Arthur Clarke pointed out decades ago that some kind of mini-elephant would be a great home service animal. With a trunk to work with, it could open refrigerators, pick up the phone, and do other delicate handling operations.
not ideal scale, though, what with the cube/square scaling thing. might be better off breeding some sort of intelligent chimp. hairless so they don't shed, except for maybe some decoration here and there. more of an upright critter than a knuckle walker, to free up the hands.
I was referring to pickup trucks, not rigs. There are plenty of cases where the old,naturally aspirated engines outperform the smaller turbo engines on heavy loads -- even in terms of fuel economy. Of course, it could be argued that most trucks are generally NOT heavily loaded and are used as if they were ordinary passenger vehicles, so designing to this usage is not improper. The problem here is that the vehicles are being used for ego enhancement rather than necessary capability when a smaller, lighter, more efficient, and quite possibly more nimble vehicle would be appropriate.
It is also not fair to compare big-block V-8s made out of pot metal to the 4 cylinder made out of aircraft-grade aluminum or at least a much better grade of steel (for the block). The materials have improved all around, and those improvements would benefit the V-8 as well. Try making that turbo-4 out of the crap Ford used to make engines 40 years ago, and it would be blowing up well short of 100k (see Hyundai Excel for examples).
Oh, OK. I was reading something else in your post other than what you intended.
I don't understand why we're seeing all these gasoline hybrids instead of diesel ones. Aren't diesels running in their optimum range much more efficient? And with all these emissions issues turning up, isn't it feasible to set up diesel hybrids to basically always run in a narrow range with the best emissions and efficiency possible?
Diesels already almost always run in their optimum range. A car engine basically has three operating states that are important. Accelerating from a stop, cruising (usually at highway speeds), and accelerating at highway speeds (to pass).
Gasoline engines hit peak power and torque at the high-end of their RPM range. That's great for accelerating at highway speeds, not so good for cruising and accelerating from a stop. Because most of the engine's time is spent cruising, that's where you need to optimize fuel burn rate to improve overall fuel efficiency. Gas engines have a lot of problem with this because it's not coincident with their peak power and torque production. Consequently you're having to optimize the engine's performance at two hugely different RPMs. The hybrid helps a lot here because the electric motor provides a lot of torque at 0 RPM for accelerating from a stop (power = torque * RPM * a constant),and allows the gas engine to be shut off completely for a while during cruising. So now you can optimize the gas engine for high-RPM efficiency, and rely on the electric motor for what would normally be low-RPM operation.
Diesel engines have a higher compression ratio so hit peak power and torque at the low-end of their RPM range. That's great for cruising and accelerating from a stop, not so great for accelerating at highway speeds. This is why they're so common in tractor trailers - it's OK if the truck takes a long time to accelerate at highway speeds, but you want good power and fuel efficiency during cruise. Since the diesel engine's peak torque and power happen close to cruise, they're a lot easier to optimize for fuel efficiency.
A hybrid won't actually help much here because it doesn't add much - the diesel engine already has lots of torque close to 0 RPM, and is fuel efficient during cruise. About the only thing a hybrid would add would be regenerative braking. While that's a big deal in city driving, the vast majority of the driving tractor trailers do is on the highway, so again there's little benefit from the hybrid. The best thing to add to a diesel is actually a turbo. Their weakness is power output at higher RPMs, and a turbo provides extra power at the high-end of the RPM range, which improves accelerating to pass at highway speeds - precisely the driving stage diesels normally have problems with.
Beating test cycles by engineering to the test is hardly a new phenomenon, and it is the bulk of why current EU tests are being replaced by new standards currently in development that are harder to game. Even with this improvement, expect some level of optimization for test conditions while either ignoring or even harming real world performance.
The relentless cycle beating has had a myriad of harmful effects beyond just not accomplishing the purpose.
* Regulators start to believe their emissions goals can actually be met, even when they realistically cannot while maintaining adequate driving performance. People just don't baby the throttle the way the NEDC does.
* Somehow, the problems the controls were intended to alleviate aren't getting any better, so they crank them down tighter. The engineering gets even more optimized for the test. The cars get nice "green" certifications, and everyone wonders where the smog is coming from.
* Often, this engineering means smaller engines and turbos, which inevitably don't last as long as the larger displacement engines they replace. It also means increased mechanical complexity. Guess who picks up the tab for this? Us.
* The smaller, boosted engines may do just fine in emissions testing, and even performance testing on the dyno, but often they are not as good as the larger, naturally aspirated engines they replace for real-world tasks. This is particularly true with trucks, where you'll see V-8s being replaced by turbo-4s. They may still have the same or even better power on paper, but they now have spool-up lag and have to operate in a higher RPM range to haul cargo and/or passengers, and really can struggle with towing loads due to the lesser torque.
It remains to be seen that diesels with urea injection "cannot realistically meet emissions goals". VW wanted to avoid that system on these cars for various reasons.
Meanwhile, it's immensely clear that emissions are hugely cleaner than they were pre1970; performance is as good as or better; and today's little engines working hard last 200k easily while the big lazy v8s of the day would be lucky to hit 100K.
And big rig diesels have always been mainstays of turbocharging, other than the GM Rootes blowers, precisely because they are driven more on highways and run at a narrow range of rpms for long periods of time compared to passenger cars and turbo lag isn't encountered very often, and the increase in efficiency is worth big bucks, and diesels are more efficient that gasoline engines which are not direct injected. http://forums.anandtech.com/sh... And torque is not less with a turbocharger, http://www.blogcdn.com/www.aut...http://image.fourwheeler.com/f...http://www.gizmag.com/bmw-adds...
That is the real problem. The entire basis for the corporate system is avoidance of responsibility. Maximize profits at any cost, even human life. And bad emission controls do threaten human life, see the killer smogs in London in the 50's or in China today. Look at the BP oil spill, the Piper Alpha, or Bhopal India and not a single C level manager or member of the BOD was held responsible, despite the fact that when things go right they get bonuses.
Until we hold executive officers, whose title comes from the word "to execute" as in to make happen, or members of the BOD are personally held civilly and/or criminally responsible then nothing will really change.
Jay Leno had it right the other day. If it's an American company getting caught they just blame it on incompetence and disorganization and rogue employees etc. But VW being a good German company, they'd rather have it known as a fraud, but a brilliant and well engineered fraud, than just incompetence.
We have murder rates and mass shootings far beyond that of any other Western nation.
And if you were to remove from those stats the four municipalities in the US that have the most gang-related crime, the US murder rate would be fourth from the BOTTOM of the stats pile. And the four municipalities where all of that mayhem takes place? Some of the tightest gun control laws in the country, and the places are run by Democrats and have been for decades. Not to trouble you with facts or anything.
Fourth from the bottom of what pile? And who is telling you this? The average US murder rate (4.7/10000) is higher than that of any country in Europe except Greenland, Russia, and a couple of the other former USSR states (and higher than most of the former USSR states). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... It's higher than most Asian countries and almost all of Oceania. It does look better than most of the African countries, and most of the Latin/South American countries. Of course, the original poster did say "Western" nations, so if you call Colombia a Western nation and Australia not.....
But you say the overall murder rate is hiding the details; that most of the murders are in 4 big cities. OK, let's break it down by state; you can leave out any state that might have one of those cities; unnamed but I assume you might know who they are. (spoiler alert) Here are the states with murder rates higher than the US average:
Louisiana 10.8
Alabama 7.2
Mississippi 6.5
Maryland 6.4
Michigan 6.4
South Carolina 6.2
Missouri 6.1
New Mexico 6.0
Nevada 5.8
Georgia 5.6
Illinois 5.5
Arizona 5.4
Arkansas 5.4
Indiana 5.4
Oklahoma 5.1
Florida 5.0
Tennessee 5.0
North Carolina 4.8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_homicide_rate
Firstly, if they are higher than the US average rate, then they are going to do worse by comparison with the other countries than the US does. Second, most of these don't seem to be Democrat controlled with tight gun laws, in general.
You also might want to check on the homicide rates per municipality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... , which don't do much to bolster your statement re "the four municipalities where all of that mayhem takes place? Some of the tightest gun control laws in the country, and the places are run by Democrats and have been for decades."
I repeat; where are you getting this stuff from? The Big Book of RightWing Facts?
The EPA and their counterparts in other countries have a lot of very fancy equipment to test these emissions; equipment that would need to be calibrated against "reality" to be meaningful - this means measuring real cars outside in the wild at least once in awhile. It is almost inconceivable that all of these organizations don't know that their tests are being circumvented at least a little bit and that it is the norm to do so. VW may have just pushed too far...
The trouble is, reality varies. One guy spends all his driving either standing on the gas, or on the brakes, and gets lousy mileage. The other guy drives 10 mph below the speed limit and coasts up to every red light at 3 mph so as to never brake, and gets terrific mileage. The official test has to find some kind of average driver behavior.
This is a nightmare scenario really for VW and anyone else involved in owning/fixing these cars. It's most likely going to cost thousands per car to add the system necessary to clean the NOx gasses out of the exhaust that larger trucks use. And there is a good chance additional modifications will be needed that will likely give a significant hit to fuel mileage. These manufacturers are staring down the barrel of thousands of dollars per car fixes plus class action lawsuits up the wazoo from customers who's cars are suddenly getting double digit worse mileage.
Seems to me that a retrofix of installing the urea injection system is undoable; instead there will have to be some sort of detuning that will reduce the temperature of the combustion and exhaust (exhaust gas recirculation, for instance). And my feeling is that anything that does that will necessarily reduce the mean effective pressure or whatever they call it on the piston, which will necessarily reduce the torque which will naturally reduce the HP, etc.
Auto manufacturers have been told to limit NOx emissions to levels far below that produced by nature. So sure, they'll 'comply' with regulations written by a bunch of crazy hippies in California.
If what the greenies want is to eliminate cars, then why don't they just propose that law and get all the whining over with?
if you don't mind me asking, where do you get your numbers from?
"Audi; truth in engineering".
Geez guys, perhaps you don't realize that the current crisis might require you to revisit some of your marketing? quickly??
I didn't think I had a story here, thanks for reminding me of my potato cannons!
In my intro to electronics course we had taken the flash circuits from disposable cameras and hacked them to trigger via a photocell.
I had another idea: take the ~300v from the flash capacitor, dump it through a car ignition coil then through a spark plug, and I'd get a much more reliable spark than could be had by a piezo grill igniter. My best guess is that I had a few hundred thousand volts at the spark plug. I put everything in a small plastic Radio Shack project box, put a button on each side, and wired the buttons in series to prevent accidental discharges.
It worked very well: in ~5 years of use I think I went through two C cells and it only failed to work when the first battery died. Whenever I'd show off my handiwork, my audience was invariably more intimidated by the sound of the circuit charging up than the actual potato cannon:)
Mark my words, the nation which controls potatoes will rule the world. Ireland will rise again.
I've used various bent paperclips to straighten out the mashed and mangled pins on 8P8C connectors that used proprietary wallplates and couldn't readily be replaced.
In my youth of steady hands and keen eye, I was often able to repair scratched records that got stuck repeating, by straightening out the grooves with the corner of a razor blade.
I once soldered two safety pins on my Remco crystal radio science kit and poked them in to the phone wire leading down my parent's house. Found what I was getting for Christmas. Felt guilty and never did it again.
Then there's the intercom feature I added to my 5 tube superheterodyne radio. Speaker also acted as a microphone.
I won't get in to that.
By the time I was done, there wasn't an electronic audio device in my parent's house which did not have a jacks attached to the back which would allow the audio to be tapped off the volume control or, more importantly, audio from another device inserted across the volume control. This would allow one to feed the record player output into every single device in the house, given sufficient coax cable, whenever the parents were not home.
Had an old rustbucket Corvair, with a sticky starter solenoid which would frequently require a firm tap or two with something large, hard, and heavy in order to make the connection. Discovered that that feature was surprisingly effective at eliminating the possibility of a second date, despite it being really not particularly irksome in practice.
My worst fail would probably be the time I (many years ago before I understood computers as well as I do today) used glue to attach a CPU heatsink and fan to the CPU. That plus the decision to use the heatsink and fan from a Pentium 166 MMX on a 300MHz Cyrix part is probably what eventually killed the CPU.
These days I only use proper CPU thermal gunk and I use the heatsink and fan that Intel supplies with its chips (or if the chip didn't come with one, I buy the one that Intel tells me I need)
Can't think of any other hardware fails since I am not really a hardware guy.
heh. the time I built a random light flasher out of transistors and potted it in a clear epoxy cube, just for a paperweight/gadget. Put it in a vacuum for the epoxy to cure, to ensure no bubbles. Epoxy curing is exothermic, of course, and transistors in those days were germanium, which did not like heat at all. The vacuum probably didn't help at all, insulating the gadget as it cured. What makes it even funnier is that I couldn't even salvage the other components and rebuild it, in that it was at that point potted in epoxy.
One year I was working at a Radio Shack in Ottawa (South Keys! Recognize!) over Christmas. Actually, it was the last year before they became "The Source." One of the products that corporate was really pushing for the season were these "customization" miniature remote-control car sets, where you could change things like tires. rims, spoilers, etc. and collect different sets to build your own fleet of racers. The margins were huge and the parts were all crap, but they looked cool, and they knew kids who got hooked would want more than one set, and would want to talk with employees about them.
So, to encourage us sales associates to familiarize ourselves with the kits, they gave each store in the Ottawa region an extra write-off allowance, and told us to use it opening some of the kits and playing with them, and that there would be a race among all the stores at the regional Christmas party in late November.
I was determined to win, so I asked Artie, the store manager, if adding more batteries was a violation of the "stock parts only" rule, and he said he didn't give a fuck. The motor in the kits was driven by a single 9V battery, so I opened four kits and tore the 9V leads/housings off three of them. I then added them to the remaining car, wiring all the leads in parallel, and gluing the housings to the top of the frame, where I was "supposed" to attach some sort of molded-plastic carapace that looked like an exotic street car.
We tested it on the carpet in the store and it was very fast, despite getting bogged down in the fibers. We kept it at low speeds because we didn't want to blow the engine out.
When the big night came, I put in 4 of the expensive lithium 9Vs from the top shelf. I put it down on the hard wood of the race track, next to seven other cars, each with just the stock design, despite their varied appearances. One of the visiting executives called a simple "Ready, set go!" and pandemonium ensued. You see, nobody had realized that all the sets being used were still configured with the default radio frequency settings. So the start of the race was just a burst of cross-talk, and the cars when zipping off in all directions. Our car lost three tires, as its axles spun so fast that the double-sided tape securing the tires to the rims completely delaminated.
Anyway, we eventually realized that there were not enough frequencies available to race the cars all at once, so the decided to judge the winner with a small device that simply measured the rotational velocity of the wheels and reported back an actual speed (as opposed to scale speed) in kilometers per hour. I replaced the tires on our car, and brought it to the tester. After the performance with the tires, they let me get tested last. The record car among the other seven was capable of a respectable 11 km/H. I put the car in the test bed, and gently pulled the throttle trigger up to maxim. The tester stared at it a moment, as the wheels whined away with a high-pitched scream. "Sixty six." he finally said, slowly, as if not really believing the number on the display. "Sixty..." and then motor burst into flames.
oh lord, reminds me of more long forgotten slot car tales; the days of taking apart a commercial motor and rewinding one's own rotor, replacing the magnets with more powerful ones, etc. hey, do you think that kind of stuff will come back when electric cars become standard? "Yup, hotrodded it myself, replaced the windings with 4 miles of 12 gauge Teflon insulated"
I could have sworn there was a commercial attachment/accessory for the Selectric that turned it into a normal printer. This was around the time where the daisy-wheel typewriters hit the consumer scene (Olivetti and Smith Corona had ball typewriters for a while too) and a considerable amount of them also had Centronics interfaces available as attachments.
Nothing beats the Selectric. Much faster than a daisywheel, and they had that lovely mechanical staccato sound that was music to the ears. The sheer number of them that are still out there (and working) is incredible.
Selectric was living proof of the adage that any technology gets perfected at exactly the same time it becomes obsolete.
Old, cheap $3 pair of Cube headphones found at Big Lots. Had them for years, cabling finally gave out. Came across a broken Polaroid PBT598 bluetooth speaker set, literally the only thing intact was the gumstick amp/bluetooth board, and even then it had damage, it having fried a couple of SMT capacitors, the battery and speaker trace pads were missing.
So, first order of business, get the SMT caps replaced. Easily done - just salvage components from various boards I've got around the house. Slightly trickier was exposing traces and fresh metal to solder to for battery and speaker connections. Making it fit required Dremel and hot glue work due to the shape of the headphones, and as a result the thing does look like a total hack job on the case itself.
But if I want to drown the world out in its entirety, 2x3w strapped to my head certainly does it. I can't hear my garbage disposal, vacuum cleaner, or even the neighbor's loud rap music. Volume has to be kept at pretty much 25% as anything higher, while clear (up to about 60%, then the poor speakers begin to distort) simply hurts.
Reminds me! Found an ancient 20w mono McIntosh lab grade tube amp in a dumpster behind the electronics dept at school. Had to replace all the capacitors, most of the resistors, and of course the tubes. The all-important McIntosh transformers potted in epoxy or similar comprised the entire interior of the chassis, however, so I assumed they were still within specs. Used the thing for years as a mono hifi, before that stereo thing became popular. (did you know you could still buy early Beatles albums in mono? ) Finally sold it to a collector type person, who wanted to replace the new components with the old malfunctioning ones, which I had thriftily saved over the years.
found a Fender guitar amp, literally buried in a snowbank. the speaker cone had a big hole through it and the handle of the toggle switch was broken off; replaced both and the thing worked like new. geez they are well built.
About ten years ago I decided to dust off my tele-operated car and take it for a spin. I started by plugging the red wire into the battery's negative terminal and the black wire into the positive, and watched as all the magic smoke escaped. I just stood there for 5 minutes staring down at a thousand dollar's worth of ruined electronics. Now I always use an actual black wire instead of adding a little black electrical tape to the end of a red one.
I eventually built another one a few years later. somepics.
a full wave rectifier can be your friend, and make polarity a thing of the past.
I once received a first gen xbox for free, back when it was worth something. it had the wrong voltage psu. I ordered a replacement but it didn't work, for some reason.
so.. some splicing and with a spare atx psu later it was up and running in a jiffy. wouldn't fit in the case anymore of course.
oh and I used a cardboard box as a pc case too, why not.
and soldered power in wires to a laptop that had a broken charger port, because why not.
what is this concept you people seem to have, of a PC having a case?
Back in the late 1980s i tried to control my scalectric cars by hooking the controller cables up to the pc speaker. The idea was that by writing code to play sound at different volumes I could control the voltage to the tracks, thus car speed, and write a program to drive perfect laps. Totally failed to consider the power differentials or the RF noise from the brushes (hey I was 10 years old).
Fried the entire computer, even the old seral mouse (my first ever) was toast.
ah, slot cars. that was when i first grasped the concept that the speed controllers were just variable resistors, and I could just measure their resistance and get potentiometers. Followed very quickly afterwards by the concept of the power rating of a potentiometer.
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Arthur Clarke pointed out decades ago that some kind of mini-elephant would be a great home service animal. With a trunk to work with, it could open refrigerators, pick up the phone, and do other delicate handling operations.
not ideal scale, though, what with the cube/square scaling thing. might be better off breeding some sort of intelligent chimp. hairless so they don't shed, except for maybe some decoration here and there. more of an upright critter than a knuckle walker, to free up the hands.
they're delicious
I was referring to pickup trucks, not rigs. There are plenty of cases where the old,naturally aspirated engines outperform the smaller turbo engines on heavy loads -- even in terms of fuel economy. Of course, it could be argued that most trucks are generally NOT heavily loaded and are used as if they were ordinary passenger vehicles, so designing to this usage is not improper. The problem here is that the vehicles are being used for ego enhancement rather than necessary capability when a smaller, lighter, more efficient, and quite possibly more nimble vehicle would be appropriate.
It is also not fair to compare big-block V-8s made out of pot metal to the 4 cylinder made out of aircraft-grade aluminum or at least a much better grade of steel (for the block). The materials have improved all around, and those improvements would benefit the V-8 as well. Try making that turbo-4 out of the crap Ford used to make engines 40 years ago, and it would be blowing up well short of 100k (see Hyundai Excel for examples).
Oh, OK. I was reading something else in your post other than what you intended.
Diesels already almost always run in their optimum range. A car engine basically has three operating states that are important. Accelerating from a stop, cruising (usually at highway speeds), and accelerating at highway speeds (to pass). Gasoline engines hit peak power and torque at the high-end of their RPM range. That's great for accelerating at highway speeds, not so good for cruising and accelerating from a stop. Because most of the engine's time is spent cruising, that's where you need to optimize fuel burn rate to improve overall fuel efficiency. Gas engines have a lot of problem with this because it's not coincident with their peak power and torque production. Consequently you're having to optimize the engine's performance at two hugely different RPMs. The hybrid helps a lot here because the electric motor provides a lot of torque at 0 RPM for accelerating from a stop (power = torque * RPM * a constant),and allows the gas engine to be shut off completely for a while during cruising. So now you can optimize the gas engine for high-RPM efficiency, and rely on the electric motor for what would normally be low-RPM operation. Diesel engines have a higher compression ratio so hit peak power and torque at the low-end of their RPM range. That's great for cruising and accelerating from a stop, not so great for accelerating at highway speeds. This is why they're so common in tractor trailers - it's OK if the truck takes a long time to accelerate at highway speeds, but you want good power and fuel efficiency during cruise. Since the diesel engine's peak torque and power happen close to cruise, they're a lot easier to optimize for fuel efficiency. A hybrid won't actually help much here because it doesn't add much - the diesel engine already has lots of torque close to 0 RPM, and is fuel efficient during cruise. About the only thing a hybrid would add would be regenerative braking. While that's a big deal in city driving, the vast majority of the driving tractor trailers do is on the highway, so again there's little benefit from the hybrid. The best thing to add to a diesel is actually a turbo. Their weakness is power output at higher RPMs, and a turbo provides extra power at the high-end of the RPM range, which improves accelerating to pass at highway speeds - precisely the driving stage diesels normally have problems with.
mod up !!!!!
Beating test cycles by engineering to the test is hardly a new phenomenon, and it is the bulk of why current EU tests are being replaced by new standards currently in development that are harder to game. Even with this improvement, expect some level of optimization for test conditions while either ignoring or even harming real world performance.
The relentless cycle beating has had a myriad of harmful effects beyond just not accomplishing the purpose.
It remains to be seen that diesels with urea injection "cannot realistically meet emissions goals". VW wanted to avoid that system on these cars for various reasons.
Meanwhile, it's immensely clear that emissions are hugely cleaner than they were pre1970; performance is as good as or better; and today's little engines working hard last 200k easily while the big lazy v8s of the day would be lucky to hit 100K.
And big rig diesels have always been mainstays of turbocharging, other than the GM Rootes blowers, precisely because they are driven more on highways and run at a narrow range of rpms for long periods of time compared to passenger cars and turbo lag isn't encountered very often, and the increase in efficiency is worth big bucks, and diesels are more efficient that gasoline engines which are not direct injected. http://forums.anandtech.com/sh... And torque is not less with a turbocharger, http://www.blogcdn.com/www.aut... http://image.fourwheeler.com/f... http://www.gizmag.com/bmw-adds...
That is the real problem. The entire basis for the corporate system is avoidance of responsibility. Maximize profits at any cost, even human life. And bad emission controls do threaten human life, see the killer smogs in London in the 50's or in China today. Look at the BP oil spill, the Piper Alpha, or Bhopal India and not a single C level manager or member of the BOD was held responsible, despite the fact that when things go right they get bonuses.
Until we hold executive officers, whose title comes from the word "to execute" as in to make happen, or members of the BOD are personally held civilly and/or criminally responsible then nothing will really change.
Jay Leno had it right the other day. If it's an American company getting caught they just blame it on incompetence and disorganization and rogue employees etc. But VW being a good German company, they'd rather have it known as a fraud, but a brilliant and well engineered fraud, than just incompetence.
We have murder rates and mass shootings far beyond that of any other Western nation.
And if you were to remove from those stats the four municipalities in the US that have the most gang-related crime, the US murder rate would be fourth from the BOTTOM of the stats pile. And the four municipalities where all of that mayhem takes place? Some of the tightest gun control laws in the country, and the places are run by Democrats and have been for decades. Not to trouble you with facts or anything.
Fourth from the bottom of what pile? And who is telling you this?
The average US murder rate (4.7/10000) is higher than that of any country in Europe except Greenland, Russia, and a couple of the other former USSR states (and higher than most of the former USSR states). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... It's higher than most Asian countries and almost all of Oceania. It does look better than most of the African countries, and most of the Latin/South American countries. Of course, the original poster did say "Western" nations, so if you call Colombia a Western nation and Australia not.....
But you say the overall murder rate is hiding the details; that most of the murders are in 4 big cities. OK, let's break it down by state; you can leave out any state that might have one of those cities; unnamed but I assume you might know who they are. (spoiler alert) Here are the states with murder rates higher than the US average:
Louisiana 10.8
Alabama 7.2
Mississippi 6.5
Maryland 6.4
Michigan 6.4
South Carolina 6.2
Missouri 6.1
New Mexico 6.0
Nevada 5.8
Georgia 5.6
Illinois 5.5
Arizona 5.4
Arkansas 5.4
Indiana 5.4
Oklahoma 5.1
Florida 5.0
Tennessee 5.0
North Carolina 4.8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_homicide_rate
Firstly, if they are higher than the US average rate, then they are going to do worse by comparison with the other countries than the US does. Second, most of these don't seem to be Democrat controlled with tight gun laws, in general.
You also might want to check on the homicide rates per municipality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... , which don't do much to bolster your statement re "the four municipalities where all of that mayhem takes place? Some of the tightest gun control laws in the country, and the places are run by Democrats and have been for decades."
I repeat; where are you getting this stuff from? The Big Book of RightWing Facts?
I think faking a test counts as violating the law, and I believe the EPA regulations are quite specific about it.
The EPA and their counterparts in other countries have a lot of very fancy equipment to test these emissions; equipment that would need to be calibrated against "reality" to be meaningful - this means measuring real cars outside in the wild at least once in awhile. It is almost inconceivable that all of these organizations don't know that their tests are being circumvented at least a little bit and that it is the norm to do so. VW may have just pushed too far...
The trouble is, reality varies. One guy spends all his driving either standing on the gas, or on the brakes, and gets lousy mileage. The other guy drives 10 mph below the speed limit and coasts up to every red light at 3 mph so as to never brake, and gets terrific mileage. The official test has to find some kind of average driver behavior.
This is a nightmare scenario really for VW and anyone else involved in owning/fixing these cars. It's most likely going to cost thousands per car to add the system necessary to clean the NOx gasses out of the exhaust that larger trucks use. And there is a good chance additional modifications will be needed that will likely give a significant hit to fuel mileage. These manufacturers are staring down the barrel of thousands of dollars per car fixes plus class action lawsuits up the wazoo from customers who's cars are suddenly getting double digit worse mileage.
http://www.wired.com/2015/09/v...
http://www.popularmechanics.co...
Seems to me that a retrofix of installing the urea injection system is undoable; instead there will have to be some sort of detuning that will reduce the temperature of the combustion and exhaust (exhaust gas recirculation, for instance). And my feeling is that anything that does that will necessarily reduce the mean effective pressure or whatever they call it on the piston, which will necessarily reduce the torque which will naturally reduce the HP, etc.
Auto manufacturers have been told to limit NOx emissions to levels far below that produced by nature. So sure, they'll 'comply' with regulations written by a bunch of crazy hippies in California.
If what the greenies want is to eliminate cars, then why don't they just propose that law and get all the whining over with?
if you don't mind me asking, where do you get your numbers from?
"Audi; truth in engineering". Geez guys, perhaps you don't realize that the current crisis might require you to revisit some of your marketing? quickly??
"had not however been able yet to obtain the weapons they wanted"
well, clearly they're not real Americans then.
I didn't think I had a story here, thanks for reminding me of my potato cannons!
In my intro to electronics course we had taken the flash circuits from disposable cameras and hacked them to trigger via a photocell.
I had another idea: take the ~300v from the flash capacitor, dump it through a car ignition coil then through a spark plug, and I'd get a much more reliable spark than could be had by a piezo grill igniter. My best guess is that I had a few hundred thousand volts at the spark plug. I put everything in a small plastic Radio Shack project box, put a button on each side, and wired the buttons in series to prevent accidental discharges.
It worked very well: in ~5 years of use I think I went through two C cells and it only failed to work when the first battery died. Whenever I'd show off my handiwork, my audience was invariably more intimidated by the sound of the circuit charging up than the actual potato cannon :)
Mark my words, the nation which controls potatoes will rule the world. Ireland will rise again.
I've used various bent paperclips to straighten out the mashed and mangled pins on 8P8C connectors that used proprietary wallplates and couldn't readily be replaced.
In my youth of steady hands and keen eye, I was often able to repair scratched records that got stuck repeating, by straightening out the grooves with the corner of a razor blade.
I once soldered two safety pins on my Remco crystal radio science kit and poked them in to the phone wire leading down my parent's house. Found what I was getting for Christmas. Felt guilty and never did it again.
Then there's the intercom feature I added to my 5 tube superheterodyne radio. Speaker also acted as a microphone.
I won't get in to that.
By the time I was done, there wasn't an electronic audio device in my parent's house which did not have a jacks attached to the back which would allow the audio to be tapped off the volume control or, more importantly, audio from another device inserted across the volume control. This would allow one to feed the record player output into every single device in the house, given sufficient coax cable, whenever the parents were not home.
Had an old rustbucket Corvair, with a sticky starter solenoid which would frequently require a firm tap or two with something large, hard, and heavy in order to make the connection. Discovered that that feature was surprisingly effective at eliminating the possibility of a second date, despite it being really not particularly irksome in practice.
My worst fail would probably be the time I (many years ago before I understood computers as well as I do today) used glue to attach a CPU heatsink and fan to the CPU. That plus the decision to use the heatsink and fan from a Pentium 166 MMX on a 300MHz Cyrix part is probably what eventually killed the CPU.
These days I only use proper CPU thermal gunk and I use the heatsink and fan that Intel supplies with its chips (or if the chip didn't come with one, I buy the one that Intel tells me I need)
Can't think of any other hardware fails since I am not really a hardware guy.
heh. the time I built a random light flasher out of transistors and potted it in a clear epoxy cube, just for a paperweight/gadget. Put it in a vacuum for the epoxy to cure, to ensure no bubbles. Epoxy curing is exothermic, of course, and transistors in those days were germanium, which did not like heat at all. The vacuum probably didn't help at all, insulating the gadget as it cured.
What makes it even funnier is that I couldn't even salvage the other components and rebuild it, in that it was at that point potted in epoxy.
One year I was working at a Radio Shack in Ottawa (South Keys! Recognize!) over Christmas. Actually, it was the last year before they became "The Source." One of the products that corporate was really pushing for the season were these "customization" miniature remote-control car sets, where you could change things like tires. rims, spoilers, etc. and collect different sets to build your own fleet of racers. The margins were huge and the parts were all crap, but they looked cool, and they knew kids who got hooked would want more than one set, and would want to talk with employees about them.
So, to encourage us sales associates to familiarize ourselves with the kits, they gave each store in the Ottawa region an extra write-off allowance, and told us to use it opening some of the kits and playing with them, and that there would be a race among all the stores at the regional Christmas party in late November.
I was determined to win, so I asked Artie, the store manager, if adding more batteries was a violation of the "stock parts only" rule, and he said he didn't give a fuck. The motor in the kits was driven by a single 9V battery, so I opened four kits and tore the 9V leads/housings off three of them. I then added them to the remaining car, wiring all the leads in parallel, and gluing the housings to the top of the frame, where I was "supposed" to attach some sort of molded-plastic carapace that looked like an exotic street car.
We tested it on the carpet in the store and it was very fast, despite getting bogged down in the fibers. We kept it at low speeds because we didn't want to blow the engine out.
When the big night came, I put in 4 of the expensive lithium 9Vs from the top shelf. I put it down on the hard wood of the race track, next to seven other cars, each with just the stock design, despite their varied appearances. One of the visiting executives called a simple "Ready, set go!" and pandemonium ensued. You see, nobody had realized that all the sets being used were still configured with the default radio frequency settings. So the start of the race was just a burst of cross-talk, and the cars when zipping off in all directions. Our car lost three tires, as its axles spun so fast that the double-sided tape securing the tires to the rims completely delaminated.
Anyway, we eventually realized that there were not enough frequencies available to race the cars all at once, so the decided to judge the winner with a small device that simply measured the rotational velocity of the wheels and reported back an actual speed (as opposed to scale speed) in kilometers per hour. I replaced the tires on our car, and brought it to the tester. After the performance with the tires, they let me get tested last. The record car among the other seven was capable of a respectable 11 km/H. I put the car in the test bed, and gently pulled the throttle trigger up to maxim. The tester stared at it a moment, as the wheels whined away with a high-pitched scream. "Sixty six." he finally said, slowly, as if not really believing the number on the display. "Sixty..." and then motor burst into flames.
oh lord, reminds me of more long forgotten slot car tales; the days of taking apart a commercial motor and rewinding one's own rotor, replacing the magnets with more powerful ones, etc.
hey, do you think that kind of stuff will come back when electric cars become standard? "Yup, hotrodded it myself, replaced the windings with 4 miles of 12 gauge Teflon insulated"
I never saw a DisplayWriter.
I could have sworn there was a commercial attachment/accessory for the Selectric that turned it into a normal printer. This was around the time where the daisy-wheel typewriters hit the consumer scene (Olivetti and Smith Corona had ball typewriters for a while too) and a considerable amount of them also had Centronics interfaces available as attachments.
Nothing beats the Selectric. Much faster than a daisywheel, and they had that lovely mechanical staccato sound that was music to the ears. The sheer number of them that are still out there (and working) is incredible.
Selectric was living proof of the adage that any technology gets perfected at exactly the same time it becomes obsolete.
I see your literal interpretation and raise you a moebius strip. Thanks for playing, fellow geek.
i'd drink to you both from my Klein bottle, but....
First, the pictures - http://i.imgur.com/moKxZEU.jpg and http://i.imgur.com/XCtxuqg.jpg
Old, cheap $3 pair of Cube headphones found at Big Lots. Had them for years, cabling finally gave out. Came across a broken Polaroid PBT598 bluetooth speaker set, literally the only thing intact was the gumstick amp/bluetooth board, and even then it had damage, it having fried a couple of SMT capacitors, the battery and speaker trace pads were missing.
So, first order of business, get the SMT caps replaced. Easily done - just salvage components from various boards I've got around the house. Slightly trickier was exposing traces and fresh metal to solder to for battery and speaker connections. Making it fit required Dremel and hot glue work due to the shape of the headphones, and as a result the thing does look like a total hack job on the case itself.
But if I want to drown the world out in its entirety, 2x3w strapped to my head certainly does it. I can't hear my garbage disposal, vacuum cleaner, or even the neighbor's loud rap music. Volume has to be kept at pretty much 25% as anything higher, while clear (up to about 60%, then the poor speakers begin to distort) simply hurts.
Reminds me! Found an ancient 20w mono McIntosh lab grade tube amp in a dumpster behind the electronics dept at school. Had to replace all the capacitors, most of the resistors, and of course the tubes. The all-important McIntosh transformers potted in epoxy or similar comprised the entire interior of the chassis, however, so I assumed they were still within specs. Used the thing for years as a mono hifi, before that stereo thing became popular. (did you know you could still buy early Beatles albums in mono? ) Finally sold it to a collector type person, who wanted to replace the new components with the old malfunctioning ones, which I had thriftily saved over the years.
found a Fender guitar amp, literally buried in a snowbank. the speaker cone had a big hole through it and the handle of the toggle switch was broken off; replaced both and the thing worked like new. geez they are well built.
About ten years ago I decided to dust off my tele-operated car and take it for a spin. I started by plugging the red wire into the battery's negative terminal and the black wire into the positive, and watched as all the magic smoke escaped. I just stood there for 5 minutes staring down at a thousand dollar's worth of ruined electronics. Now I always use an actual black wire instead of adding a little black electrical tape to the end of a red one.
I eventually built another one a few years later. some pics.
a full wave rectifier can be your friend, and make polarity a thing of the past.
I once received a first gen xbox for free, back when it was worth something. it had the wrong voltage psu. I ordered a replacement but it didn't work, for some reason.
so.. some splicing and with a spare atx psu later it was up and running in a jiffy. wouldn't fit in the case anymore of course.
oh and I used a cardboard box as a pc case too, why not.
and soldered power in wires to a laptop that had a broken charger port, because why not.
what is this concept you people seem to have, of a PC having a case?
Back in the late 1980s i tried to control my scalectric cars by hooking the controller cables up to the pc speaker. The idea was that by writing code to play sound at different volumes I could control the voltage to the tracks, thus car speed, and write a program to drive perfect laps. Totally failed to consider the power differentials or the RF noise from the brushes (hey I was 10 years old). Fried the entire computer, even the old seral mouse (my first ever) was toast.
ah, slot cars. that was when i first grasped the concept that the speed controllers were just variable resistors, and I could just measure their resistance and get potentiometers. Followed very quickly afterwards by the concept of the power rating of a potentiometer.