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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.
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
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.
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!
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
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
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.
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
Best understatement for a major hurricane hitting a populated area... EVER.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Universe_mod el
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.
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.
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
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".
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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/
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.
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!"
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!
Obviously hurricanes are particle accellerators. The wind consists of small particles called "molecules", which hurricanes accellerate to speeds in excess of 100 knots. And yes, hurricanes are also characterized by separation of charge. I find it difficult to imagine how anyone could fail to recognize these obvious facts.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
This article just proves again that we live in an Electric Universe!
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