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Giant Microwave Turns Plastic Back to Oil
An anonymous reader writes "From the newscientist article: "Key to GRC's process is a machine that uses 1200 different frequencies within the microwave range, which act on specific hydrocarbon materials. As the material is zapped at the appropriate wavelength, part of the hydrocarbons that make up the plastic and rubber in the material are broken down into diesel oil and combustible gas.""
Finally, a use for all those AOL CDs!
That the mines of the next century will be our garbage mountains. It will be the place with the highest density of easily obtainable materials.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
no mention on how much energy it takes to run the thing, or how much energy it puts out. it's not of much use if it costs a fraction to just bury the old plastic and make new stuff from scratch.
People are made of hydrocarbons... kind of!
Will this be the new trendy form of cremation?
I drink to make other people interesting!
when I stop at the gas station/convenience store, I'll be able to buy a burrito that's 1/2 frozen coming out of the microwave, and fuel 1/2 frozen coming out of the microwave. How far we've come!
I've gotten my microwave at home to break my food back down into component carbons. Or at least something pretty similar to coal.
Gamertag: WyleType
Whats the energy in/out on this one? Worth it?
Even if the process uses a lot of energy it seems to me it beats landfilling.
I hope they figure out a way to turn people into fuel soon. The article talks about using this to salvage copper wire and save space in landfill. Microwaving shredded car tires to extract diesel. How long 'til there is a reclaimation center on every corner? The streets could get a whole lot cleaner soon...
So long, and thanks for all the fish
damn you, you laws of physics you!
Guns don't kill people, bullets kill people!
What I gather is that they use multiple magnetrons or microwave circuits to generate frequencies that will resonate with all the common bonds in hydrocarbons, just as 2.4Ghz is the resonant frequency of the protons in a water molecule swinging back and forth. However, they also claim (for example) that it can dissolve the insulation off a piece of copper wire. But it's still the same principle as a microwave oven, so I ask: how can they put a conductor into the chamber and not have it immediately burn up due to microwave absorbtion? Cut it up into teeny bits?
But it's recycling, we're not allowed to ask if it's worth it, because if we did we might not bother to recycle anything.
Error:
The process they are talking about sounds a lot like petroleum cracking, both use catalysts to break larger hydrocarbons/polymers into smaller pieces but the petroleum cracking takes place upwards of 1000 degrees so if it is already being used, why not this too? Currently to produces plastics we use crack petroleum into ethylene, propylene etc. and to produces certain precursors we use superacids, zeolites and super lewis acids which are really not very environmentally friendly. whatever use they can get out of the process without needing to crack more petrol is a good thing at least on paper.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
does 1200 different frequencies mean that the bandwidth is discontinuous?
imagine how long they spent choosing all those frequencies...
www.purevolume.com/martyd
Powering the next generation with the accumulated shit of the previous one. Brilliant.
It's the modern day equivalent of turning water into wine.
JEG / SYD / AU
Almost two years ago.
-- Old Man Kensey
Good! they can start by zapping all that annoying hard plastic bubble packaging that every bleeding thing seems to come in now and is harder then hell to open without damaging the contents! What frigging idiot came up with that idea?!? If there isn't a hell, they should make one, and put idiots like that in it! I know...a prison...we'll strip them naked and make sure their cells are free of anything with sharp or pointed edges, and all their meals, toilet paper, soap etc will come wrapped in their diabolical inventions!
You're using her as bait, Master!
The short of it is that you need to do is put a lot of electrical energy into water and you get hydrogen. Electricity can't run a car because you can't just have an extension cord dragging out the back. Hydrogen is a portable form of energy that a car can run on. The fact that it takes more energy to produce than gasoline is irrelevant.
God spoke to me.
How much energy does it take to run that "microwave" to convert some plastic back to usable hydrocarbons? It's presumably powered by electricity...and where did that electricity come from? Most electricity around the world comes from the consumption of fossil fuels. If this process could be linked exclusively to alternate energy sources, like solar or wind, etc., then it might be a net positive thing.
>> plastic... broken down into... combustible gas
Try feeding your dog a (small) Lego. It has the same effect. For almost a week.
This is true and people have been using animal fat as a fuel ever since they discovered fire. Exxon realized that 150,000 people already die each year from global warming and their bodies represent an untapped, carbon neutral fuel source. Check out the results at Vivoleum.com, and you to may want to be a candle or SUV fodder. Burn guilt free!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You can still see the tribute video here. It has all of the good parts anyway. The press release is also preserved elsewhere.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
wonder if it could be used to convert coal to a liquid hydrocarbon--would make the US the new saudi arabia for oil considering our huge coal deposits.
You can probably blame this on Micro$loth Winbloze!!!
There is an un-expected upturn in the market for really really giant bags of microwave popcorn.
load "$",8,1
Every hydrocarbon you save can be used somewhere else.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Isn't a giant microwave full of gas really just a big bomb?
Or the Bush Administration might make war on Firestone/Michelin/Bridgestone as well...
Fighting over religion is like seeing whose imaginary friend is best.
Dr Evil!
Just like the 2450MHz frequency magnetron in your kitchen microwave oven which is specific to water (H2O) molecules
The 2.45GHz frequency isn't "specific to water": water doesn't have a resonance there, and it will heat many other kinds of molecules.
I'm not sure how much I'd trust the rest of their process if they don't even seem to understand how microwave ovens work.
I'm sure it helps to stick the stuff into a blender first.
If we microwave oil, will we get Dinosaurs?!?
Finally a Mr.Fusion now where's the hover conversions?! And monkey butlers!
True, but how is it enforced? Perhaps in the Netherlands, people can be trusted to just do it, but I'm not sure that would work here.
... well, you tell me which one people are going to do? (Hint, it's the one that's less work.) Hell, I know people who don't even recycle metals, because it's too much work to sort stuff into the bin that they're already given. Easier just to chuck it all in one bin and not think about it. And that's only two cans, one for all mixed recyclables and one for 'everything else.'
In fact, I'm pretty sure that in my municipality, it's technically illegal to throw out anything that's toxic into the regular trash, but there's no enforcement mechanism, and given a choice between taking that old NiCd phone battery or fluorescent light tube to the recycling center, and just putting it in the trash
I've heard anecdotally that in Japan, there are people who basically go through trash at transfer stations, and will hunt down (based on personally identifying information in the trash) those folks who don't sort their recyclables out and reprimand/embarrass them -- short of something vaguely creepy like that (and in the U.S., social ostracism and humiliation aren't going to work as punishments), I'm not sure any consumer-sorting programs are going to work.
Without draconian enforcement, I think the sorting has to be -- or at least has to be backed up by sorting -- done at the transfer station or dump.
From a different perspective, sorting garbage based on predetermined criteria seems to be like something that, once you get over the initial investment in the system that does it, is probably better done by one giant machine that sorts the garbage for 100,000 people, than each of those 100,000 people having to take a few minutes a day to think about it. From a purely economic perspective, the opportunity cost of everyone's time probably justifies an automatic sorter, and when you factor in the recovered value from the recyclables [1] and the possible "dump mining" aspects that it creates later, I'd think it would be a good investment.
[1] The value of the metal and Type 1 plastic, anyway; the higher-number plastics don't seem to be worth recycling right now, at least based on what I've read.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Ever see what happens to gold in a microwave? Sparks. Lots of them. I've never seen what happens to copper.
So what happens when plastics are recycled off of gold/copper wiring and sparks are among the by-products?
Am I the only one who forsees problems with a giant superpowered microwave full of fossil fuels?
1) build miniature hawk-10 with household items
2) get free aol cd's
3) convert aol cd's into raw materials
4) solve world energy problems
5) profit!
we're saved! screw middle-east oil!
on a less serious note... just imagine what could be done to a pickle with one of those!
Jesus Saves
So, just like, a wave, right?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
In 2003 the world was excited by stories about a process that changed any hydrocarbon into fuel. It was calculated that if all the agricultural waste in America was used, it would be unnecessary to import oil. Not only that but the process would be carbon neutral. For a variety of reasons, the process hasn't quite worked out. It appears to be marginally economical.
1 25_031125_turkeyoil.htmlt ion
Given the above, I'm not very excited by the microwave process. It may work technically but it remains to be seen if it will work economically.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/11/1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymeriza
Yea some of you guys in Europe are doing well in that kind of area, I think Switzerland? is another well ahead of the pack in that sort of forward thinking! I just wish more of the westernised nations would take those ideas on... but hey who wants thier nice comfortable lives made more difficult eh? Much too much like hard work...
Great.. and just when we were starting to look at alternative fuel
So...how many oil companies are making bids for the patents?
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
Not surprised by this at all.
...
There are countless stories of ancient technology where enlightened beings create things or destroy them by utilising special harmonic vibrations.
We have pyramids and whole cities being constructed in the remote jungle covered mountains of Peru by a small number of 'dwarfs' who move massive blocks of granite around using a nothing but a 'chiming rod'. (Sound being a vibration in teh audible spectra).
We have the armies of King David knocking down the walls of Jericho by blowing specific notes on the sacred horn of destruction. (Sound again being a vibration in teh audible spectra).
We have ancient Indians flying around in Vimyana airships and laying waste to massed armies with blasts of specially coded light waves. (Light being a vibration in teh visible spectra).
From ancient Inuit culture, we have heroes who can 'hummm' inaudible songs to summon a great whale from beneath the ice caps of the frozen north, and command the whale to do their bidding. (Subtonal vibrations in teh sensory spectra)
We have the ancient Malinese who claim to have built a city UNDER THE OCEAN in a single day, by banging two large fish together. (A vibration in teh olafactory spectra perhaps ?)
And the ancient Australian aboriginies, where the rainbow serpent created the mountains and the rivers and then literally sang day and night and linear time into existence. (A vibration in teh temporal spectra ?).
So why should we be surprised that vibrations in teh Microwave spectra hold the power to perform the modern alchemical trick of turning old barbie dolls and art-deco floor coverings into diesel fuel ?
Thats hardly progress - I would be impressed if they came up with a giant titanium chiming wand that could remotely construct a magnificent city on the Moon in a couple of hours, or a 100 square mile flawless pyramid of solid ruby on the surface of Mars over the space of a long weekend
They're doing it by hand in China. Here's a slashdot posting, referring to a photo journal about just such a thing.
Soylent fuel is people! IT'S PEOPLE!!!
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Then again, maybe trash heaps will evolve new life forms that eat the trash before we can get to it. Remember the nylon eating bacteria that evolved in labs?
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
compared to what is gained if anything?
Just need to have non-stupid options. Every four or five months, I check with my state's waste management website for how to handle the tricky stuff (like fluorescent tubes and button batteries), mostly because that's about how often I lose a CFL. Their answer is that I must drive halfway across the state (it's a small state, but the way the roads are, half-way across might as well be all the way across). Also, I have to make a special appointment for the privilege.
I might consider doing this when my CRT monitor finally fails, but somehow I doubt that burning 12 gallons of gasoline for a single compact bulb is less harmful to the environment than tossing it in with the regular trash. And if it's not, then there's no point in my continuing to use them, as the 12 gallons of gasoline puts the lifetime cost well over that which regular light bulbs would've been over the same time period. They fail to break often enough that just accumulating a bunch of spent CFLs is really an option. It'd take me ten years to fill a small box with 'em, and frankly, I don't want to store hazardous waste for that long.
The items aren't exactly very large or numerous. I fail to see why they can't just put one or more small bins at the transfer station for them. How much space would a whole town's worth of expired button batteries need to take, anyway?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Vivoleum - energy that's not just green, but Soylent Green!
To my knowledge, no plastic has a "resonance" in the microwave frequency range. Except for heating effects, I doubt there can be any microwave assisted chemistry involved in this. There is too little info in the New Scientist article to assess this, but I doubt this is rocket science...
So we have more oil to burn. Great. Okay, it's perhaps better than burning plastics directly, with all the contaminants like chloride, fluoride, heavy metals, in it. But it will add to our CO^2 production. At least garbage that is stored properly will not add to the global warming problem. If this microwave process is economically viable, oil prices will go down, and that unfortunately means we'll just burn more.
This idea is labeled as recycling and therefore good. But this is not the kind of recycling we need. It's not clean energy. We need alternative fuels and reusable non-polluting products.
assignment != equality != identity
Finally! I mean, we've got enough plastic to drive our cars on forever, no? And we don't have any use for that plastic anyway, I mean, plastic isn't very useful at all now is it.
What about coming up with more effective ways of making old plastic into new plastic instead, since we have a tendency to destroy the raw material for making plastic by burning it in our vehicles.
Badgers, we don't need no stinking badgers! - UHF
G.I. Joe?! Is this the thanks?!?
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Was that really so funny :D , or just deliberate ignorance that made you smirk embarrassingly ? ;)
... gasp ... French) about the "world-first" plastic recycling plant.
... you should see the hateful glares you get if you attempt to put bottles or plastics in general refuse. Even putting the wrong kind of plastics in the wrong plastic collection bins has earned me an earful of abuse from a local for not respecting the rules.
... it's accomplished with terrestrial heat pumps.
... in this case, millions of tons of plastic shit that we ditch when we feel like it without a thought of the consequences. We should pay the cleaning bill as we make the mess, not leave it to our grandchildren to wipe our shit off their faces 200 years later down the track.
:
So, here you are, people. Buried on page 23/28 in the recent edition of Rega (rescue operations) magazine here in Switzerland, I found this EXCELLENT article (originally in
The Swiss people are FANATICAL about recycling
And to answer the p's question: much of the energy used in the process comes from nuclear plants, but Switzerland is right up at the top of the world ranks for numerous "renewable" energies: for geothermal, it ranks at number 2 behind New Zealand, and it does that without any noticeable geothermal activity on the ground surface
Besides all that, is it so important to think about how much energy is required to clean up our own mess ? I believe we have a duty to ourselves and future generations to take responsibility for our own shit
When you buy an electrical product here in Switzerland, you are OBLIGED to cough up extra to cover the costs of disposing of the damned thing when you're done with it. Same thing should be forced on everyone with plastics - we should all pay more now for them so we can deal with the issue as things are "consumed", whether by paying for the fuel to run these processes, or putting the money aside for dealing with the mess later. Like nuclear power should be priced much higher to take into account the future cost of disposing of the nuclear waste. (A fastbreed reactor works great for this, but costs WAY too much in general).
Enough o.t. rant, on to the article
https://www.rega.ch/fr/dateien/medien/1414/PDF_Reg a_Magazin_68_fr.pdf
My translation for those who don't understand French... (original text follows)
"In Genesis it was written: 'From dust you came, to dust you shall return'.
In English it's known as 'going full circle', an expression not quite completely translated by the image of the circle thus described. What it means to describe is the principle of returning to the point you started at.
In this instance, it doesn't relate to taking a step backwards at all, but a definitive step forward - one of the numerous little steps that are being taken to save (perhaps 'preserve' would be better here) our planet Earth.
To cut a long story short, here in Sihlbrugg in the Swiss canton of Zug, they're converting plastics (originally from petrol) back in to petrol again. The idea seems so simple in principle that you ask yourself why we even bother to talk about it: it's obvious, right ?
Well, not obvious enough it seems: the proof, noone's actually thought of actually doing it before. Today, the Sihlbrugg factory is a world first - and was appropriately recognised as such with last autumn's "Prize for Innovation" in the canton of Zug.
And it's all the buzz all over Europe.
So you ask yourself the question: what is the Sihlbrugg's system called, an incineration site or a petrol refinery ?
The answer: both of them.
This is what is truly implied by the phrase 'back to the future'.
We've all read who knows how many times about how much plastics have become a problem: the bags that are strewn over and through
It shouldn't define it.
The problem with english is that spelling is completely illogical, fixed and used to define the pronunciation of a word. It leaves huge ambiguity over the pronunciation of words which you are unfamiliar with. Every child has to deal with this bullshit as they are indoctrinated at school.
In other languages, there isn't such a problem. The letters have specific sounds and the spelling can be used to reconstruct the pronunciation of the words. See a new word in German for example, you can pronounce it pretty much correctly without having heard someone speak it first.
Deleted
These numbers are attributed to Jerry Meddick, director of business development at Global Resource Corporation. I'd guess mr. Meddick originally said to the reporter "running 20 pounds of ground-up tyres ... produces 1.2 gallons of diesel oil, 50 cubic feet of combustible gas, 2.2 lb of steel, and 7.5 lb of carbon black", using units he's familiar with.
Okay, a publication calling itself scientific is not going to publish figures in non-SI units. I appreciate the effort of conversion, but it's not much better to publish figures in "base 0.454", as it were. Reading in base 10, the above quote best represents (in a roundabout way) the steel yield of the machine: to get 1 kg of steel, put in 9.1 kg of ground-up tyres.
What if you want to express the total yield per unit of ground-up tyres? Use a unit amount or a power of 10 amount of tyres and calculate the rest from that:
For every 10 kilograms of ground-up tyres, the Hawk-10 produces 5 litres of diesel oil, 1.6 cubic metres of combustible gas, 1.1 kg of steel, and 3.7 kg of carbon black.
This is much easier to comprehend: if a ton (1000 kg) of ground-up tyres were delivered to a Hawk-10, it would produce approximately 500 litres of diesel oil, enough to run my 1999 Ford Focus on my 100 km per day commute 5 days a week for 20 weeks.
Now, where's that microwawe...?
Usage: km/h for speed (kilometers per hour); kph for very slow impulses (kilopond hours).
Clearly, the specific properties of the microwaves used (not just the heating) cause specific chemical changes in the plastic and rubber compound. Essentially, polymer chains are being broken up. But we as consumers are told not to worry about microwaves from cell phones, WiFi, or base stations.
Why? Well, the photon energy (Planck's constant times the microwave frequency) is too low to cause chemical changes. All microwaves are supposed to do to tissue is a small amount of heating. Yet clearly, other processes that damage polymers can go on as well. DNA is a polymer, and breaks in DNA induced by EM fields is exactly what Lai and Singh at Washington state university have found. Their work has been surpressed: http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/march05/w akeupcall01.html.
In Soviet Russia High-Energy Microwave Chernobyl-Chili in a plastic bowl microwaves you!
Something witty goes here.
Actually, the Roman emperors (Nero and others) already figured out how to turn people (especially religious freaks) into fuel, almost 2000 years ago...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I pay several hundred pounds a year to have my garbage dumped in a landfill. They should be buying it from me, recycling and selling it. I'd then have a pretty bloody good incentive for sorting the stuff before it goes out.
Deleted
South Africa makes most of its liquid petroleum from coal. The same process is also used to convert tar from the Canadian tar sands into liquids. The petroleum industry calls is 'cracking' or 'fractionating' reactors. The process dates back to the 2nd war. Google for 'Fisher-Tropsch', 'Sasol' and 'Syncrude'.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
What about coming up with more effective ways of making old plastic into new plastic instead Point is, this is already being done. That doesn't stop a lot of plastic from ending up in landfill anyway. As fossil fuels will become increasingly harder to get by, it's good to see some of it can be recovered from existing waste.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
... when they find a fast and efficient way to turn water and CO2 into oil and oxygen.
Unless it turns garbage into hand cut hay for our agrarian future, it's the spawn of the technological devil we've all sold our souls to.
Deleted
Yet another script kiddie at work on that URL you .. These people just suck.
gave
Dear Visitor,
This domain has been killed.
Sincerely,
The Yes Men
Oh shush- many many many chemical reactions just need a little heat. With enough heat, most things do break down into constituent components. Quit your fearmongering.
Why 1200 different frequencies? And what mechanism is used to break the bonds whith microwaves? -the photon energy at these frequencies is to low to be ionizing. I will stay sceptical until further details emerge...
One of the great and wonderful things about English is that spelling reflects quite accurately the history of the word. Sure, there are some pronunciation ambiguities that are a little difficult to learn, but even ESL learners get over that hill remarkably quickly.
But with English -- unlike almost any other language -- you can look at a word and immediately know that its roots are in Greek, or Latin, or French, or Celtic, or whether it's a modern loan word. This has massive benefits for advanced literacy, as it means you actually know more words than you think you do, and can quite accurately guess at the meaning of new words you encounter -- which is of far greater utility than simply knowing how to say the word. Get the sound wrong and people will correct you almost immediately, so what's the problem?
In other languages, once a word has been imported, its roots are lost, and with that the connection to the linguistic system from which it came, and its connection to other similarly-sourced words.
So, regular spelling: great for primary school kids; not so great for everyone else who wants to use language at a more advanced level, for things like communication and literature.
Look at super markets, lots and lots of items in small tiny packages. Can I bring my own 4 gallon container and fill it up with shower gel? NO.
Why not? Why cannot items be prices per volume, not per packet.
Or if super markets provided recycling bins so you can bring back old containers/wrapping and pay the consumer back with a store credit that will
reduce garbage dumps massively. Id like to see a 30cent discount on a shampoo bottle if I bring back the old one. At least this 'discount' system bypasses
taxes so you dont get taxed on the recycling (* until some idiot politician acts like a mafia boss and goes, lets rape and steal *)
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Scientists have reported Thursday that they have successfully extracted usable energy from recent fusion experiments. However, the downside is that it takes more energy to start the fusion experiment than is extractible.
Lai and Singh's work have not been supressed: rather it has shown to be hard to replicate. And there is another explanation to the statements in the article: they mechanism of work is not as the inventors think (not at all unusual) and it is only the heat that gives the result. The article is far too thin in details to know for sure.
Kitchen shears.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
When oil runs out, what is to replace plastic? There are specific applications (perhaps food safety), durability, outdoor exposure, etc where plastics seem to be quite handy. The biodegradable replacements I'm not sure will meet those requirements.
"Anything that has a hydrocarbon base will be affected by our process..."
So, we can also recycle humans, or any organic compound?
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
the SI prefix "giga" come from the same root as "gigantic." Just as someone would sound like a rube if they said "Look at that gig-antic tree," so to those who say "gig-a-byte" instead of the proper "jiga-byte."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Heh, but isn't it better to come up with alternatives to fossil fuels. Using plastic would be a seriously temporary solution, with China also starting to become a motorized nation, all the fuel recovered from plastic would probably only last a month and what would we do then?
I know plastics are being recovered now, but what we need is more plastic, not more fossil fuels. Fossil fuels we can live without, plastics would be very difficult (but then again, plastics can also be replaced by different starch-based products, wood fiber and others).
Bad analogy warning:To me, researching ways to turn plastic into oil is like researching ways to make cigarette smoke back into cigarettes, not something we really need, although I bet smokers would disagree.
Badgers, we don't need no stinking badgers! - UHF
...this is stupid.
OK, so we turn all that plastic back into oil.
Just so that we can burn it?
Just what the world needs, I'm sure.
And the military applications are...?
Fata viam invenient.
Let me tell ya little story bout a man named Fred,
Jersey Engineer barely has time to eat bread,
Then one day he was cookin up some food,
after a 20 minute call it was a bubblin crude.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
So, what part of my "microwave safe" plastiware have I been eating all these years ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
How can you possibly interpret the actions that have been taken surrounding Lai and Singh's work (see the article I linked) as anything other than surpression? And their work has been replicated: http://www.springerlink.com/content/21np1etlm5pj5u 5g/, in a simpler system even.
If that were the case, why use multiple specific frequencies instead of just an un-tuned microwave source or Ohmic heating? Besides, there are strong indications that an unusual mechanism is at play. Lai and Singh have found that the DNA effects are reduced when using an iron chelate (removes iron from tissue) first. Maybe iron services as an intermediate or catalyst for free radical formation under EM excitation. It is not implausible because such heavy elements have a large spin-orbit coupling.
I've said for years it would be a great job for prisoners to do the sorting. Have the household garbage run down a conveyor belt and have them pick out the useful bits.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
How much microwave power do you need to reconstitute oil back into dinosaurs?
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
I was commenteing on their work in the microwave range, not on ELF-EMF. And the supression is in the eye of the beholder.
There has not to be any reason for their use of multiple frequencies, more than that the inventors believe that it is important.
Don't be silly. Pure heat energy provides energy quanta on the order of k*T (Boltzmann's constant times the temperature in Kelvins). Only when this is close to bond energies will materials break down through a purely thermal (no catalysts, radicals, or whatever) process. With typical bond energies on the order of 1 eV, you'll see that the required temperature for a purely thermal dissociation process is way higher than can be found in systems were with lots of chemistry going on, such as biological tissue.
IANAS but doesn't this seem like a far-fetched pipedream?
The real miracle would be to turn Strongbow into Dry Blackthorn.
(I can already do the reverse.)
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
All this time I just thought leftovers in the tupperware reheated in the lunchroom microwave were just yucky.
It's all so clear now.
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
Vivoleum was a gag site associated with a gag presentation to a bunch of industry insiders.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
One thing I find with English speaking people, is that they don't care so much about the pronunciation, or even if you use the correct grammar. Not that it doesn't matter, but that they are more tolerant of others who have less of a grasp of the language. One example. I was sending out a fax from a convenience store (in Ontario), and the clerk only knew French (talk about bad service). Anyway, I asked if I could borrow a pen and used the work "stylo" which is the word I've always used. She corrected me and said "plume", even though "stylo" is a perfectly cromulent word. I encounter stuff like this all the time with French people. If you don't use the correct (or expected) word, pronunciation, or grammar for what you're trying to say, then they act like they don't understand you, and even sometimes laugh about how badly you speak. Maybe it's just because I live in Canada an we are used to people who are speaking English as a second or third language, but I've never seen that kind of attitude from any english speaking person.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
the world replaces all natural gas power plants with nuclear power plants. Gas has been obsolete for so long.
Will it blend?
Ding! You are now free to move about the country.
A few years ago an Australian company Molectra Technologies (http://www.molectra.com.au) used microwaving shredded car tires, and extracted enough oil and other compounds to power the process. It won the Australian Invention of the Year award.
Remember, people are our greatest resource!
Contact your company's HR department to find out how YOU can help!
Basically with 2 out of the following 3 characteristics of a word: Meaning, spelling and pronunciation, you can usually figure out the third. Which is fine by me.
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
I heard just yesterday some tree hugger whining about all the single-use plastics that fast food places use. Whatta concept...put recycle bins in McD's making oil a renewable resource....Eat junk food, save the planet.
How much does the machine itself cost and how much electricity does it use to transform? I guess my real question is, does it put out more than it requires? Yeah I can see all the other benefits that the machine has, but this would be the big selling point wouldn't it?
It's all about the electric field strength bitches.
This can be derived from the power density of the transmitting source.
But in the end, when the electric field gets large enough, funky shit starts to happen.
I think 2.4 GHz arcing/flashover happens at field strengths between 20 kV/cm^2 and 40 kV/cm^2, depending on the air pressure. There's a d00d from Texas Tech that wrote some long evil thesis on this very topic.
In regards to that paper by Lai and Singh, I kind of dismissed the ideas they had a few years ago, including others claiming biological effects of microwaves, but have began to change my mind. Especially after the whole article on killing bacteria in dish clothes by putting them in the microwave oven for a minute or so.
successful at mining piles
of slashdot's garbage!
How you found one post
out of so many boggles
my mind? Slashdot search?
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Get Frodo and throw them in the lava!
Just make it powered by a diesel engine. Problem solved.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
And then there's bicycle...
This space available.
Deleted
Yes, but how much POWER does it take to run the Microwave equipment? If you are using more electricity to melt the plastic into fuel what is the point?
Does this have anything to do with LINUX??????
What's neat about this is that it takes waste products that would end up in a land fill and converts them to a usable form again... with a surplus over the amount of energy needed to do so. Not much, certainly not enough to supplant alternative fuel sources... but enough to drive the conversion process and power a few other machines nearby.
This will be great for factories all around and farms and other types of businesses that end up with a lot of waste material. Maybe we can make those 75% self-sustaining... which means they won't be depleting more raw materials as quickly. This is a good thing.
Even if the only use is for our Municipal trash companies to run their fleet of vehicles off of the trash they collect... we've won a huge gain. Maybe trucking companies could do the same... converting their used tires to fuel every month (they go through a lot of tires).
This is equivalent to farms using their biomass to convert to biodiesel or ethanol for use in their farm equipment. It's not a commercial enterprise but it reduces waste and improves their efficiency which means they can pass the savings on to the rest of us (or stop needing subsidies from tax dollars).
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
An excellent plan I admit, but you've forgotten one crucial factor...
Politicians
The US is 8 trillion dollars in debt. That means they spent all the money you had, and then just kept on spending... 8 trillion times. Do you believe for a second that they could leave 1 trillion alone for nuclear waste disposal? The odds at eight trillion to one are not good.
So... Why don't you just chuck it into a volcano? It isn't as if the things aren't already spewing all sorts of radioactive crap out anyway.
Deleted
Because that's what we need, is more ways to obtain fossil fuels. [/sarcasm] Why would we want to spend so much energy and money trying to squeeze out every last drop of oil? This pisses me off.
Internet: Serious Business
How many language do you know making you the expert about 'other languages'?
I can only speak from my knowledge of 5+ dialects of Dutch, French, German, English and some Latin. I can tell you that the "roots" are in all mostly very recognizable. I believe, the deeper you understand a certain language the more you get a feeling for the connections and origins of it.
You sound like you've recently been studying for your English finals and used the lack of deeper knowledge of other languages as a sign of superiority of 'English' because you only recently are starting to 'get it'.
you can look at a word and immediately know that its roots are in Greek, or Latin, or French, or Celtic, or whether it's a modern loan word.
i disagree most whole-heartedly. i can tell in two out of the four cases you mention, but thats only because i speek greek and french; the average individual on the other hand would likely not be able to make that distinction.
In other languages, once a word has been imported, its roots are lost, and with that the connection to the linguistic system from which it came, and its connection to other similarly-sourced words.
once again, i don't think you've got it right. a greek person can tell you which of two words that have been taken from italian was originally greek, and which is not.
you're not a linguist, but you do seem to be a linguistic bigot, although you couch it in marketing spin.
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
Who cares about plastics - these guys have invented the first PHASER!
But beware the darkside. Soon we may have beams that will turn PEOPLE into natural gas!
Of course, if someone aimed it at Congress, no one might notice....
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
Slashdot should really be capitalized.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Nonsense. I only know a little bit about a few languages, but off the top of my head Japanese and Korean are both much better at sorting out word origins. Japanese even has a separate syllabary for modern loan words.
In Korean, you know if a word is pure Korean (no associated Chinese character, different verb structure), Chinese (associated character, verb structure) or loan word (tend to be very long, uses Chinese verb structure).
What "any other language" were you thinking of there?
Unlike a daycare, trash is not really a service you can be denied. The trash company cannot say, "Oh, you didn't jump through x hoop, so we aren't going to pick up your trash."
What I find amazing is that Slashdot readers haven't thought about how technology could be used to solve this problem. But first, a fact to keep in mind; the price of dealing with waste will go up. When we start deciding that we must care for the whole life of a product we will have to pay for that. Personally, I think it's a good deal and plan. Some may not. But in order to properly recycle and reduce waste, we will have to pay more money somewhere; upfront for the companies to deal with it or at the back end if we want the trash people to deal with it.
That said, it seems to me that institute "green" bags made of strong but biodegradeable material (bamboo?) with RFID chips in them. When they're dropped off at your house in some sort of secure manner (or, like the mail, are highly prosecuted if messed with) the unique identifier is logged with your residence and by the type of trash that bag should carry. Then, when it's picked up, the ID is read and the appropriate household is charged. If the wrong type of trash ends up in the bag ("this bag went through the machine and read out that it had metal instead of paper... ding!") you get charged for the resorting fee. If you have a lot of bags in a particular week, you get charged exponentially beyond the first an additional burden fee. And so on.
Really, the problems that people have with trash is that it's a pain, no one wants to do it, it's hard to sort (in part because no one wants to do it), and when there is an error it's messy to clean up. I think, frankly, the segmentation of trash is a perfectly reasonable plan, and can be supported with modern technologies to get around the fact that presently trash has no provenance, save the house it's in front of.
[Ego]out
"The cleaned garbage cans are then placed on a clean garbage conveyor 56 from where they pass through a microwave station 58."
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20020023860.html
The patent does not state why the microwave action though, it could be for disinfectant purposes?
So that's what really killed off the dinosaurs!
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
Perhaps, Anonymous should disclose whether s/he owns any stock of these guys at GRC:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=GBRC.PK
I've looked into this technology earlier, and I'm not against the article being submitted, but I think disclosure as to holdings (or lack thereof) in the underlying company would be helpful for the submitter to do. It's just the irony (potentially) of paid bloggers for Microsoft's new people-ready campaign. I mean this is a form of a "people-ready" slashvertisement as well perhaps?
Disclosure: I've advised my bro to get into this company and he has a small number of shares (~3k) in these guys at avg px of 1.70 for what it's worth...
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
I mean, think about it. If you could use this approach in a beamed energy weapon, you could aim it at the enemy's equipment and dissolve all the plastic bits. What combination of microwave frequencies would dissassemble other kinds of molecules? Could you use it to break down the carbon fiber in the new Boeing wings? Or to weaken concrete? Or to alter the strength of characteristics of alloys?
This is wonderful! I've been getting pretty upset about Peak Oil, and this means that we'll be able to supplement and then continue our contribution to global warming, during and shortly after the decline and disappearance of available oil.
That's funny, claiming to know how ancient Greek and Latin were pronounced. Can you do a good impersonation of Erasmus, too?
Where exactly can I find the pronunciation guide in the Système international?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Does that mean Ralph Richardson (The Supreme Being) and a bunch of little people that built the world are going to pick up all the AOL disks and put them into a giant rubbish bin?
Surely a "Giant micro wave" is just a wave?
Just for everyone's collective enlightenment, the story about day-care is discussed in Freakonomics. IIRC it occured in Israel.
Definitely a book worth reading if you're even peripherally interested in economics or the economic consequences of everyday actions. Good light summer reading.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Goodyear has been reworking cured rubber back into uncured rubber using a microwave for years. They discovered the process when one of the Lincoln workers got pissed and put some tennis shoes into the microwave. The result was a lot of smoke and rubber that could be reused in product process.
:)
They wouldn't do the rework during the day since it created tons of black smoke coming out of the smokestack.
Devastingly effective, but can only be played on an animated recorder, by construction paper children.
I speak four languages. In order of proficiency: English, Chinese ("Mandarin"), German, Spanish. Not sure what the relevance of that is, but you asked.
And notice, too, that I didn't say "all other languages" in the sentence you quote, nor did I say it was impossible to work out the roots in other languages. Not sure how you can tell what I "sound like" from reading something I've written... but we'll let that one go. I probably should have said "can be lost" -- apologies.
Unfortunately most of the academic articles I summarized to make my original post are behind logins.
But here's a somewhat accurate free primer for you, if you're actually interested in the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography
>>Do you imagine that you can't do things like this in languages like German which have consistent spelling and grammar?
No.
I agree. Here's a very loose primer on what I was talking about in the case of English:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography
Your example languages aren't good for your argument, as East Asian languages in general are actually _excellent_ examples of what I was "thinking of there".
Eg. For many years, "telephone" in Chinese was a loan word with three syllables in Chinese "te-le-feng" -- obviously from English, right? But as happens in most East Asian languages, that struck speakers as unnatural, and a "native" substitute took over completely. "Telephone" in Chinese is now "dianhua". Literally translates as "electric speech". Not a loan word, a completely native construction. But "telephone" -- the English word -- still retains its roots and is related to other words. If it was spelled "telifohwyn" (or three other variations in local varieties of differently pronounced English, or "faryap") could you say the same thing?
We only pay $17/month US for trash service. All we have to do is put recyclables (aluminum, glass, metal, plastic with logo, paper) into a green trash bucket, yard waste into a brown one and everything else into a black one. It's easy, and they really make it worth our while (every other city around here is about $50/month).
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I heard about this the other day on the news, and wondered if it was indeed The Yes Men. Ha ha. Now I know.
Ultimately this can't be a good way to recycle plastic. All you are doing is taking it out of the ground to burn it, combine it with oxygen to make it heavier and then releasing it into the air? Id rather have it in the landfill until we can find a better solution then this. Unless you can turn that oil and gas back into plastic.
So if it can turn plastic back into oil what will it do a box of Peeps?
~Vexed and loving it!
PCs are clearly of major importance in the promotion of human well being. Electronic publication is cheap, effective and revolutionizing all fields of human practice and learning. A lifetime's worth of expensive textbooks can easily be replaced by one or two cheap electronic devices. Electronic records keeping and commerce saves business billions each years. Medical records prevent mixups and save lives. All of these savings can be safely recouped by the software industry if software piracy can be prevented.
M$ Research's amazing new Soul Scan has this potential. It is biometric feedback device that verifies the user's identity and deepest thoughts, which can be used for further profit as well as piracy prevention. Before using the computer, the consumer must insert his fingers into the Soul Scanner, which instantly creates a neural network to read the consumer's mind. If the consumer is not authorized to access the computer or any of it's records, the device electrocutes the consumer and ends the piracy threat. The cost of the device will add a trivial $100 cost per unit, which can be passed on, but much more will be extractable from users because of it.
Because the profit potential is so strong that all major governments are being lobbied at this moment to mandate Soul Scann. They are being told that it's the only way to defeat the terrorists and others who would exist outside the US economy.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I don't see a single comment on if they tried using it to heat up REALLY BIG leftovers.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
about time a reason came along. Let's build some big ships to go clean up...
I have been interested in this subject for a while.
I started out being interested in wood-gas powered engines and vehicles. I obtained several books on the subject published around WWII, another book on making "town gas" from coal that dated from around 1890, and a set of plans published by the US Government during one of the oil crisises. As I did more research I became disenchanted because of the carbon monoxide leaked by the devices. I think it is a reasonable technology for certain narrow purposes, however -- some big agricultural operations use a lot of stationary diesel engines to pump water, and a gasifier placed next to them might use agricultural waste. I am not sure it would be any more efficient than a stationary steam engine, but the parts are easier to come by.
I did have the idea of running the gasification process via a microwave. I new that tuned microwaves had been used experimentally in similar processes, even to excite the pollutants entering a catalytic converter to reduce car emmissions. I wanted to build an automated device, which would have a hopper for pelletized or working material, a feed screw, and it would heat the working material in a hydrogen environment with a microwave. Since the heat would not come from partly burning the working material in the same chamber, the product would not be mixed with CO2. I would reticify water into oxygen and hydrogen, and by baking the working material in hydrogen I would get a more hydro-carbon balenced product instead of H2 and CO. But the apparatus seemed to have outgrown my ability to build it in my backyard.
I then got interested in bio-diesel. Eventually my research lead me to conclude that it is impractical as a large scale operation, because they use soy bean oil which sucks up a lot of resources to grow. It seems more practical if the source is peanuts; but getting into peanut production is hard for me because I would actually have to purchase the right to plant acreage (it is illegal in the United States to plant more than one acre of peanuts for commercial purposes). My goal was to make my own travel independent of the mechanations of liberal carbon-taxers or Bushist war-starters, and one acre of peanuts would at most give me 40 gallons of diesel a year, which is not enough, even if coupled with the waste of my considerable consumption of bacon.
I have also done fairly extensive research into small-scale wind and solar power, focusing mostly on the economics and payback times. I kept deciding that it made more sense to insulate my house and take other simple measures. The main issue is with storing the intermittent source of power, it's the batteries that end up being a big chunk of the cost.
Then I got to thinking that maybe I could make a small stationary plant that would gasify wood and other trash and re-synthesize it back to a liquid fuel that would work in an automobile. I got the book "Synthetic Fuels" by Probstein and Hicks, which I highly recommend. In particular, it gives an overview of the basic chemistry and thermodynamics, so you get a basic sense of how much input energy it would take (a lot).
My current plan I am working towards (and by working towards, I mean saving up money) is this:
I will put it on a cheap remote rural property (a couple of acres behind the airport), to avoid danger of a gas release or complaints from idiots. It will operate un-attended.
The un-attended operation will allow it to at least partly power itself off of wind or solar, because it can start up and run when it has power and shut down when it doesn't.
I'm going to build it in a shipping container, so I can move it, and so it is contained in metal so a leaking microwave won't fry my nuts. As part of the whole un-attended operation thing, it will never be on when there is someone in the container.
It will take in trash or straw or wood in a hopper with a feed screw, bake it in a hydrogen environment, and pass the resulting gas into some sort of simple catalyst bed, to
bulletproof glass, glasses, light optics. I would bet money no place making any of those items is using recycled PC in those items. I make headlights almost every day in an IM plant and the customers we make lights for would never allow us to use recycled material in them. The items I see in the plastic plant made of recycled material are things like pallets and shipping containers. I could be wrong, but I don't think the places making bulletproof glass are chucking ground up AOL cds in the mix, I am pretty sure all of those items are made of 100% virgin material.
Dude, what? You're acting like "telephone" isn't a native construction in English, and that it wasn't immediately obvious in Chinese which pronunciation was the loan word, and where it came from.
Also, I'm not absolutely sure on the "telephone" example, but a lot of words in Chinese/Korean/Japanese that were imported from English in the late 19th/early 20th century were forcibly replaced with native substitutions during World War II, because we were the "bad guys" according to the Japanese who ran things in the area at that point. The word for baseball is a good example of that.
You wouldn't be able to up and say "oh, this is an Anglo-Saxon word", but I wouldn't be surprised if people subconsciously recognize patterns.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
But with English -- unlike almost any other language -- you can look at a word and immediately know that its roots are in Greek, or Latin, or French, or Celtic, or whether it's a modern loan word. This has massive benefits for advanced literacy, as it means you actually know more words than you think you do, and can quite accurately guess at the meaning of new words you encounter -- which is of far greater utility than simply knowing how to say the word.
Knowing the origin of a root words is pretty much useless information for anyone but language historians. "Quatra-" or "tetra-"... it all means "four," and there's no need for the redundancy in the language. If anything it makes understanding the language harder because you need to learn to recognize multiple root words from multiple languages.
I've studied two languages -- Spanish and Japanese. Spanish encodes all the queues needed to pronounce a word in its written form. Letters are always pronounced the same way, and accents are visually encoded. This makes learning new Spanish vocabulary easy because you always know how to say a new written word and how to spell a new spoken word. (You also get all the benefit of Latin roots, too.)
Japanese on the other hand has an alphabet that tightly correlates to its spoken form except for the fact that it doesn't cover accent. Japanese is a semi-tonal language. The pitch of syllables as you pronounce them is import to sounding right, but it's not often essential to understanding what someone's saying. Accent isn't encoded into the written language, but the written language is phonic, so you always know how to write (in kana at least) any new word you hear.
Both languages have irregular verbs, but Spanish has significantly more than Japanese which only has two (seven if you count the -aru/-aimasu verbs). I'll tell you from experience that learning irregular verbs is purely a matter of memorization since no system (by definition) exists to describe them. This is a huge pain in Spanish, but a small workload in Japanese.
English spelling is the same. You have a general system of rules for spelling, and then you have a huge, exhausting list of exceptions. "Phone" vs. "feel" vs. "haphazard," "tough" vs. "through" vs. "throw" vs. "dough," "piece" vs. "receive" vs. "weird," "schnauzer" vs. "school," etc., etc. English spelling is an impediment to learning and not a tool for it. All the memorization of special rules takes up time that could be spent learning grammar or actually reading literature in class.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
That's the University of Washington. Washington State University is a public university in Pullman. The University of Washington is a public university in Seattle. The University of Washington invented pine and The Wave (as seen in crowds at sporting events). Washington State University was Paul Allen's alma mater until he left, helped start Microsoft, and gave a lot of money to the University of Washington.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Oil may be a *renewable* resource
Check it out:
http://www.oralchelation.com/faq/wsj4.htm
You can write all the books you want, saying "fjsf" is pronounced "dfda," but what the hell does that mean without an ACTUAL AUDIO REFERENCE?
You obviously missed my Erasmus reference, which tells me you really have no clue about what modern opinions of ancient pronunciation are based upon.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Nice. Now you could run your converted diesel "grease" car on microwave reduced AOL cds and other things like the waste plastic from shopping bags, plastic food wraps and more. Every pit stop becomes a food stop for you and the car from the same products? Quick time to free patent this use of this technology and travel the world for free.
Could the microwave emitters be powered from the car battery and perhaps a solar method could be devised to enhance the solar radiation and then target it at the plastics in a waste bin at home. Sort of solar furnace. Then the recycled oil is used for the house furnace and running your car.
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
You've missed my point again, but I've kinda tired of explaining it.
/. sniper, you will have seen my replies to other people on the gp.
Hopefully if you're actually interested in this topic and not just a
Good luck, and its encouraging that so many people seem to be interested in languages and etymology.
Lots of people disagree with you there, many of them qualified. Here's a couple of essays on the topic for you:
http://mypage.iu.edu/~shetter/miniatures/zug.htm r .html#deriv
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~l150web/index.html
http://cla.calpoly.edu/%7Ejrubba/morph/morph.ove
I would like to see this machine because I wonder:
when they put the material in the machine- how do they contain it? concievably metal would block or reflect the microwaves and plastic would dissolve- since it is vibrating the hydrocarbons wood should catch fire-
so isn't it functionally like putting a block of ice in your microwave and trying to grab the water when you open the door?
As far as I can tell, the paper in the first link mainly shows how knowing the meaning of a root words tells you why is shows up in so many seemingly unrelated concepts. In no way does it talk about any of my three points. It just talks about how knowing a root word is somewhat useful. (Though, even the English examples of "feature" and "trait" coming from "tractus" are so abstruse as to be useless since no casual reader would pick "tractus" out of a list of Latin words to guess as the origin of "feature.")
The second and thirds links are merely notes on morphology when you dig through them. They too, in no way dispute any of my three points about origin being useless info after knowing meaning, the useless redundancy of similar root words, or the impediments that irregular spelling bring to learning.
If there are many experts who disagree with me on any of my three points, then either cite an argument made by them or make one yourself. Don't just toss random links at me that make no real argument about anything I wrote about in my post.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Sorry, but your education is not my responsibility.
:)
That said, I agreed with your assertions about the relative difficulty of language learning in my original post. That much is true.
But the difficulty of spelling in English pales into insignificance besides, say, learning the inflections in heavily inflected languages, or getting tones from a non-tonal background. In other words, sure it makes it harder, but how is making spelling easier any more than a tiny bit helpful at the very beginning of language learning? And eniweigh eevn if i compretery misspl thingz u wil steel undrstnd.
Compare that minor possible gain to the simple fact that etymology supplies a lot of information for advanced users of all languages, and something has been lost at every historical attempt to "regularize" language. Reference the simplifying of the Chinese character set, the regularization of German spelling, etc. etc. etc. Again, do your own web searches since you don't seem to see the relevance of mine. Morphology plays its part here, in how we implicitly know words are "connected" in meaning.
Finally, there is no "memorization of a catalog" in language learning -- language simply doesn't work that way.
Look, IANAL ("L" being "linguist" in this case) but the last non-fiction book I read was "Language, Thought, and Reality", a selection of the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (look him up) and I get invited to all the linguist parties on campus!
Sorry, but your education is not my responsibility.
However, your ability to communicate your points is. Tossing a bunch of random links that do not spell out what you're trying to argue is a poor attempt at communication. They neither communicated that you understood my points nor what it was you (and "qualified people") disagreed with about them. Tell me what in them refuted my points, and don't make me go trying to augur a refutation to my own post out of data that is not organized to make such an argument. Communicate clearly.
But the difficulty of spelling in English pales into insignificance besides, say, learning the inflections in heavily inflected languages, or getting tones from a non-tonal background.
I will not dispute this in the slightest. It's practically a biological difference given how many native Cantonese speakers have perfect pitch compared to speakers of non-tonal languages like English. However, I will still dispute that your assertion that irregular spellings and the smattering of multi-lingual root words are actually helpful to understanding in the face of their alternatives. I maintain that it's an inefficient use of mental resources.
In other words, sure it makes it harder, but how is making spelling easier any more than a tiny bit helpful at the very beginning of language learning? And eniweigh eevn if i compretery misspl thingz u wil steel undrstnd.
Well, for one thing, I had to break out of scanning your words, slow my reading speed to less than a third of normal speed, and scan it twice to verify that I understood what you were saying. If you think this is irrelevant to the effectiveness of communication, you're barking mad. I mean, several of your misspelled words can't be pronounced the way the normal word would be under any use of the individual letters (e.g. "compretery"). That breaks the intuitive, shape-based pattern recognition flow of speed reading and requires them to be actively "read aloud" in your head until a meaning can be associated with the garbled "sound." You can't seriously be arguing that just because it's possible to understand what your saying that what your saying is clear or that your way of writing there was just as good as standardized spelling.
For another thing, the learning of a language never stops. I encounter words I've never seen before every month from everywhere around me -- from new areas of study, from old books, from new trademarks in ads, etc. In many of those cases, the spelling suggests to me a pronunciation that is different from what it intended. To this day, I probably have words that I pronounce wrong in my head because they're never used in daily conversation, and I'm only familiar with them from books. Every now and then, I turn one up to my embarrassment. I'm not alone in this; I had a friend pronounce "writhe" as "wreathe" because he'd not really ever used the word in a conversation before and had only read it.
Compare that minor possible gain to the simple fact that etymology supplies a lot of information for advanced users of all languages, and something has been lost at every historical attempt to "regularize" language.
But was the meaning of the root words lost in the obfuscation of their origins? If not, then that reinforces my point. If so, then you may have a point. While the radicals composing some characters were completely changed (instead of just simplified) in both Japanese and Chinese simplification efforts, no ability to puzzle out the meaning was lost -- just the historical roots. Writing the newer characters is significantly faster and no slower to read for people trained initially in the simplified system. I cannot comment on the German effort since I am not familiar with it other than to know that it's unpopular like every other attempt to modernize some traditional element of society that people take national pride in, like currency and measurement units. Some discussion of how it's ma
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Swedish takes this to the extremes, it even use some special cases "foreign" grammars. It's a good thing when you learn a new european language (esp. German, French and Latin), but other then that, it's a bad thing. Because of Swedish diverse range of dialects, it's a necessery evil.
As of the relation between English and Swedish. You may have noticed that I write this in Swedish. I write in very old Swedish (called Old Norse in the English speaking world). I write it as it could have been spoken by a medieval village idiot, incapable of correct grammar and pronounciation, as he make an bad impression of a gay frenchman. Then I add some modern English spelling. It's close enough to become readable by most people who read English.
I'm actually able to produce better English than this, but if I set my brain in "English mode", I become stupefied (and get a head ace). English must be the worst thinking language that ever existed. It has only rudimentary support for expressing feelings and impressions, math and logical reasoning. It has almost no melody and a minimum of available sounds. It's grammar is both too complicated (feel free to criticise Swedish grammar, it's even worse in that aspect) and too primitive. It has irregular spelling (yes, I know, Swedish is worse). It's impossible to make distinct expressions as well as express precise uncertainties. The vocabulary shared by all native English speakers is miniscule. It's the BRAINFUCK of natural languages. The only good thing about English is that it has a regular pronounciation of written words, but languages like Spanish and Finnish is even better. I am aware that not all English dialects are this stupid, but those who aren't, are only understood by small populations.
Compare a typical university course computer science or math text book, starting at the same level of knowledge. In English: 700-1200 pages, very tedious and mostly written in mathematical notation, because you can't speak math in English. In Swedish: 200-400 pages, adding a lot of extra content, funny pictures and esoterica. In German: 100-300 pages adding even more content, some obscure dirty jokes, schematics and very, very detailed step-by-step instructions. Whats worse, most literature at Swedish universities today: are written in (American) English; are bad translations from English or, shudder, written in really bad Swenglish (sometimes even worse then mine) by a local professor. I'm sure this produces generations of really stupid students.
A good translation of a novel from English to Swedish usually loose about 1/4 of it's volume without loss of quality. A good translation from Swedish to English double in volume with some loss of quality. Usually books translated from Swedish to English are cut down or even dumbed down, not to become too heavy reading (even so for Pippi Longstocking). I think this is true for most translations from other languages to English; I haven't read that much novels in both other original languages and English translation.
As comparison, a bad, word by word translation from English to Swedish roughly doubles in volume without loss of content. Change some prepositions and you get mostly correct Swedish. But it's awful.
There are a lot of languages that are easy to learn, expressive and elegant. It's a shame that English has become lingua franca. It's even worse that most computer languages are based on English. Perfect candidates basing a computer language on could be Latin, German or even Esperanto. Oh, I forgot, Perl is actually uglified Latin, Python is dumbed down German (or perhaps Dutch)... nevermind.
PS. Those who would like to get a feeling of my beloved mother tounge, without actually learning it, could read something by Eric S. Raymond. To my knowledge, he don't speak any Swedish. But in way of expression, use of grammar and, especially, interpunctation an