Seriously guys...
The first thing that my head pictured was a lonely little program being forced to do manual labor - mending fences, tending to the Gnu Hurd, taking old Gateway 2000 PCs out to pasture, then having to shovel some Win ME...
I paid for part of my degree by working as a custodian in a school district near my home in New Jersey. I'm not quite sure what their newer desks are made of, but it's certainly not Bakelite - it doesn't have the characteristic smell.
The problem with putting even low-to-moderately nice-ish things in a school is two-fold:
First, kids from middle school and up (even kids in a decently well to do area) seem to love destroying stuff. There's two basic types of desks in this district, the kind with a particle board desktop with some kind of 'tough' plastic outer coating, and the kind with a solid hard/resilient plastic desktop. The main mode of failure of the first kind is some wise-ass will start to use a mechanical pencil or similar to start etching something asinine into the top of the desk. Then someone will start to pull at the scar and will eventually peel back and rip off the whole outer plastic coating. With the second kind, it's apparently far more entertaining to just break off the whole top of the desk since it's brittle and will fracture nicely.
Second is that every summer, the whole school gets cleaned with some rather interesting commercial cleaners. In order to get off all the pencil/pen/marker marks, there's an even harsher cleaner that's used. So if you try to use some kind of fabric or softer material, they simply won't get cleaned. It's hard enough to get a school full of hard surfaces cleaned in a summer without having to clean fabric furniture and worrying about mold/mildew/stains/etc. With parents being what they are, they won't stand for their little precious snowflakes having to park their asses on dirty furniture - so that's out.
Think about it like this... why do you suppose that there's no nice stuff available in public parks? Some people (not everyone, but enough to be a problem) just like breaking other people's stuff. It's not theirs, why should they worry? Take what you see in just about any publicly available restroom and now apply that to furniture. It's a problem of attitude and personal responsibility.
There are no magical boxes, but there's a useful point on the knowledge spectrum to start with for just about every kind of tech there is out there. I'd never expect my mother to have to belt out something in assembly just to be able to edit the photos of the grandkids and mail them out to the family. But I would expect her to be able to understand that the computer is just another tool people will use to help them do work, and that will do what you tell it, no more and no less (assuming that it isn't broken.)
For my mom and most other people, I liken it to cooking (hey - I don't care who you are or what you're interests are, we all eat and most of us can't afford to have someone else cook for us our whole lives.) You don't have to know the laws of thermodynamics and chemistry and be able to calculate all the heat transfer properties and intermediate chemical reactions of the ingredients just to be able to bake a cake (or cookies if you think the cake is a lie.) Nor can you just shove the ingredients in the oven and expect to get a cake out of it. You should be able to know and identify what some basic ingredients are, and that there are some good and bad combinations to them, and a few recipes to start out with. It's too bad that this is a rather personal journey and that there is no general guidance other than to pose a few statements, maybe a problem or two that has some current relevance, and to have some resources on hand to point to for questions
The OP has the same work cut out for them that every other teacher in history has had. They want to share their wonder and inquisition of a specific, but broad topic to others and may not even realize that their audience might not give a damn. Not everyone who plays with wires gives a damn about power generation and electrical theory, some of them just want to get paid money to hook up the wires in someone's house to everyone else's wires.
-
Their other problem is that they posed the question to slashdot, and are probably overwhelmed with the answers they got. It's like a thirsty stranger wandering in and asking for a drink at a beverage trade show - all they wanted was a cup of something wet to quench their thirst and what they got was a discussion on whether or not a particular seltzer was too much at first, or if milk counted as a drink, or some inflaming comments about those zealots who drink of the Kool-Aid.
-
What I would like to see in the curriculum is a note that all of this software is only an example of a certain class of tool, and explain that there is a whole class of tool that each belongs to. They should give everyone the basic understanding of how some of the stuff works and a few examples that mean something to them. With every step of the way, remembering that you still need to reinforce the basics such as proper grammar and having your communications be a complete thought.
That way, you're not just teaching them to be end users, but helping them to be creators. Any fool can push the power button on a mixer if told the specifics of model such-and-such; most people can surpass that and go on to cook something that passes for a meal; only a select few ever go on to find their calling as a chef. I'd guess that this class should be the equivalent of being able to make most students a passable electronic cook. In the end they should be given the tools (which are free), and some examples with limitations of what can be done easily and what is unrealistic - how a spreadsheet can help you manage details in your budget, but can't magically manage the budget for you - how to pull the red eye out of a photo so you're not making a poster of someone look possessed, but not be able to fix the motion blur from a shaky camera - how a shell script can help you rename a bunch of pictures in a directory, but it can't sort them by content. Once given the basics, the ones with the interest will pursue it on their own.
Unfortunately there are lessons that can't be taught by citing a specific piece of software, re
Their fine print is no porn and no excessive media files (multimedia can't be more than x% of your storage use. AFAIK that's a pretty significant bandwidth and disk reduction right there. Not sure what the CPU cap was, but I'm not running much on my personal site.
Cool your combustion stream too much and you get things like condensation of nasty stuff on your equipment, visible smoke, etc. Many times they will actually keep the stream hotter than they'd really like just to ensure that it will throw the products of combustion up and away from the surrounding area. How many people are really qualified to know the difference between smoke and steam and any other stuff in the exhaust stream without having been taught before seeing it?
Besides, the power companies don't like to waste heat because heat is money. The industry doesn't go by efficency, they go by heat rate (how much heat it costs to make so much electricity). Any excess heat wasted is just about literally like throwing money away. On top of that, whatever system you implement has to be a money maker. The tech has existed for a long time to reduce the environmental impact that power generation has, but for the most part it doesn't make money sense to use it all. Unfortunately we're going to have to legislate these changes into effect, but when we do don't be surprised when your energy costs go up. It's like when people trade in their old gas car for a new diesel or hybrid... how many take the time to crunch the financial numbers to see if it makes fiscal sense? I'd bet it's not many. These companies won't make that mistake because they're not driven by that do-good feeling many consumers have.
Sakai is also far superior to Blackboard, and the ability for student groups to set up their own sites (including places for documents, wikis, chat, and other stuff) is incredibly helpful. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakai_Project Besides, it's named after an Iron Chef... what could be better?
Even engineering grads suck sometimes. I have a friend who does the computing support for part of the ME department of a large uni, and he's got some problem cases. He was asked to build some good computers to do CFD work and went and spent about $4k putting together two computers for these grad students that work under the department head. The computers get put together, tested, and sent off. Maybe three weeks go by and the guys say that they don't work, and one won't even power on any more. They went and put on cracked versions of chinese windows, were loaded with malware, and both got infected with BIOS viruses. Well, one got working again after a half a month of work, and the other is apparently a really expensive doorstop - the bios virus bricked the machine... everything except the power supply seems to be shot.
Hey, someone who might be able to answer this... My question is how do you think the waste heat from the fuel cell reaction will affect the life and performance of the Li-poly battery? I'm not all that up on battery tech, but I was under the strong impression that heat is always bad for batteries, i.e. heat causes material degradation, reduces battery functionality over time, messes with chemical kenetics, and increases electron leakage due to the higher amount of energy around. Isn't that why there are limitations to recharge rates on batteries for laptops, etc? I've read that fuel cells operate ideally within a fairly narrow temperature range and while I suppose that the evaporation of the fuel within the tank attached to the side of the thing would help to act to remove some heat from the system, I can't imagine that it would be all that much. Also, if it does cause it to run at reduced temperatures, wouldn't condensation of product cause problems?
Gee it's funny, I don't have to remind people to buckle up when I drive. Sometimes they even have the seatbelt on before they close the door. I wonder why. Sometimes they start praying too... Some folks are just kooky I guess.
Joking aside, I've driven over a million miles in my short lifetime so far. I've seen too many goofy and careless and otherwise avoidable accidents to not insist on everyone in every vehicle that I'm ever in to wear a seatbelt. And to wear it properly. A seatbelt across the abdomen and not up against your hips isn't going to do any more than just keep your body from becoming a projectile in the passenger compartment and potentially tear up your intestines (how strong are your abdominal muscles - can they take a crash?)
It's sad how many peoples' lives would be better by this little principal. I grew up with a fat parent and fat siblings. I would see the way that people would treat them and didn't want to be treated the same way. Looking for some advice, I ended up getting a subscription for a men's health magazine (also for the humor and the quality of the non-health articles) and over the course of about 10 years or so that I read it, the only thing that seemed to last was 'moderation.' It's funny that it not only works for food, but for exercise, work, hobbies, relationships, money, etc. Never too much or too little of anything. And everyone should have some vices, as long as you keep tabs on them and don't let them run amok, and they don't cause you to neglect any other aspect of your life. It's a dead simple rule to follow too.
PS/2 keyboards could be hot plugged once the BIOS handed over control of the computer to the OS. But if you set the computer to ignore the missing keyboard and just continue booting, then you were out of luck until you power cycled the computer with a keyboard plugged in. I don't remember if DIN keyboards had the same functionality, so someone else could chime in on that one.
Hey... could you send me some of whatever you've been smoking (i bet you get some quality stuff down on the island)?
Seriously though, that room to me is something akin to selling 'cable elevators' to audiophiles. It's somewhere between overkill and voodoo. Whenever you need RF shielding, read up on the physics, do the math, and go for whatever works the cheapest. I wonder how much of that $79k varies, with the recent price of copper and all. I know copper's a great conductor and all, but hell... even shipping on that beast has to be enormous. Besides... the Faraday cage relies on the skin effect, so it makes me wonder if copper plated aluminum or pvc would do the trick. It might keep people from trying to steal your room to sell for scrap.
Betz's Law - Pmax = 16/27*1/2*rho*v^3*Area - is the max extraction you'd get from the wind. Kinda like that whole second law of thermo thing... a little tricky to get around (but if you do you'd be rich). But don't take my word for it, confirm it for yourself.
A Faraday cage is not expensive - not by a long shot... any contiguous metal mesh or solid works as long as the gaps in it are a certain threshold below the wavelengths that you're trying to block. Just make sure the damn thing is totally enclosed (don't leave a big window in it) and that the whole thing can electrically talk to the rest of itself. If you want to be fancy, then ground the damn thing. I helped set one up for a grad student studying protein interaction with a very expensive, very sensitive galvanometer - 15 bucks worth of copper screen from McMaster Carr and poof - no noise in the signal.
The tricky thing with wind power is that it's unsteady, so who knows... a properly designed cvt might work... if you could make it strong and mechanically efficient enough to be worth building. We consumers like having nice steady ac power 60 times a second (in the USA), and you don't really see that with direct wind power generation. Apparently the big fix so far has been to generate it in DC, then have an inverter turn it into something that can be dumped on the grid (just like with PV cells) - or go AC -> DC -> AC. If you could skip that middle man, you'd have higher efficiencies, but we don't want that... we want power on our convenience. As far as my limited knowledge goes, that's been a huge problem with power generation in general, and that's why you have to have different generation for base load power and use peakers whenever needed. If we had better energy storage, we could see decent increases in efficiency with the equipment of today.
It's an interesting engineering problem though... tough electrical customers, tough physical problems, boundary layer effects, park hill and tunnel effects, and the biggie: political issues. It's funny though... everyone thinks of the birds but how many remember bats? How many tons of insects do bat populations take out every night?
I can whole heartedly recommend picking up a copy of Advanced Engineering Mathematics by Michael Greenburg. It's a serious book, and it's especially helpful if you're trying to piece together the mental constructs of what the math means to what the physics means. I bought it to understand the math that that describes the physics, but it works both ways. It covers everything from ODEs, PDEs, linear algebra, vector field theory, Fourier methods, complex variables, etc. It basically covers everything from mid-level undergraduate math to some graduate stuff (it's used as a grad textbook at my school). I seriously can't recommend this book enough. ISBN 0-13-321431-1
The thing about it is that it's presented in a way that's digestible. I'm not saying that you can read the book like it's the next in line of the Ender series, but you can get through the damn thing.
Ok, so the elimination of solids waste part I get. The part that I don't get is how they were able to get this thing to give more output than needed to make the damn electric arc in the first place. No I didn't RTFA (I'm new here, but not that new), but do they get 60 MWe net, or do they just not quote how much juice it takes to run the plasma torch? Unless they've had some super breakthrough, up until this point the generation of electricity from plasma arc gasses has always been to minimize losses from running the damn thing. It's great for reducing the amount of solid wastes you have in a landfill, but as far as an energy source, wouldn't you be better off letting the stuff rot on it's own (under anaerobic digestion), than trying to vaporize it. It's seemed silly to me to use an electric arc to vaporize something into stuff you can burn in a turbine which is used to make electricity to run the electric arc that you use to vaporize something. (Yes it's a ridiculous sentence, but so is the operation of the thing if they haven't had some awesome change in the method of operation.) I guess the positive side is that the method is useful in getting rid of garbage that is otherwise tough to dispose of.
Coastal snow: wet and clumpy
Inland snow: powdery and packable
You can drive just fine on packed snow, try the same on the sloppy crap we get near the coast.
That's about the answer that I got when I asked my dad about why nobody in his home state (Montana) seemed to be in a truck. You don't need it. Meanwhile, here in 'Jersey we get jackasses that think that just because you have anything other than 2wd, you can drive however you please... as my aunt put it "Four wheel drive won't keep you from sliding off the road, but it'll help get you back on once you do something stupid."
It makes me wonder that if you have a large percent of the population plugging in their vehicles at night, does that make for a more consistent draw in baseline power? Would that be enough to get the power companies to switch to larger, more efficient systems being run more often, or would we still have the same amount of peak-load systems coming up and down through the day?
Something that always gets to me is that whenever anyone says something that has to happen on large scale systems, I have to wonder if they've been exposed to all the other areas that the system is connected to. But hey - at least it's only man made systems that is for discussion here, not stuff as dynamic and understudied as ecological systems.
I want to see when some high school kid breaks into some system on a large ranch, then proceeds to send all the cows to their school or whatever they want to disrupt. If this happens, is that enough to get the FBI involved, just because it's electronic? How could someone (other than the group trying to sell this to ranchers) think this is a good thing? Do they seriously think it will have the capabilities to replace a proper border collie?
I know that there a quite a few people in industry that have the notion that 'academics are there to spend money, people in industry are there to make it.' However, we all can't be MIT. Our formula racing car is pretty much made from scratch, with just about everything except the engine made by the students, and we're trying to change that. Every year MIT probably spends more on its drivetrain than we do on our whole car.
Either way, it'd be a long shot. We'd probably use them as a disk array to dump our lab data to from our cameras. If my friend gets his analysis tools ported over to CUDA, we're probably only going to need one or two computers for number crunching and the rest for storage, but thanks anyway.
So, what you're saying is that this Casey Jones character should just stick with being a vigilante, and helping April and her rather large reptilian friends...
I know of a combustion lab at a state university in NJ that wouldn't turn down a donation. Our lab advisor would rather use his money to make sure his grad students can eat rather than buy equipment that we don't absolutely need. It's actually been good for us because we've been forced to come up with creative solutions ourselves, rather than just buy equipment that would make the job easier. I'd understand if you turn down a cold-call beg for donations, but hey - it couldn't hurt to ask.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously guys... The first thing that my head pictured was a lonely little program being forced to do manual labor - mending fences, tending to the Gnu Hurd, taking old Gateway 2000 PCs out to pasture, then having to shovel some Win ME...
I paid for part of my degree by working as a custodian in a school district near my home in New Jersey. I'm not quite sure what their newer desks are made of, but it's certainly not Bakelite - it doesn't have the characteristic smell.
The problem with putting even low-to-moderately nice-ish things in a school is two-fold:
First, kids from middle school and up (even kids in a decently well to do area) seem to love destroying stuff. There's two basic types of desks in this district, the kind with a particle board desktop with some kind of 'tough' plastic outer coating, and the kind with a solid hard/resilient plastic desktop. The main mode of failure of the first kind is some wise-ass will start to use a mechanical pencil or similar to start etching something asinine into the top of the desk. Then someone will start to pull at the scar and will eventually peel back and rip off the whole outer plastic coating. With the second kind, it's apparently far more entertaining to just break off the whole top of the desk since it's brittle and will fracture nicely.
Second is that every summer, the whole school gets cleaned with some rather interesting commercial cleaners. In order to get off all the pencil/pen/marker marks, there's an even harsher cleaner that's used. So if you try to use some kind of fabric or softer material, they simply won't get cleaned. It's hard enough to get a school full of hard surfaces cleaned in a summer without having to clean fabric furniture and worrying about mold/mildew/stains/etc. With parents being what they are, they won't stand for their little precious snowflakes having to park their asses on dirty furniture - so that's out.
Think about it like this... why do you suppose that there's no nice stuff available in public parks? Some people (not everyone, but enough to be a problem) just like breaking other people's stuff. It's not theirs, why should they worry? Take what you see in just about any publicly available restroom and now apply that to furniture. It's a problem of attitude and personal responsibility.
For my mom and most other people, I liken it to cooking (hey - I don't care who you are or what you're interests are, we all eat and most of us can't afford to have someone else cook for us our whole lives.) You don't have to know the laws of thermodynamics and chemistry and be able to calculate all the heat transfer properties and intermediate chemical reactions of the ingredients just to be able to bake a cake (or cookies if you think the cake is a lie.) Nor can you just shove the ingredients in the oven and expect to get a cake out of it. You should be able to know and identify what some basic ingredients are, and that there are some good and bad combinations to them, and a few recipes to start out with. It's too bad that this is a rather personal journey and that there is no general guidance other than to pose a few statements, maybe a problem or two that has some current relevance, and to have some resources on hand to point to for questions
The OP has the same work cut out for them that every other teacher in history has had. They want to share their wonder and inquisition of a specific, but broad topic to others and may not even realize that their audience might not give a damn. Not everyone who plays with wires gives a damn about power generation and electrical theory, some of them just want to get paid money to hook up the wires in someone's house to everyone else's wires.
- Their other problem is that they posed the question to slashdot, and are probably overwhelmed with the answers they got. It's like a thirsty stranger wandering in and asking for a drink at a beverage trade show - all they wanted was a cup of something wet to quench their thirst and what they got was a discussion on whether or not a particular seltzer was too much at first, or if milk counted as a drink, or some inflaming comments about those zealots who drink of the Kool-Aid. -
What I would like to see in the curriculum is a note that all of this software is only an example of a certain class of tool, and explain that there is a whole class of tool that each belongs to. They should give everyone the basic understanding of how some of the stuff works and a few examples that mean something to them. With every step of the way, remembering that you still need to reinforce the basics such as proper grammar and having your communications be a complete thought.
That way, you're not just teaching them to be end users, but helping them to be creators. Any fool can push the power button on a mixer if told the specifics of model such-and-such; most people can surpass that and go on to cook something that passes for a meal; only a select few ever go on to find their calling as a chef. I'd guess that this class should be the equivalent of being able to make most students a passable electronic cook. In the end they should be given the tools (which are free), and some examples with limitations of what can be done easily and what is unrealistic - how a spreadsheet can help you manage details in your budget, but can't magically manage the budget for you - how to pull the red eye out of a photo so you're not making a poster of someone look possessed, but not be able to fix the motion blur from a shaky camera - how a shell script can help you rename a bunch of pictures in a directory, but it can't sort them by content. Once given the basics, the ones with the interest will pursue it on their own.
Unfortunately there are lessons that can't be taught by citing a specific piece of software, re
Their fine print is no porn and no excessive media files (multimedia can't be more than x% of your storage use. AFAIK that's a pretty significant bandwidth and disk reduction right there. Not sure what the CPU cap was, but I'm not running much on my personal site.
Just remember kiddies... Robot Jox wasn't a documentary film.
Cool your combustion stream too much and you get things like condensation of nasty stuff on your equipment, visible smoke, etc. Many times they will actually keep the stream hotter than they'd really like just to ensure that it will throw the products of combustion up and away from the surrounding area. How many people are really qualified to know the difference between smoke and steam and any other stuff in the exhaust stream without having been taught before seeing it?
Besides, the power companies don't like to waste heat because heat is money. The industry doesn't go by efficency, they go by heat rate (how much heat it costs to make so much electricity). Any excess heat wasted is just about literally like throwing money away. On top of that, whatever system you implement has to be a money maker. The tech has existed for a long time to reduce the environmental impact that power generation has, but for the most part it doesn't make money sense to use it all. Unfortunately we're going to have to legislate these changes into effect, but when we do don't be surprised when your energy costs go up. It's like when people trade in their old gas car for a new diesel or hybrid... how many take the time to crunch the financial numbers to see if it makes fiscal sense? I'd bet it's not many. These companies won't make that mistake because they're not driven by that do-good feeling many consumers have.
Sakai is also far superior to Blackboard, and the ability for student groups to set up their own sites (including places for documents, wikis, chat, and other stuff) is incredibly helpful. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakai_Project Besides, it's named after an Iron Chef... what could be better?
Sorry, I have to ask - what kind of freaky weirdo wasn't using his computer at 3AM? Takes all kinds, I guess.
Says the guy posting this at 11:11AM?
Even engineering grads suck sometimes. I have a friend who does the computing support for part of the ME department of a large uni, and he's got some problem cases. He was asked to build some good computers to do CFD work and went and spent about $4k putting together two computers for these grad students that work under the department head. The computers get put together, tested, and sent off. Maybe three weeks go by and the guys say that they don't work, and one won't even power on any more. They went and put on cracked versions of chinese windows, were loaded with malware, and both got infected with BIOS viruses. Well, one got working again after a half a month of work, and the other is apparently a really expensive doorstop - the bios virus bricked the machine... everything except the power supply seems to be shot.
Hey, someone who might be able to answer this... My question is how do you think the waste heat from the fuel cell reaction will affect the life and performance of the Li-poly battery? I'm not all that up on battery tech, but I was under the strong impression that heat is always bad for batteries, i.e. heat causes material degradation, reduces battery functionality over time, messes with chemical kenetics, and increases electron leakage due to the higher amount of energy around. Isn't that why there are limitations to recharge rates on batteries for laptops, etc? I've read that fuel cells operate ideally within a fairly narrow temperature range and while I suppose that the evaporation of the fuel within the tank attached to the side of the thing would help to act to remove some heat from the system, I can't imagine that it would be all that much. Also, if it does cause it to run at reduced temperatures, wouldn't condensation of product cause problems?
Gee it's funny, I don't have to remind people to buckle up when I drive. Sometimes they even have the seatbelt on before they close the door. I wonder why. Sometimes they start praying too... Some folks are just kooky I guess.
Joking aside, I've driven over a million miles in my short lifetime so far. I've seen too many goofy and careless and otherwise avoidable accidents to not insist on everyone in every vehicle that I'm ever in to wear a seatbelt. And to wear it properly. A seatbelt across the abdomen and not up against your hips isn't going to do any more than just keep your body from becoming a projectile in the passenger compartment and potentially tear up your intestines (how strong are your abdominal muscles - can they take a crash?)
It's sad how many peoples' lives would be better by this little principal. I grew up with a fat parent and fat siblings. I would see the way that people would treat them and didn't want to be treated the same way. Looking for some advice, I ended up getting a subscription for a men's health magazine (also for the humor and the quality of the non-health articles) and over the course of about 10 years or so that I read it, the only thing that seemed to last was 'moderation.' It's funny that it not only works for food, but for exercise, work, hobbies, relationships, money, etc. Never too much or too little of anything. And everyone should have some vices, as long as you keep tabs on them and don't let them run amok, and they don't cause you to neglect any other aspect of your life. It's a dead simple rule to follow too.
PS/2 keyboards could be hot plugged once the BIOS handed over control of the computer to the OS. But if you set the computer to ignore the missing keyboard and just continue booting, then you were out of luck until you power cycled the computer with a keyboard plugged in. I don't remember if DIN keyboards had the same functionality, so someone else could chime in on that one.
Hey... could you send me some of whatever you've been smoking (i bet you get some quality stuff down on the island)?
Seriously though, that room to me is something akin to selling 'cable elevators' to audiophiles. It's somewhere between overkill and voodoo. Whenever you need RF shielding, read up on the physics, do the math, and go for whatever works the cheapest. I wonder how much of that $79k varies, with the recent price of copper and all. I know copper's a great conductor and all, but hell... even shipping on that beast has to be enormous. Besides... the Faraday cage relies on the skin effect, so it makes me wonder if copper plated aluminum or pvc would do the trick. It might keep people from trying to steal your room to sell for scrap.
Betz's Law - Pmax = 16/27*1/2*rho*v^3*Area - is the max extraction you'd get from the wind. Kinda like that whole second law of thermo thing... a little tricky to get around (but if you do you'd be rich). But don't take my word for it, confirm it for yourself.
A Faraday cage is not expensive - not by a long shot... any contiguous metal mesh or solid works as long as the gaps in it are a certain threshold below the wavelengths that you're trying to block. Just make sure the damn thing is totally enclosed (don't leave a big window in it) and that the whole thing can electrically talk to the rest of itself. If you want to be fancy, then ground the damn thing. I helped set one up for a grad student studying protein interaction with a very expensive, very sensitive galvanometer - 15 bucks worth of copper screen from McMaster Carr and poof - no noise in the signal.
The tricky thing with wind power is that it's unsteady, so who knows... a properly designed cvt might work... if you could make it strong and mechanically efficient enough to be worth building. We consumers like having nice steady ac power 60 times a second (in the USA), and you don't really see that with direct wind power generation. Apparently the big fix so far has been to generate it in DC, then have an inverter turn it into something that can be dumped on the grid (just like with PV cells) - or go AC -> DC -> AC. If you could skip that middle man, you'd have higher efficiencies, but we don't want that... we want power on our convenience. As far as my limited knowledge goes, that's been a huge problem with power generation in general, and that's why you have to have different generation for base load power and use peakers whenever needed. If we had better energy storage, we could see decent increases in efficiency with the equipment of today.
It's an interesting engineering problem though... tough electrical customers, tough physical problems, boundary layer effects, park hill and tunnel effects, and the biggie: political issues. It's funny though... everyone thinks of the birds but how many remember bats? How many tons of insects do bat populations take out every night?
I can whole heartedly recommend picking up a copy of Advanced Engineering Mathematics by Michael Greenburg. It's a serious book, and it's especially helpful if you're trying to piece together the mental constructs of what the math means to what the physics means. I bought it to understand the math that that describes the physics, but it works both ways. It covers everything from ODEs, PDEs, linear algebra, vector field theory, Fourier methods, complex variables, etc. It basically covers everything from mid-level undergraduate math to some graduate stuff (it's used as a grad textbook at my school). I seriously can't recommend this book enough. ISBN 0-13-321431-1
The thing about it is that it's presented in a way that's digestible. I'm not saying that you can read the book like it's the next in line of the Ender series, but you can get through the damn thing.
Ok, so the elimination of solids waste part I get. The part that I don't get is how they were able to get this thing to give more output than needed to make the damn electric arc in the first place. No I didn't RTFA (I'm new here, but not that new), but do they get 60 MWe net, or do they just not quote how much juice it takes to run the plasma torch? Unless they've had some super breakthrough, up until this point the generation of electricity from plasma arc gasses has always been to minimize losses from running the damn thing. It's great for reducing the amount of solid wastes you have in a landfill, but as far as an energy source, wouldn't you be better off letting the stuff rot on it's own (under anaerobic digestion), than trying to vaporize it. It's seemed silly to me to use an electric arc to vaporize something into stuff you can burn in a turbine which is used to make electricity to run the electric arc that you use to vaporize something. (Yes it's a ridiculous sentence, but so is the operation of the thing if they haven't had some awesome change in the method of operation.) I guess the positive side is that the method is useful in getting rid of garbage that is otherwise tough to dispose of.
Coastal snow: wet and clumpy
Inland snow: powdery and packable
You can drive just fine on packed snow, try the same on the sloppy crap we get near the coast.
That's about the answer that I got when I asked my dad about why nobody in his home state (Montana) seemed to be in a truck. You don't need it. Meanwhile, here in 'Jersey we get jackasses that think that just because you have anything other than 2wd, you can drive however you please... as my aunt put it "Four wheel drive won't keep you from sliding off the road, but it'll help get you back on once you do something stupid."
It makes me wonder that if you have a large percent of the population plugging in their vehicles at night, does that make for a more consistent draw in baseline power? Would that be enough to get the power companies to switch to larger, more efficient systems being run more often, or would we still have the same amount of peak-load systems coming up and down through the day?
Something that always gets to me is that whenever anyone says something that has to happen on large scale systems, I have to wonder if they've been exposed to all the other areas that the system is connected to. But hey - at least it's only man made systems that is for discussion here, not stuff as dynamic and understudied as ecological systems.
I want to see when some high school kid breaks into some system on a large ranch, then proceeds to send all the cows to their school or whatever they want to disrupt. If this happens, is that enough to get the FBI involved, just because it's electronic? How could someone (other than the group trying to sell this to ranchers) think this is a good thing? Do they seriously think it will have the capabilities to replace a proper border collie?
Well, either way - I appreciate the notion.
I know that there a quite a few people in industry that have the notion that 'academics are there to spend money, people in industry are there to make it.' However, we all can't be MIT. Our formula racing car is pretty much made from scratch, with just about everything except the engine made by the students, and we're trying to change that. Every year MIT probably spends more on its drivetrain than we do on our whole car.
Either way, it'd be a long shot. We'd probably use them as a disk array to dump our lab data to from our cameras. If my friend gets his analysis tools ported over to CUDA, we're probably only going to need one or two computers for number crunching and the rest for storage, but thanks anyway.
So, what you're saying is that this Casey Jones character should just stick with being a vigilante, and helping April and her rather large reptilian friends...
I know of a combustion lab at a state university in NJ that wouldn't turn down a donation. Our lab advisor would rather use his money to make sure his grad students can eat rather than buy equipment that we don't absolutely need. It's actually been good for us because we've been forced to come up with creative solutions ourselves, rather than just buy equipment that would make the job easier. I'd understand if you turn down a cold-call beg for donations, but hey - it couldn't hurt to ask.