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Wilma the Capacitor and Particle Accelerator
Sterling D. Allan writes "In a story at the new Open Source Energy Network site, Paul Noel says: "Energetically speaking, the vortex that forms in these storms is also a natural particle accelerator, and a massive capacitor bank. As the harmonic circuit develops, it resonates acoustically and functions as a capacitor, extracting the heat from the storm and transmitting it away. Without this electrical circuit, the storm would fail almost instantly due to the accumulation of heat from condensation of water." He also asserts that understanding these phenomena better could help us harness the power of nature, seen and unseen."
before they do any damage to us: Detonating an EMP bomb inside?
So we could actually find a use for this greenhouse effect we're generating.
Of course, once we use this cheap power we stop making greenhouse gases and our power source dies.
D'oh!
(But no, this is very cool.)
The author takes painkillers while the storm is thousands of miles away because of the electrical effects of the storm on his body.
Give me a break.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
He also asserts that understanding these phenomena better could help us harness the power of nature
At last, a coherent argument for global warming and climate change.
Check this bullshit out:
What a heaping plate of crud. This is embarassing.
Well, I guess as long as Wilma doesn't cross the streams with Alpha, we should be OK.
This looks like it's a lot of big words (which the article writer doesn't even understand) and not much science.
Real_men_don't_need_spacebars.
"and functions as a capacitor, extracting the heat from the storm and transmitting it away." -Article The author doesn't have a clue what a capacitor is.
What was that old expression .... "Don't screw with Mother Nature"?
This confirms my long held suspicion that those pseudo-scientific explainations of the Oz effect (that hurricanes, cyclones, and other cyclonic weather phenomena can tear holes in our space-time continuum and send us to parallel earths or back in time) are all totally correct.
Its time to harness hurricanes to establish trade relations with dinosaurs, talking animals, and anything else we can get at through the dimensional rifts torn into existance.
I, for one welcome the chance to become a hurricane overlord.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
The thing he's wrong about is the causes of these electrical phenomena. It's definitely Russian-made electromagnetic generators operated by the Yakuza. If we really want to harness the power of hurricanes, we simply need to find these generators and either (a) destroy them or (b) sell them to Third World dictators to destroy each other with.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
That a site called opensourceenergy uses IIS. (Well that and the tylenol thing)
The storm supposedly needs to lose heat energy to keep operating? I thought it was the other way around.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Nope, it isn't.
What a heaping plate of crud. This is embarassing.
;-). Dielectric Stress my foot. I guess if people lack basic scientific knowledge or even a scientific temper, any nonsense can be written as if it were gospel truth!
Actually I found this as lucid and useful as the "Executive Summary" and 'Mitigating Factors' in a Microsoft Security bulletin
Unless the author of the piece is himself at the vortex of the storm, he isn't acting as the dielectric in the capacitor that is the storm. His fevered imagination is probly the cause of all the dielectric stress.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
With winds gusting to 125MPH I was inside of Wilma as it battered Ft. Lauderdale. I can tell you for a fact and from personal observation that this guy is one of those psuedo intellectual types that does not know squat about what he speaks.
Just for the record, although I was able to get to Jacksonville after the storm, there are still millions of people in the greater Ft. Lauderdale and Miami area that have no power. The lack of power makes it so that they are unable to get gasoline and therefore they can't even leave. There are other shoratages as well and the damage is massive.
As usual, Slashdot reports on "news that matters", some twat prattling on about hurricanes as particle accelerators. Real funny when the particle is an aluminum car port coming at you at 105MPH.
hm... then again, it could well be:
s s%22&meta= => 917 hits.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22dielectric+stre
I'm more shocked that it got through when the article submitter works for the source website. Surely waiting for some qualified thirdparty to confirm the news isn't nonsense would've been wise?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Energetically speaking, the vortex that forms in these storms is also a natural particle accelerator ...
you can say that again ...
The Dutch will inherit the earth. If not, we'll settle for a bit of ocean. Beta delenda est!
Heat. Friction/Wind Resistance. Gravity. Barometric Pressure.....dsa zx xasdsfht Oh, I fell asleep, slammed my head on the keyboard, and awoke to realize this is really boring. Sorry.
--Always, I mean never..., No I mean always check your references.--
Wilma the Capacitor and Particle Accelerator ... Rejected
Yeah, I'll go with pseudoscience on this one. It's pretty interesting how it combines good science with out-of-this-world inferences ("tidal forces of the moon" becomes "zomg! moon causes aftershocks!" and "dielectric stress" (which isn't even a true "stress" in the mechanical sense of the word) becomes "hey, my knee hurt before the hurricane therefore the storm must be a capacitor because only dielectric stress could have hurt my knee")
As soon as the cyclonic windspeed hits 88MPH, spacetime is warped back to 1985. Turning slightly within the eye as it passes allows jumping to various other babyboomer moments in the 1950s. Surf's up!
--
make install -not war
So what this guy is trying to say is that we should attach a piece of wire with a key on the end to a kite and fly it into the storm thus tapping the stored enegry. This will not only provide us with a huge amount of free energy but disapate the storm as well. Cool.
I'll wait while this numb skull goes and tries his ideas out.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
I'm more shocked that it got through when the article submitter works for the source website. Surely waiting for some qualified thirdparty to confirm the news isn't nonsense would've been wise?
/. is about. If you're coming here expecting a peer-reviewed scientific journal, or actual journalism, I'm afraid you're in the wrong place.
Are you new here? Practically every other article is submitted by a party related to the article source websites. Nothing here is really news, but more just fodder for discussion. Or at least bitching (as the case may be here).
Imagine you're at the nerd table in high school, and people are continually coming up to the table peddling their wares or ideas. Maybe a couple people at the table chime in with something they heard in the news every now and then. In any case, it's all subject for discussion. We can talk about how something is crap, discuss the implications about this or that, or at least see if we can make milk come out someone's nose. That's really all
That Dielectric Stress your google hits are talking about is "electrostatic force divided by the area" in a capacitor, which is a known system and yes occurs. What this guy talks about is hokey and not at all the same. Pure BS.
-everphilski-
"Without this electrical circuit, the storm would fail almost instantly due to the accumulation of heat from condensation of water."
The flow of heat and water in hurricanes is well enough understood. I'm sure electrical discharges play a part in most storm mechanics, but even if a hurricane had ZERO discharges, its massive "humidity engine" would still run.
I don't know where these guys come from, where they think that electromagnetics are the ultimate macro-scale drivers of weather events.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
I get 529 hits on google.
Then I typed in "cheese fetish" and got 936, lol
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
Since when did Slashdot become home to new age nutcases? Orgone Accumulators make great songs for Hawkwind and Kate Bush, but as physics it's not a basis for anything other than providing something to laugh at.
ian
While his analysis might be incorrect, how do you know that his back is not affected by weather changes? Indeed, that is often something that is reported by people who sustain injuries.
When I was young, there was a farmer down the road who took shrapel in his knee in WWI. Just before a storm came his knee would swell up, and right after the storm was gone it'd stop. You could sit there watching it happen. Now, I'm not sure why it happened. But it did happen, and it happened frequently.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Indeed, that is often something that is reported by people who sustain injuries.
No shit, really? I've never heard that.[/sarcasm]
Sparky, what makes it bullshit is his analysis, which involves claims that it's because of the dielectric stress of a storm that's hundreds of miles away. Pretty much every single statement in his article is purest, unmitigated, grade-D bullshit.
I don't point of this post? I looked at the article, and thought it was a comment on how abused the phrase 'Open Source' is becoming. What exactly has that site got to do with licensing and source code? It gets even more amusing given that the site appears to be run on a prepackaged microsoft product. Bizarre.
Here's his website. Quite an interesting mix of websites he administers there...
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
None of this is strange physics. All of it is accounted for by current weather models. Talk of "particle accelerators" and "capacitor banks" is silly; there's a lot of energy converted to lightning in thunderstorms, but it's small and secondary compared to the heat engine which drives it.
The authors of this piece are first-class cranks.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Ah, sorry, and yes, I am rather new at discussing here. This one just threw me because I'm just more used to seeing news stories submitted that have been covered elsewhere (e.g. the BBC or New Scientist) which adds an extra layer of editorial filtering.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Actually, this person is somewhat involved with the Open Source Energy Network. It's open source, even if it isn't software, so it's on-topic here at Slashdot.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Well, now you know.
And no, his potentially incorrect analysis does not make this phenomenon itself "bullshit" (to use such an uncouth word). Much like the incorrect analysis of alchemists didn't "invalidate" the various phenomena of chemistry. After all, perhaps in the future we'll find that he was correct, and you were not. It's something that has happened many times before in the history of science. He who is wrong violently attacks those who suggest alternative theories, and yet the alternative theories turn out to be completely correct.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Best understatement for a major hurricane hitting a populated area... EVER.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
The link between global warming an hurricane activity isn't quite there yet...they need more data, which means they need more destructive hurricanes.
Here's a good overview of the current thinking with the link between hurricane activity and global warming. Basically they can't prove the link between the number of hurricane's that make it inland, but it seems as if a link between hurricane strength and global warming is there. Since the 70's the number of class 4 and 5 hurricanes have gone steadily upwards.
A nuclear explosion could have that effect but it would also kill a lot of people.
taught by the local Life University here in Georgia, oh they teach "Chiropractic science"
t _is_chiro.asp
http://www.life.edu/Chiropractic_and_Wellness/wha
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Even if you could would you really want to. You mess with nature at your peril, who knows what long term effects dissipating storms would have. There are enough nutjobs around claiming that cloud seeding is the cause of some historical floods as it is.
Philip
Signatures are broken
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Universe_mod el
Capacitor - An electric circuit element used to store charge temporarily, consisting in general of two metallic plates separated and insulated from each other by a dielectric. Particle Accelerator - A device, such as a cyclotron or linear accelerator, that accelerates charged subatomic particles or nuclei to high energies. It's almost ridiculous the way the author used the terms. Here's how I break down his relationships: Capacitor - A hurricane gathers energy from the warm ocean waters as it crosses the equatorial Atlantic regions. It releases this energy as it hits shore. Particle Accelerator - I don't know. Maybe he read the dictionary.com definition and picked up on cyclotron and though, "Cyclotron, tropical cyclone.... ah hell, same difference. Let's run with it!"
Just make sure you don't use that term in an image search... : p
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
Hurricane Wilma was (at its peak), the most intense hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Basin. In all probability, Wilma Flintstone is the most desirable woman who ever lived. Coincidence? No. They both have large electromagnetic fields, which causes dielectric stress (Energetically speaking).
I thought his bull warranted a much higher grade than a D!
This guy's in the Bozo brigade. I'm not disputing that his back aches. I am disputing the wealth of bullshit in the article:
He's a bullshit artist, and he's selling a product. No different than Simpson & Son's Patented Energizing Moisturizing Tantalizing Romanticizing Surprising, Herprizing Revitalizing Tonic. The term might be vulgar, but it's a hell of a lot more to the point than just calling it "snake oil."
A hurricane is a heat engine. Heat engines need heat sinks to get rid of their waste heat. Ergo, a hurricane needs to lose heat, QED.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
There is nothing wrong with having an open mind to alternative theories.
However, alternative hypotheses require strong evidence to be accepted.
Let's look at the facts here. Paul Noel had back pain in the weeks leading up to Wilma hitting Florida. We don't know how often he has back pain, but lets assume that this pain was distinctive, call it "storm pain". So Paul is having storm pain in the weeks before Wilma hits Florida. Now, where was Wilma during this time? Wilma was a tropical depression in the middle of the Atlantic. Currently, there are a number of tropical storms in the middle atlantic (Alpha and Beta). Is he having the pain right now? If his pain truly has a range of many thousand miles, how often does his pain pick up snowstorms in Canada? Or Pacific cyclones? Does the range depend on which storms are being covered on TV?
In addition, his idea that it is electromagnetic in nature is easily testable. The electromagnetic spectrum is easily measured by someone with the proper equipment. I understand that he may not have access to this kind of equipment, but he shouldn't be telling us that it is electromagnetic in nature as some kind of default. There are plenty of things going on in the world, and just because you don't know what it is doesn't make it electromagnetic. Perhaps he is actually picking up hurricanes with his pain, but he is doing it with seismic waves. Too bad that he 'just knows' that it is electromagnetic - he could be looking in the correct place if he didn't 'just know' the wrong answer.
I have an alternative hypothesis also. I think that his back pain is caused by something other than hurricane Wilma. I think that something in the local conditions in Alabama (which had a cold front come through at the same time that Wilma hit Florida, which dropped the temperature by a good 20 deg F) may have had more to do with his pain than a storm which got lots of media coverage. He could record which days he had back pain and what type, so that he could then draw correlations using weather records. That would be a good beginning. After he has correlations then he could make a theory of what the mechanism was, and try to test it. Then random people on the internet wouldn't be calling him so pseudoscientific, and his alternative theory might have a chance. Until he does something like that, you are wasting your time with him.
Why is this on slashdot? This is just as bad science as many creationism sites.
Why can't we moderate the actual stories! This should be a -3 Stupid.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"Because this concept is outside the reductionistic-chemical paradigm that governs the drug industry, this not usually discussed by medical science."
Of course it's outside the reductionistic-chemical paradigm, because it's crap! I'll file this one in the same place I file the Electric Universe theory and the UFO's-riding-behind-Comet-Hale-Bopp theory.
A lot of people are talking about "killing" hurricanes as if it's not something that has been tried before.
It was previously theorised that if you could induce a hurricane to precipitate it would lose energy and dissapate. They tried this out by chucking some powder stuff into a hurricane. The hurricane did stop sooner than they expected, but not before drastically changing direction and devastating an unprepared area.
I'm sorry I don't have any sources for this as I read it in a book when I was little, but I'm sure somebody here should know about it.
-RadioElectric
From the bottom of my heart, I genuinely thank you. It's been a crappy week, and somehow "cheese fetish" made me laugh so hard I cried. Thanks.
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
Here's another interesting article about Katrina.
I've read articles that claim hurricanes actually help expend the energy built up in the oceans from the sun. If we were able to stop hurricanes from forming and could just keep them as Tropical storms, could the Earth gain too much energy over time? I don't really have the answer as it is just speculation, but maybe, just maybe, hurricanes happen for a good reason. So if we mess the weather too much, I expect bad things to happen far worse than just a few hurricanes every year.
It's just going to make the storm more powerful. You've got to find something much more far fetched to deal with a storm. E.g. Scaring hundreds of birds on the beach and have them fly right into the storm. If that doesn't work, try pinguins. If even pinguins don't work, you'll have to have the hero to jump from a plane into the eye of the storm with a bucked of water, ductape, 6 marbles, his trusted knife, some rope and toilet paper. If the hero can't jump, his love-of-his-life is an acceptable replacement.
Is it not also true that hurricane patterns run in cycles. Thus every 20 to 30 years there is a cycle and they also believe there is a secondary cycle. In the 120 year range.
We don't have records dating back very far on how stonge hurricane are, we don't have a clue how many there have been outside of the last 100 years, and those are just in 1858 it felt like 140 mile per hours winds!
Anyway my point being we have no constructive data about hurricanes at all in the range that we need them to have any idea if this is just not a normal cycle. By the time we figure it out it will be to late anyway.
Peace out hippies.
Neck_of_the_Woods -- lives in Florida, right in the eye of the storm.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
The proper role of an editor is to properly categorize material which is suitable for the publication, and reject that which is not. Taco's judgement in this case is, shall we say, questionable. The source website is full of logical and scientific garbage, so it doesn't belong in the science category. The talk of "particle accelerators" is bunkum too, unless you are talking about phenomena like sprites and jets which also occur in thunderstorms (and are at least somewhat understood but still under research), or perhaps if you are talking about particles from shingles and 4x8 sheets of plywood up to whole trees accelerated to 150 knots. Thus it doesn't belong in the hardware category either. And it takes itself far too seriously to be funny.
There really is no legitimate Slashdot heading under which this piece fits. Accordingly, I suggest a new one: the duncecap. This is for articles (or editorial decisions to post articles) which are too stupid for words, and to properly categorize such errors in judgement rather than throwing them down the memory hole.
Any editor posting a mis-categorized article which really ought to be filed in "It's stupid. Ask your editor why this is here" should have to wear a real duncecap during the performance of their duties for the next 24 hours. That sort of reminder is necessary to keep editors from shirking their responsibility to be, you know, editors.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Obviously, /. needs a new icon.
/. needs is editors who have some background in the scientific method.
/. really needs is editors .
/. could use is a new icon for stories like this. I propose this (suitably cropped). /. also could use a new section for stories like this - may I suggest "sqrt_minus_bs_squared.slashdot.org" - for "imaginary bullshit".
Well, what
Well, what
But I digress.
What
www.eFax.com are spammers
The author, Sterling D. Allan, has been spamming Wikimedia sites with links to his wiki and clone news sites.
3 ASpam_blacklist&diff=225451&oldid=224684
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk%
Imagine you're at the nerd table in high school, and people are continually coming up to the table peddling their wares or ideas.
I think you are getting the nerd table in high school confused with a VC's office. What you mean here was pummelling you beyond recognition.
This is total junk science. Why is this being posted as "news"? Paul claim "Without this electrical circuit, the storm would fail almost instantly due to".
i ndex.asp
The use of the word "instantly" when discussing any weather phenomena is not accurate. Everything takes time to form, or not - to use such terms indicates the author is over exagerating his claims.
Terms like "massive capacitor bank" and "harmonic circuits" are also used to wow the audience into thinking that perhaps the author might actually know what he is talking about.
Not only that but it's on "opensourcenergy.org" after poking around I felt like I should get my tin foil hat out, I'd be in good company. Check out this great piece of reporting: http://www.opensourceenergy.org/_layouts/apps/dp/
Okay guys, let's not be so quick to slam this.
l ogies
Just how smart are we anyway? Present scientific models do not fully comprehend vortex phenomena such as tornadoes and hurricanes -- or smaller-scale manifestations such as the "tornado in a can" pulverizer.
See index at: http://peswiki.com/energy/Directory:Vortex_Techno
Don't throw out radically new idea too quickly. Our present models are not serving us in this area, so why not explore a new idea and see where it takes you?
Paul Noel (article author) is a genius, seldom appreciated by his peers -- true of most truly brilliant people (e.g. Tesla).
Tomorrow's news yesterday -- the bleeding, visionary edge.
I imagine a lot of the bitching arises from the fact that most of the people here aren't in high school anymore and want the editors to grow up, too.
Wonder what happens when he turns on the TV and is exposed to that electric field. Man his back must really hurt. Maybe he should coat his house in tin foil.
Commander, if this was intended as a joke, it's not funny enough.
This kind of thing makes me consider removing Slashdot from my feed aggregator. You probably lost a few dozen right there.
It's not your job to know everything, but if you can't tell whether something is crap, either leave it alone, or get someone qualified to help.
thanks
mt
i still think that the world is flat
I'd probably say "better safe than sorry" in this case. "We only might be killing ourselves" is plenty close for me.
You don't charge a capacitor with AC, silly.
If all hurricanes were destroyed ... what would that do to the climate worldwide? What about rainfall? It would be easier and cheaper to move people (permanently) out of vulnerable areas.
Building in an area that is hurricane-suceptible, in the area the expected to flood, should NOT BE REWARDED by subsidized insurance, rescue efforts, and rebuilding money. Except for fishing and shipping, there are few publically valuable reasons to build and live in the Gulf Coast. Resorts? Let them fend for themselves - they are for-profit businesses.
Slashdot has alway posted stuff like this. Yeah it looks like junk(haven't read the article), but it is not new to slashdot. If articles like this haven't caused you to stop coming here by now, it never will.
In short: Shut the Hell up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yeah. Bitch about it all you want, but that's not going to happen. I tolerate others' bitching most of the time because I often concur, but expecting it to change is not realistic. The editors are less interested in what is "good science" or what is "news" than what will generate a conversation, and what will pay the bills. I honestly don't know if Slashdot would be nearly as fun if it were the straight up news site that we so often wish it were. This place just wouldn't be the same without the regular groaners from Dvorak or Roland Piquepaille, the Apple/Google fanboyism, the knee-jerk MS bashing, etc. Love it or hate it, it's part of the slashdot aesthetic.
just watched this last night from PBS's Nova ScienceNowt ml
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3214/02.h
Tennis Racket
.999c to be useful these days. What a stupid article.
Pitcher's Arm
Automobile
Spring
Hand Gun
You get the idea. Particle accelerators need to be able to hit
Particle accelerator? I'm sorry. It all just sounds a little "time-cubish" to me.
Proverbs 21:19
I'm noticing a growing new trend: moderators are giving AC's moderations of "-1, overrated" instead of the proper moderation (+funny in this case).
Perhaps you didn't realize that AC's are actually the silent majority of slashdot. Most of us are lurkers. When you start driving away AC posters, you'll also start losing the lurkers. That in turn will cut down on page views, and that could drastically affect slashdot's ad revenue. So by being a jerk and moderating down innocent ACs for fun, you're just hurting the site. Stop doing it.
Don't get me wrong: I don't mind when you mod down trolls, or when you mod down a +5 to +4 because you think it's overrated, but stop modding down the ACs just for being ACs.
As the harmonic circuit develops, it resonates acoustically and functions as a capacitor, extracting the heat from the storm and transmitting it away.
Capacitors don't function acoustically, and they don't extract heat. A capacitor is two plates (or sheets) of metal placed closely enough together that AC current will "pass through" (actually it doesn't; the charge builds up on one plate until the current reverses, then loses that charge and it builds up on the other plate) while DC current won't.
It has absolutely nothing whatever to do with acoustics or heat transfer; it is an electrical component. NOTHING about any storm acts as a capactor.
I RTFA and the rest of the article is as brain dead as the blurb. I've had arthritis since I was a teenager, and yes, weather affects me, but it has nothing whatever to do with storms.
I can tell you if the weather is going to change, but I can't predict how. If my back hurts, it might get suddenly hotter or colder or storm or stop storming, depending on what it's doing.
TFA is crap. Oh well, nobody's perfect.
(MRC="shotgun" although I think that's a bit drastic...)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
New understanding into the fields of Quantum Mechanics could easily explain what is going on. Quantum Physics or Quantum Mechanics as its sometimes called, does not obey any of the normal Laws of Physics nor any of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. New Cosmology fields are driving this understand. The discovery and confirmation of the existance of Black Holes, Warped Space, Dark Matter, and the recent discover that light can be slowed down flies in the face of established science. What does this have to do with this article. It has a lot to do with it. It adds scientific credibility to it in those areas of science once thought of as flights of fancy and are now gaining universal acceptance. Cosmic String Theory is one such field. So before writing something off as bullhocky just remember that something that was considered fantasy ten years ago is accepted scientific fact today. And those who are opposed to the Theory of Global Warming got a major wake up call this year and it name was Katrina.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
Can't... stop... LAUGHING...
:-)
Can't... BREATHE... eyes... leaking...
Thanks, I think I can go deal with it being Wednesday now.
No, there is no way, mainly because the article is 100% bullshit. It's laughable that Slashdot is actually running this.
IANAMeteorologist, but I do have a physicists' union card. The heat from the condensation of water is an integral part of keeping a thunderstorm going. I think you can find the thermodynamics of it in the Feynman Lectures, volume 2. So this electro-acoustical story sounds like BS to me.
"But all your emitter and collector are belong to me!"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And this sort of thing, ladies and gents, is why I don't pay for slashdot.
This guy is talking bollocks.
Unfortunately, science is not cool anymore. It's a victim of its own success; things which obey rules never really attract attention. If light suddenly decided not to travel in straight lines, or objects suddenly ceased to attract one another in proportion to the ratio of the product of their masses to the distance between them, that would get noticed. If you want to get into the papers for drawing a triangle, all you have to do is make sure that its angles add up to something other than 180 degrees. If the pressure in a fluid were to act more strongly in one direction than another, or a homogeneous filament suspended by its ends formed some other curve than y = k * (e ** x + e ** -x), no doubt somebody would be screaming for Something To Be Done. {Except they would not, because we'd all be dead}.
It probably doesn't help either that there is a public perception that scientists create things like nuclear weapons, genetically modified foods, climate change &c. and haven't yet given us the flying cars and wristwatch TV sets they promised us.
Pseudo-science, on the other hand, is cool. It attracts the kind of sad-acts who, no longer content with merely refusing to eat the same kinds of food as the rest of us or call their kids the same kinds of names as the rest of us, now apparently resent the concept of being bound by the same fundamental laws as the rest of us.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Sadly, I'm forced to agree. Too bad Digg.com's discussions are even worse.
Actually, with tooth paste, a swiss army knife and some dental floss you can do a much more powerful explosive.
And save tons of money on dental work, too!
I've had this sig for a while, I can't search back and find the attribution, but its from a fellow /.er
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I find this pretty common in techies who didn't complete a formal education. Because they never had someone explain exactly the relations of capacitance, dielectric properties, EMF, or other scientifically known phenomena, they tend to "reinvent the wheel" with new names.
Tesla was working with electricity at the time when committees were being formed to standardise names and units for all the "new" sciences. So while Tesla forged ahead and was creating his own terms for ideas such as inductance and surface effect, the less talented were sitting around academia publishing notes on inventions, and their terms became the commonly used terms today. When Tesla-heads (zero-point energy or free energy morons) rediscover his early writings, they find all kinds of unfamiliar terms and just assume he was describing something different and magical. When an electrical engineer reads Tesla's early works, there immediately is a connection to what was learned in second and third year EE courses, even if the terms are slightly different.
This article was squeezed out by a poorly educated crackpot, who assumes that just because he's never seen detailed scientific studies of weather phenomena, they must not exist or were suppressed by some mystical cabal (which is true, they are called Universites, and they teach only their students what they know, the public are on their own)
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
The Geneva Conventions appliy to weapons of war, used in warfare between two or more nations. Using weather control for peaceful purposes don't apply; however if we were to try and steer a hurricane away from our gulf coast and it ran into Cuba instead, I imagine they'd be very vocal about it and there would be a lot of political fallout.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
This article just proves again that we live in an Electric Universe!
At long last I know where all my socks have disappeared while being dried in the dryer.
Im gonna sale a hurricane on ebay now.
RUPERT! I TOLD YOU TO WATCH THE BAGS! You were looking at the boys again, WEREN'T YOU.
sure just get a big old fashoned ultraviolet pulse laser and zap the storm, it would ionize the air between the laser and the storm causing a short circuit. OBTW you're nominated to push the button on the laser, I'm going to watch from a half mile away.
There was talk about lightning being significant in tornadoes, and I can vouch for there being a lot of lightning in tornadoes, I've seen five of them at night and they even glow a very pretty blue-green. We also clocked windspeeds of over 800MPH on school (un-calibrated air defense) doppler radars in them, this could be caused by super-sonic shock waves from lightning.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
To bad the site has hijcked the term "open source". The less the term is associated with crackpots the better.
By the way any big storm will create "seismic disturbances". Big waves crash on shore, and heavy stuff falls over, and seismographs can pick this up. Big woo.
And falling barometric pressure can make your joints hurt, as the pressure inside your body equalizes with outside.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
But it is a good indicator. Besides he ignores the massive amount of heat that is radiated out by a tropical storm (through well understood thermodynamic processes) amd that if massive amounts of EM energy were being emitted by such a storm, it's not only be easily detectable, but also would overwhelm most of our delicate electronic devices and electrical power infrastructure - globally.
Hi Sterling.
r om_the_Vacuum/ One is his back pain. He presents no evidence that his back pain was caused by Wilma, and only presents one possible hypothesis (the electromagnetic one). Another is his link between vacuum energy and hurricanes. His only evidence that there might be link to vacuum energy is that according to his calculations, Wilma was losing energy of an "amount here is equal the detonation of a 20 megaton Hydrogen bomb every few minutes. To strip the planet of this much heat this fast requires an ionic short circuit into deep space." Um, there is this thing called the stratosphere where energy is radiated away into space as electromagnetic energy, named infrared. This is not new knowledge. Nor does it have anything to do with ionization or any "ionic short circuit". People on slashdot know this stuff. You should too.
;)
I'm surprised you have the guts to show yourself in the thread after some of the comments which have been made. So, kudos on your bravery.
However, I would like to take this opportunity to explain to you why so many people are mad at you right now.
People were expecting (rightly or wrongly, this being Slashdot) a science story. This is not what they got. I will explain to you why this is not a science story.
A science story would present a phenomenon which was previously unexplained, then present either a number of possible explanations and a way of testing them to see which one was right, or preferably, evidence showing that a particular explanation was correct. Paul Noel has not done this with his article.
Instead of presenting an unexplained phenomenon, he makes suppositions and then skips the physics. I see a number of phenomenons which are being described in the linked article and its accompanying one at http://pesn.com/2005/10/21/9600193_Wilma_Energy_f
There are certainly things we don't know about hurricanes and other vortices. However, there are a lot of things that we DO know. Mr. Noel doesn't seem to know the existing science behind hurricanes, and he doesn't seem to have any problem with making up possible ideas to explain his gaps in knowledge. This is not a bad way to learn a subject, mind you. But before you go around telling other people that your ideas are correct, you better test them. Mr. Noel doesn't seem to have considered other hypotheses, much less tested to see which ones are correct. I mean, seriously! Vacuum energy? WTF? Where does that come from? His theory might as well be that the energy fairies are stealing it for all that he explains the mechanism. If he wants to expand our knowledge, great. Where is he doing that?
I appreciate what you are trying to do with OSEN. If you guys want to discuss ideas, please do. However, once you decide it's worthy of publicizing, then you need to hold your people to the same burden of proof that other scientists are held to. Does Paul know how much you just publicly humiliated him? Linus wouldn't let any crap code into the linux kernel, and you shouldn't be posting any old crap to slashdot. Don't waste our time - it's enough of a waste as it is!
You know, I work on weird stuff also. I know that there is plenty of energy that we could be harvesting if we did it right. I'm building something right now you would probably find quite interesting. Some day someone like me might need something like OSEN to get word out about something that is not accepted by a part of the science community, or squelched by big business. However, if you think that ideas are more important than evidence, you would do me no good. I'd be better off avoiding you. If you want to have a little club, that's fine. But if you want to have more, you'll have to back up your shit with more than "we don't know everything". No shit. We already know that. Tell us something we don't know - not just something we don't think. There is a difference.
OBTW you're nominated to push the button on the laser, I'm going to watch from a half mile away.
Ignoring for a minute that the original article seems to be less then reputable, and this response is facetious...
If you are talking about instantly discharging all the energy in a hurricane, you might consider more than a half a mile buffer.
Now returning to reality...
Wew know that the observed climate changes are part of the natural cycle called the North Atlantic Occilation. As the ice melts in Greenland, more old Norse farmsteds come out of the ice. Forests still aren't nearly as far north in the arctic as the stumps of the forests from before the mid-14 century.
Meanwhile, the Greenland ice cap is thickening, so maybe this won't be an 800 year Warm, like the Medieval Climactic Optimum, after all.
The US pollutes less then most other countries. Kyoto lets China and India - the world's largest polluters, continue to do so, while trying to destroy America's economy. It has nothing to do with climate - there is no evidence of anthropogenic global warming - but rather international politics.
The 'Tornado in a can' is a funnel-shape device that takes rotating air at the top, and pulverizes whatever is put into it by the time it comes out the bottom.
_ a_Can
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Tornado_in
Here's the catch, the amount of energy put in does not compute to the extent of pulverizing that takes place.
There is something about the vortex that present science does not comprehend.
Tomorrow's news yesterday -- the bleeding, visionary edge.
ha ha
Especially as a researcher of hurricanes.
This man needs to look at some actual real atmospheric science work. Even a little search would get him a wealth of hurricane information:
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/tcfaqHED.html
I would suggest anyone interested in hurricanes to read this FAQ. It is relatively regularly updated with new research and information.
TFA has some interesting points, but electromagnetic forces? How about simple thermodynamics? The troposphere responds to thermal forcings more readily than electromagnetic. (This is not necessarily true of the very upper reaches of the atmosphere, e.g. ionosphere, where electromagnetic forcings by the sun have not been heavily filtered and where the diatomic molecules of N2 and O2 do not make up the majority of the air.)
He is right, though, in a analogue way about the hurricane being a capacitor and that it needs to release heat energy somehow. He's just completely wrong on how hurricanes typically do this.
Hurricanes are warm core systems. This means that the center of the hurricane is warmer than the environment it lives in. This is required to keep the winds in balance. In a developing storm, the warm core is thought to form because of all the condensational heating. Then, as the storm strengthens, the heating from the convection (in a way) fluxes into the eye which allows the storm to strengthen and stay in balance (this is known as thermal wind balance, one of the fundamental balances in vertically-varying fluids... it is the phenomenon that explains why jet streams happen over frontal systems). In a way, one could think of the warm core of the hurricane as a sort of thermal capacitor... but it's not a perfect analogue.
Additionally, with all that energy transfer, why doesn't a strong hurricane keep strengthening even with all the convection happening? Simply put, the convection helps maintain the hurricane vortex against friction. Since the hurricane has strong winds near the surface, an unforced vortex will spin down very quickly. The convection around the eyewall provides the energy needed to keep the vortex spinning against friction. Take a moment and think about how much energy friction must be dissipating, then, if you need as much convection as is seen with strong hurricanes.
The hurricane is well-known to be a strongly balanced vortex that has an obvious structure that doesn't require any odd forcings like electromagnetics. Thermodynamics and fluid dynamics are all that are needed to understand 90% or more of the hurricane's structure. Electromagnetics in hurricanes is pretty silly. Besides, it's been well-observed that, given the strength of the convection in hurricanes, they have very little lightning compared to continental thunderstorms. The exact reasons for this are still speculative, but deal with the different precipitation processes in the two types of convection. Either way, I found all this rather silly. It's interesting to think about, but, from an expert in the field, pretty much ludicrous on its face.
-Jellisky
I don't understand. Is he saying that he needs shock treatments? It appears that most psychiatrist would agree.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I just built a new octa-Xeon laptop with 15k cheetah x5 raid drives. Also built the hurricane transducer to power it.
Now I'll wait for Wilma...
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Try eating shit and dying next time.
Are these cranks possibly related to the Electric Universe brigade. I detect a similar level of wackiness and some common themes.
Seriously though, I read Slashdot to keep abreast of new technology news, not to read pseudo-scientific babble. I think the editors need to tighten up the quality control.
The article also make a lot of references to the perfect storm being in 1993, when in fact it was in 1991
. storm/
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/NATURE/06/30/perfect
Paul is the author of this piece that so many here at Slashdot have flamed. Here is a response that he submitted for your consideration.
/reply_to_slashdot.htm
It is posted in full, with illustrations, at http://pesn.com/2005/10/25/9600196_Wilma_Capacitor
- - - -
To the critics of my article that made their comments in Slashdot's site, I say thanks for your attention. Maybe some of you will get brave and try to prove me wrong rather than just make argument. When you do, somewhere on the trail, we may come to more fully understand these events. What must be understood is just how poorly these events are understood. This may seem strange for the pasting some of you shot at me, but I am most interested in good science. Good science is more interested in fact than the politically correct opinions of today. That means you say thanks for criticism....
To those who might have noted a bit more and been supportive, thanks. But keep on looking at reality. What I say doesn't matter except if it gets people thinking. Do remember I didn't attempt to write a technical document. It was more like a news report.
For those who think I don't know what is going on regards these storms, I am so far into the edge of understanding them, I probably do sound crazy. This comes from the point of view of having observed this stuff for a long time. My observations of tornados and their associated phenomena extend from the 1960's. It grew more intense and deliberate in the early 1970's. Early on when I heard strange stories from tornado events, I thought these people were crazy. After actually observing them myself, I have concluded that most reports are probably less crazy than the reality. The physics is pretty strange. Hurricanes are very much related to this because tornados generally occur associated with continental storms, that are minus the name "Hurricanes" very much the same type of storm. Hurricanes also contain lots of tornados. It is all one set of physics.
When the massive outbreak of April 3 of 1974 occurred I was watching and taking notes. I was there! In the two days prior to this outbreak, the wind blew warm and strong at up to 50 mph from the south, southwest. It had rained early on April 1 and the ground was soaked across the eastern USA with something close to 3 inches of rain in many areas. There was some tornado activity on the 1^st . As the evening of the 3^rd drew on tornado warnings were followed by massive tornados. I witnessed from a distance 2 of these super cell storms for about 45 minutes total. My location gave me an exceptional view most of the time. At that time I witnessed large volumes of air glowing with Cerenkov radiation. (Ref) These were several cubic miles in volume. This is referenced in the movie "Twister" where they talk about "going green." The events are related. The technical advisors from NASA (6 persons) to the movie were witnesses of the same event. I also took notes. K. Vonnegut (Troy NY) published these notes in a scientific report on the event.
Later that evening as another series of thunderstorms passed through, the people without power knew to evacuate as tornados arrived, because "The air turned green." The NASA movie advisors were witnesses of this latter event.
This event led me to look into the physics at a very deep level. What I found was most interesting. The predecessor to the US Department of Agriculture's Soil Conservation Service had published their annual report in 1910. It just happened to be in the local Public Library. I doubt the book even exists any more. In that report a discussion of drought, and soil erosion by various means led to a section on rain impact erosion and similar topics. It was noted in the report that the wind blowing over wetland at over 12.5 mph would aspirate microscopic droplets of water out of the land. These droplets were highly charged on their surfaces at the maximum for water. This is the belt o
Tomorrow's news yesterday -- the bleeding, visionary edge.
And the flaky pseudoscience was laughed at by anyone who actually understood the subject.
from down here in homestead it was quite a ride as we were in eyewall winds for quite some time and never got to experience the eye itself. see my livejournal for my play by play of the event http://cixel.livejournal.com/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
Its a damn sad say when a pair of canadians act like complete idiots( with the exception of Lester Pearson, and John Defenbaker ).
Of course Storms act as capacators, which results from differing tempreture air currents move across others, they also discharge like common electrical capacitors. Its called LIGHTNING. now, if these mental midgets can detect it with their spines, which I doubt they posess, they would need to be far away from all other sources of electrical noise. How they ever sat down long enough to write a web page is beyond my comprehension.
Off topic reply:
Maybe you should read this
More details here, if you are not convinced (pdf).
Above links may require that you access them from a institution (a university fx) that subsribes to The British Medical Journal.
His analysis certainly is crap, given that he only knows a little bit of physics and tries to describe his symptoms using "dielectric stress." Still, if he was uniformly afflicted by EM (as in, working with his computer is difficult and painful), then perhaps he could be suffering from electrosensitivity. Some countries (like Russia) recognize it as an official affliction, while others, like the UK http://www.hpa.org.uk/hpa/news/articles/press_rele ases/2005/051103_electrical_sensitivity.htm, are only investigating.