Orleans? Or Sunday, when anyone walking outside for 10 hours will be killed by 145 mph flying debris?
Or how about Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday, where the only pedestrian route out of Nola (the bridge to Gretna) was blocked by armed cops shooting over the heads of anyone trying to walk out?
You are mistaken about the responsibilities and privileges of FEMA. One of the reasons FEMA is often "feared" by conspiracists and antigovernment types (sometimes counting me in their ranks) is their unbalanced power that transcends so much of the rest of our structured federalism. FEMA is empowered to do exactly that, without the state's permission. Especially under the new DHS rules, FEMA and the president can "invade" as soon as a disaster is declared, by the president. Who had declared most of Louisiana a disaster the week prior, though in a late response to Tropical Storm Cindy, which passed through weeks earlier. LA Governor Blanco had already declared the remaining (and other) parishes in emergency/disaster status before the storm hit, even though Bush didn't even need that according to DHS/FEMA regulations. And even if Bush had broken the rules, I doubt anyone would have made anything stick, or seriously tried, if they had just rescued people and not screwed up royally (a big "if", you have to admit, especially in hindsight). And even if Bush had taken that risk, and someone had made something stick (extremely unlikely), that's what real leaders do. They sacrifice themselves, if need be, to protect their community. That's what heroes are made of. Bush is perfectly clearly made of lesser stuff.
Though the kind of stuff he is made of seems to be teflon, because none of his catastrophes from the past 5 years seem to have really stuck. I share your desire to see these issues "resolved". Because this is the biggest disaster we've had yet, but certainly far from the biggest potential disaster. We've still got another 3.5 years to wait for that to come along, like maybe a 9.0 earthquake in San Francisco (another pain in Bush's ass). I really don't want to have to lose San Francisco, too, after New Orleans (and a big blow to NYC) before Bush is "resolved". I want him out now, replaced by someone who can do his job.
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but if you leave disaster management to profit-seekers, the poor and the needy will not be protected.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
FUCK YOU AND YOUR NAZI BULLSHIT.
The levees are FEDERAL. New Orleans and Louisiana politicians, media and scientists have been telling Bush, often in person, for years, what everyone who cared knew: the FEDERAL LEVEES wouldn't save the city from the inevitable F4-5 storm. You lying fuck.
New Orleans was something like 67% Black. Go dig up whatever lying stats show that Florida, either the entire state or the hurricane-affected areas, was somehow more than 67% Black. You lying fuck.
You are getting your tongue-in-cheek jollies at the expense of thousands of dead New Orleanians and other Gulf Coasters. It's like some kind of game to you, with your deranged made-up lying to defend the incompetence of Bush and your boys running the show. Stick your tongue up your ass, you nazi propaganda spewer. You're not fit to associate with humans. I hope some disaster strikes you before we have a chance to remove the Asshole in Chief that you worship with such reality-defying fervor.
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misery end of main character?
What do you need electricity for? Just stick it in the freezer.
The complete article says the problem is not completely solved yet. He is trying to get compress air through human effort. Lots of beans.
The lower classes think that class is all about money. The middle class think it is about educationo and work. The upper classes think it is about taste and breeding.
And, they are actually all correct, and all incomplete.
During the second half of the twentieth century, an enterprising organization known as the RIAA made its name - and a fortune -harvesting enormous chunks of music from artists all over America, packing them into records, tapes and CDs and exporting them around the world. By the time P2P networks marked the end the "packaged music trade" in the early 2000s they were sending 100-ton shipments of music as far afield as the Caribbean and Calcutta.
Yeah, welcome in the hood !
We got Hash, Weed, Beer, 20 sorts of strong liquor and all the softies and alcopop you can drink.
We just don't have water, and I must tell you a Beer bath is only fun the first time...
"Blacks carrying off food were called looters, while whites doing the same thing were "surviving"
Yes. And in the article about USA "Pre-emptive nuclear strike" the other countries nuclear armament is called Weapons of Mass Destruction while the US one is called "our defensive arsenal".
Check your vote, educate yourself and your children to be able to spot this sort of BS and possibly start taking an interest in survivalist stuff....
I think in many third world countries having ice is not very high priority when you don't even have clean drinking water.
And why are the levees federal to begin with? I'd say that they belong to New Orleans, maybe Luisiana. Stuff is best handled at the lowest level.
Bush has to worry about 49 other states, hundreds to thousands of other cities. It's not really his problem.
Or do you mean to tell me that if New Orleans said 'we can't get money to upgrade this levy from you, so we're going to do it ourselves' that the Feds would say no?
Florida isn't built below sea level, still takes plenty of damage, and has building codes through the roof anymore. All new construction is to be able to handle strong hurricanes.
I don't read AC A human right
In the wake of the Katrina Bush catastrophe, it's clear that letting the feds protect the levees can be a recipe for disaster. However, levees are expensive. New Orleans, the #2 largest port in the nation, is one of the biggest "interstate" (and international) commerce hubs in the country, in the world. Should Louisiana or the city charge tariffs on every ship that passes through, to pay for the levees that protect their traffic? When they gouge their neighbors based on their monopoly of access to the transport, who will stop them? When the mayor of New Orleans has the only key to 25% of our oil imports, and vast amounts of natural gas and food shipments, won't they become a petty tyrant?
While the LA Corps of Engineers isn't busy working on their levees, where should they spend their time? They won't have the economies of scale of the Army Corps of Engineers, which builds/maintains thousands of dams nationwide all the time. And when the LA governor decides a local porkbarrel project needs their attention more than finishing that aqueduct they've been loaned/hired to do to fight the wildfires in Colorado, who will overrule them?
It's clear the Federal response failed during Katrina Bush. But Katrina Blanco isn't exclusively the answer, either. Federal resources with local accountability is the answer. We thought we had that, too, with exercises like the simulated "Hurricane Pam" exercise, which came off much more effectively than did the real Federal response. Really, it's pretty clear that the main problem is in the White House and DHS/FEMA offices. When we clean that mess up, we can rebuild one that reflects the design specs that worked so much better elsewhere, in prior disasters. Florida's 4 hurricanes last year just prior to the election didn't suffer from failed Federal response. If they had, perhaps the consequences in the election would have saved New Orleans.
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In my limited experience, I have found that people who share your worldview have seldom faced poverty or any real need... more often, that worldview seems to be an excuse for conservatives to convince themselves that there is no class, and that poor people choose to be poor.
My mother was raised in a coal mining family of five in Appalachia. My father was raised by a single mother (his father was buried the day he was born) in Eastern Kentucky. They subsistence farmed. He was the youngest of 9 children. Yet my parents lived the American dream: a home, two cars, and three children.
They weren't afraid of hard work. My father began his working carreer at 14 when he left home for the summer to raise broom corn.
When my wife and I were first married, I was working a full-time job and going to college part-time. My wife was working part-time and going to nursing school full-time. I had to take out student loans and we barely made ends meet. The majority of the students in my wife's nursing school were JTPA claimants. They received free books, free uniforms, free tuition, free child care, and transportation money to get to school. We paid our own way.
Many of the JTPA students would come to school and sleep, because if they didn't show up they lost their "pocket money." Most of the JTPA students did not graduate.
That was the moment when I lost sympathy for the poor. The government offers them more opportunities than I was ever given and I see no reason why I should be guilted into believing that they have no choices or opportunities.
On a side note, one day during my college career, I stopped at a grocery on the way home. I waited in line behind a couple who were dressed in very designer clothes and leather coats. Their cart contained large cuts of expensive meat and things I could not afford. They paid with food stamps.
I only had a gallon of milk so my order was checked out quickly. I walked out behind the couple and watched them load their groceries in a BRAND NEW car. The sticker was still in the window. I was furious.
I most sincerely feel for the children, who are trapped in bad situations, but I lost all sympathy for able-bodied adults a long time ago. Mexicans come north illegally in droves just for the opportunity to work in this country. They work like crazy around here and manage to send money home.
So you'll have to forgive me if I call bullshit.
In this sort of thing, I would take as much non-perishable food as I could carry and maybe two changes of clothes. Being fed is far more important than having clean clothes every day. I would also pack up a basic first-aid kit. As for sleeping, a tarp and some twine can make a useable shelter, and sleeping bags are non needed in Louisiana in September.
Stick close to the roads, try to hitch rides away from the coast. You should make it okay. You don't need to survive for months on your own, just until you can get somewhere for help. Maybe you have relatives in Texas, so when you get to a reasonably safe place you can call them and have them pick you up. A little hunger or hardship is better than dying.
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
As you noted previously, ignorance and racism walk together. Bigotry will keep the ignorant ignorant. If he doesn't want to learn, it doesn't matter who or how many try to teach.
He quotes statistics as if they are supreme in support of his position without regard for the statistical fact that there are more poor white people in America than poor blacks. Liberals do like statistics, they group people into easily labeled groups, *races*, and *classes* where they can be stereotyped. They would much rather incite a mob into action rather than offer individuals true opportunity and personal responsibility.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Actually you are both almost right. Maximum efficiency comes with the engine at the peak of the torque curve (between 1500 and 6000 rpm depending on the design, fuel, temperature, etc), with maximun throttle. Any other RPM or throttle setting results in an efficiency loss. (If the throttle is not wide open the engine has to "work against a vacuum" to get air in, and that causes loss). Actually getting this is really hard though.
What the mirrors do is effectively put "empty sky / empty space" all the way around the container. The container continues to radiate heat, but the mirror blocks any heat coming from the ground and other surroundings. The mirror itself gives off almost zero infra-red. What happens is that the mirror only reflects any infra-red coming from empty space onto the container. Empty space is really cold, so almost no infra-red heat gets reflected onto the container.
If this was the case, the wouldn't mirrors be constantly below freezing?
- Sig
New Orleans, the #2 largest port in the nation, is one of the biggest "interstate" (and international) commerce hubs in the country, in the world. Should Louisiana or the city charge tariffs on every ship that passes through, to pay for the levees that protect their traffic?
Sounds like a good idea. If the levees end up costing so much that ships avoid that port for elsewhere, well, that's economics for you.
And when the LA governor decides a local porkbarrel project needs their attention more than finishing that aqueduct they've been loaned/hired to do to fight the wildfires in Colorado, who will overrule them?
Uh, why would LA engineers even be building an aquaduct for colorado? Colorado should have their own engineers. Heck, hire companies to handle that.
Really, it's pretty clear that the main problem is in the White House and DHS/FEMA offices.
Actually, it's pretty clear that the main problem is in the New Orlean's Governor's House and the Louisiana Senate for not taking precautions against a known, predicted threat.
I don't read AC A human right
I agree that Louisiana government has some clear responsibility for this catastrophe. After all, some of them are taking credit for it:
"We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans," Republican Louisiana Congressman Richard Baker joked last week. "We couldn't do it, but God did."
Remember that we're talking about the South, which didn't drop Jim Crow, desegregate, until the Feds sent in troops in the 1960s.
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make install -not war
Hmm... There's many ways to take that comment, not all of them racist.
For example, I don't care what color you are, but I have a definite bias against the 'poor'. My grandparents lived better on less equivalent money. How? They budgeted. Ever heard of 'poor white trash'? I have some family that are just that.
As far as public housing goes, well, that's so often such a huge mess I do tend to think that the best solution would be to demolish it all and start over.
On the subject of Jim Crow laws, well, I look at the films of what happened back then and shudder. How could supposably sane people be so illogical?
Looking through the internet, it seems that he's proposed regulations making companies rehabilitate housing more.
But if he's like me, his view would be that there's a limit to what he can legally do at that level.
I don't read AC A human right
IcyBall systems:l t.html
http://www.ggw.org/~cac/IcyBall/HomeBuilt/HomeBui
Ammonia Absorbtion (commonly refered to as propane refrigeration, but propane is only used to supply heat, the heat could be supplied from another source.)
http://www.nh3tech.org/absorption.html