Nobody is talking about something that weighs five to ten times more. And furthermore: calm the heck down. I don't understand why you're getting so riled up over this.
1. Alcohol leaks easier than water. At least that's been my experience with it.
2. Flexible water bottles are not rated for everclear. Even if it didn't physically and visibly dissolve the seals in front of you, I'd still have concerns over it leaching chemicals out of the plastic. Moreso than with a rigid bottle, as flexible plastics generally contain plasticizers, many of which have been linked to a variety of health issues. Some flexible water containers are made of PVC, which has very bad ethanol compatibility, it embrittles it.
3. Actually, if I were to do it again, I actually would choose the liquor store bottle. At least you're guaranteed proper chemical compatibility and a cap designed not to leak when containing alcohol.
Alcohol is not water. Don't expect it to behave like it.
No small amount. 123d Catch is usually broken and buggy, and being able to do terrain scans with my phone is important for me.
Plus, I dream of the day when we can take up full 3d video on our cell phones. Not silly stereoscopy, actual 3d, with the ability to choose any perspective. With good enough quality on the 3d imager to understand transparency and reflection (which are painfully common in real life), and with a good enough software stack to assume "that which I couldn't see between times T1 and T2 is a reasonable interpolation of how it looked and where it was positioned between these two timepoints". Plus the ability to knit together multiple people's recorded 3d data into a single scene.
Recording full 3d data may sound like a huge recording, but actually when you think about it it's not really, the geometry and texture of scenes doesn't change that much between frames in the real world; most objects are static. And the macroscopic changes should be readily subject to compression. Within a decade or two of 3d video algorithm refinement I could envision the results being smaller than a 2d recording of the same scene.
But anyway that's all "gee whiz wouldn't that be neat" stuff... right now, I just want to be able to scan landscapes on my phone better than 123D Catch can do.:P
Actually, might not be a bad idea. Might. Small individually factory-sealed liquid packages would reduce the leak risk that large bottles have due to not requiring a resealable cap. But rather than a leak risk, I'd worry about them being an outright rupture risk... foil is not particularly strong. If you have a foil pack of pop tarts rupture, no big deal, but if you have a foil pack of everclear rupture, it's going to leave some of your stuff wet and smelling like alcohol at best - at worst it'll ruin electronics, dissolve sensitive plastics, etc.
Really, when it comes to backpacking, the fewer liquids the better. Even though everclear is a rather nice and useful substance to have with.:)
Have you ever hiked long distances with a bottle of vodka? I have. It's not the vodka that's the PITA, it's the bottle.
While I'm still not too keen on this product, let's not pretend that there's no reasons for preferring a powder to liquids even at the cost of some disadvantages.
If you can meet that spec then this seems to meet all requirements:
1) Ethyl carbamate is a solid crystalline powder at normal conditions. It doesn't melt until 46C. 2) While it's a "suspected carcinogen", it's already found normally in alcoholic beverages, so if there's a small amount that doesn't react for some reason, well, that's just a normal alcoholic drink. So long as it's only trace amounts, that is, like in normal alcoholic beverages. 3) Its density, 1,056 g/cm, is higher than that of ethanol, 0,789 g/cm, so you actually get 34% *more* ethanol per cubic centimeter than taking pure ethanol. And your yield is over 100% by mass too, since the mass of the water added (which hikers generally get along the way or at their campsite) is slightly heavier than the mass of the ammonia lost. 4) If your method to remove the NH4 leaves the CO2 intact then you could generate sparkling beverages too.
Better weight ratio but it's awkward to haul around. It seems to leak easier than water (made obvious by that alcohol smell it gets on stuff;) ), and you have to haul around bulky partly-empty containers.
I've done it before, but it'd be nice to have a powder. That said, your point is spot on - you get a lot of bang for your weight-buck with concentrated liquid alcohol, not so much with this adsorbed stuff.
Yeah, I don't get this "they'll use it to make super-strong alcohol" stuff. Powdered alcohol is alcohol soaked up into a sorbent. At least in classic formations, the sorbent significantly outweighs the alcohol. If you're adding it to anything that one would classify as "liquor", you'll be maintaining or decreasing the alcohol content; it could only hike the content of things like beer and to a lesser extent wine. The same way you'd hike the contents by, you know, mixing in a stronger alcohol if it was liquid.
It's not actually a bad idea. I've taken alcohol backpacking before, but it's as he mentions, it's somewhat impractical, esp. stopping links and carrying around big containers that will average being half empty, which you can't refill with their target contents on the way like you can with water bottles. And in my experience it usually leaks sooner or later. And since it only makes sense to carry the most concentrated stuff you can buy...yeah.
Concentrated alcohol is great stuff to be with - and not just for "getting drunk in the woods". Or even the social aspect - being out in the middle of nowhere with alcohol and meeting up with other travelers can make you pretty popular;) But it's also 7 calories per gram - only fat is higher, at 9, while carbs and proteins are 4, so it's a nice weight ratio, and it never spoils. It doubles as a disinfectant, both for first aid, and for water. And it can be burned as a stove fuel.
That said, I don't know how many of the benefits would carry over to this powdered variety. The sorbent is going to significantly reduce weight per calorie, you probably can no longer burn it as stove fuel at any dilution, etc.
You're describing a massive easter egg with your analogy (a whole room of a building). Most easter eggs are little tiny harmless things. Maybe there's the occasional easter egg that could meet your analogy (such as an embedded flight simulator or whatnot), but not many.
I didn't post a big sign stating, "hey, there's an easter egg here!". I implemented it during the implementation of the task to add the dot to the scanner. I made the dot as a pixmap, and had the frog images in the same pixmap (nobody ever checked the pixmap to see what was in it, but again, they really didn't have reason to, it was just a pixmap). The value 42 was set into a define elsewhere in the code with a misleading name. I honestly don't remember if there was any code review practice on the project (it was a decade and a half ago), but if there was, it wasn't very formal. Overall the implementation was very simple - the code always drew the pixmap at the same spot, the only difference was the X offset into the pixmap used. If I remember right, I added confusion into the pixmap X offset by deliberately confusing the pixmap X offset and the X position of where the pixmap was supposed to be drawn on the screen, and thus using that to cycle the animation as the spectrum was swept across.
I once worked on a government project codenamed "Bullfrog" back when I worked at Rockwell-Collins. I won't go into too much details (we were told that it was "sensitive" but not classified), but I'll just mention that part of the project involved a radio turner that could scan through frequencies. One of my tasks was to implement the frequency sweeper, which was supposed to have a dot that would show what frequency was currently being scanned. I also as part of a different task had to implement a subwindow that could be opened or closed, which showed snapshots of the past several sweeps. The easter egg would occur if you clicked on the open/close button for the snapshot window precisely 42 times: the dot would change into a hopping frog animation;)
Nothing huge, but nothing evil either, and something that was easy to implement and easy to sneak into the code unnoticed.
Exactly. A person can buy an old inefficient junker for $500, but if you're having to pump $1500 of gasoline into it every year, and you have to swap out the transmission, then later the timing belt, then later the engine, and on and on.... you're not exactly paying just $500. It's total cost of ownership that matters:
Electric cars perform poorly on purchase price, miscellaneous on insurance, excellent on fuel costs, excellent on maintenance except for the pack, good on maintenance including the pack (due to the long warranty periods and reduced purchase costs a decade+ in the future), and as a general rule, vehicles with low operating costs retain value better than those with high operating costs (because when people are buying a used car, they're doing so to save money).
If you want a 300 mile battery pack, yes. A 100 mile battery pack for a car with the same level of streamlining would be $6,5k.
For that cost, versus a gas car you get:
* A simpler - and potentially cheaper in mass production - drivetrain
* A drivetrain that's far easier to boost to very high power levels, which with a gas drivetrain costs a lot and requires a very large, heavy engine
* A drivetrain that actually gets more efficient the more powerful it gets, not less (greater max power = fatter conductors = less resistance in normal driving conditions).
* Roughly 1/3rd the fuel cost per unit distance driven, give or take depending on your local gas and electricity prices. For the average US car's 12k miles per year, and say 30mpg comparative, with an average long-term gas price of... oh, let's say $2.40 a gallon... that's saving $640 a year. Given that the packs are usually warrantied for 8-10 years, this alone pays for itself.
* A better environmental impact almost anywhere in the first world even on grid power, with in some regions / countries, dramatically better impact.
* The ability to charge at home, aka, no trips to the gas stations. And side benefits, like having your car pre-heated (or cooled) for you when you arrive, off of grid power.
* Greatly reduced maintenance due to the greatly reduced number of moving parts - and we're not just talking about oil changes or the like. For example, you'll never have to swap out a transmission because there is no transmission (apart from a direct linkage). You're not going to have to replace a timing belt because there is no timing belt. And on and on and on, there's all sorts of things that can break in a gasoline car that don't even exist in an electric car.
Air launch usually isn't so much about the (small) extra delta-V as it is the greater flexibility on launch sites. Which is why I asked as to whether you have an equatorial site.:)
Most people's perception of how airships should behave from holes is wrong, and it's based on their experience with party balloons. The reason for the differences are:
* Party balloons are pressurized - the skin is stretched taught. The skin on airships are loose. * Skin area (and thus leak rate) scales proportional to the radius squared, while the volume scales proportional to the radius cubed. Airships are many, many orders of magnitude larger than party balloons. Consequently the rate in which gas can leak out of a hope is drastically lower.
Even large holes in airships don't take them down quickly. Even a moderate sized airship can generally continue flying to its destination and then fix the damage and refill there.
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Nobody is talking about something that weighs five to ten times more. And furthermore: calm the heck down. I don't understand why you're getting so riled up over this.
1. Alcohol leaks easier than water. At least that's been my experience with it.
2. Flexible water bottles are not rated for everclear. Even if it didn't physically and visibly dissolve the seals in front of you, I'd still have concerns over it leaching chemicals out of the plastic. Moreso than with a rigid bottle, as flexible plastics generally contain plasticizers, many of which have been linked to a variety of health issues. Some flexible water containers are made of PVC, which has very bad ethanol compatibility, it embrittles it.
3. Actually, if I were to do it again, I actually would choose the liquor store bottle. At least you're guaranteed proper chemical compatibility and a cap designed not to leak when containing alcohol.
Alcohol is not water. Don't expect it to behave like it.
Still tiny apertures, though :(
I'll take more light coming into the sensor over high frame rates and pixel counts any day.
No small amount. 123d Catch is usually broken and buggy, and being able to do terrain scans with my phone is important for me.
Plus, I dream of the day when we can take up full 3d video on our cell phones. Not silly stereoscopy, actual 3d, with the ability to choose any perspective. With good enough quality on the 3d imager to understand transparency and reflection (which are painfully common in real life), and with a good enough software stack to assume "that which I couldn't see between times T1 and T2 is a reasonable interpolation of how it looked and where it was positioned between these two timepoints". Plus the ability to knit together multiple people's recorded 3d data into a single scene.
Recording full 3d data may sound like a huge recording, but actually when you think about it it's not really, the geometry and texture of scenes doesn't change that much between frames in the real world; most objects are static. And the macroscopic changes should be readily subject to compression. Within a decade or two of 3d video algorithm refinement I could envision the results being smaller than a 2d recording of the same scene.
But anyway that's all "gee whiz wouldn't that be neat" stuff... right now, I just want to be able to scan landscapes on my phone better than 123D Catch can do. :P
Maybe half a kilo each, given that a full bottle is usually a kilo or more. So about a kilo for a "couple". That is to say, heavier than my tent.
Most people above seem to be missing the point. Carrying the alcohol isn't the problem with hiking with it. The problem is the bottle.
Actually, might not be a bad idea. Might. Small individually factory-sealed liquid packages would reduce the leak risk that large bottles have due to not requiring a resealable cap. But rather than a leak risk, I'd worry about them being an outright rupture risk... foil is not particularly strong. If you have a foil pack of pop tarts rupture, no big deal, but if you have a foil pack of everclear rupture, it's going to leave some of your stuff wet and smelling like alcohol at best - at worst it'll ruin electronics, dissolve sensitive plastics, etc.
Really, when it comes to backpacking, the fewer liquids the better. Even though everclear is a rather nice and useful substance to have with. :)
Have you ever hiked long distances with a bottle of vodka? I have. It's not the vodka that's the PITA, it's the bottle.
While I'm still not too keen on this product, let's not pretend that there's no reasons for preferring a powder to liquids even at the cost of some disadvantages.
Oh hey, the reaction is endothermic: it'll generate chilled alcohol for you! Even better :)
Hmm, wonder if it needs a catalyst...
Here's a thought: anyone know a good way to extract ammonia from ethanol? Or would it degas on its own? Because if so one could use the reaction:
NH2COOC2H5 (ethyl carbamate) + H2O (water) -> CH3CH2OH (ethanol) + NH3 (ammonia) + CO2 (carbon dioxide)
If you can meet that spec then this seems to meet all requirements:
1) Ethyl carbamate is a solid crystalline powder at normal conditions. It doesn't melt until 46C.
2) While it's a "suspected carcinogen", it's already found normally in alcoholic beverages, so if there's a small amount that doesn't react for some reason, well, that's just a normal alcoholic drink. So long as it's only trace amounts, that is, like in normal alcoholic beverages.
3) Its density, 1,056 g/cm, is higher than that of ethanol, 0,789 g/cm, so you actually get 34% *more* ethanol per cubic centimeter than taking pure ethanol. And your yield is over 100% by mass too, since the mass of the water added (which hikers generally get along the way or at their campsite) is slightly heavier than the mass of the ammonia lost.
4) If your method to remove the NH4 leaves the CO2 intact then you could generate sparkling beverages too.
Better weight ratio but it's awkward to haul around. It seems to leak easier than water (made obvious by that alcohol smell it gets on stuff ;) ), and you have to haul around bulky partly-empty containers.
I've done it before, but it'd be nice to have a powder. That said, your point is spot on - you get a lot of bang for your weight-buck with concentrated liquid alcohol, not so much with this adsorbed stuff.
Yeah, I don't get this "they'll use it to make super-strong alcohol" stuff. Powdered alcohol is alcohol soaked up into a sorbent. At least in classic formations, the sorbent significantly outweighs the alcohol. If you're adding it to anything that one would classify as "liquor", you'll be maintaining or decreasing the alcohol content; it could only hike the content of things like beer and to a lesser extent wine. The same way you'd hike the contents by, you know, mixing in a stronger alcohol if it was liquid.
It's not actually a bad idea. I've taken alcohol backpacking before, but it's as he mentions, it's somewhat impractical, esp. stopping links and carrying around big containers that will average being half empty, which you can't refill with their target contents on the way like you can with water bottles. And in my experience it usually leaks sooner or later. And since it only makes sense to carry the most concentrated stuff you can buy...yeah.
Concentrated alcohol is great stuff to be with - and not just for "getting drunk in the woods". Or even the social aspect - being out in the middle of nowhere with alcohol and meeting up with other travelers can make you pretty popular ;) But it's also 7 calories per gram - only fat is higher, at 9, while carbs and proteins are 4, so it's a nice weight ratio, and it never spoils. It doubles as a disinfectant, both for first aid, and for water. And it can be burned as a stove fuel.
That said, I don't know how many of the benefits would carry over to this powdered variety. The sorbent is going to significantly reduce weight per calorie, you probably can no longer burn it as stove fuel at any dilution, etc.
Not at all, I'm sure that more than a few users have accidentally gotten a good chuckle out of that :)
You're describing a massive easter egg with your analogy (a whole room of a building). Most easter eggs are little tiny harmless things. Maybe there's the occasional easter egg that could meet your analogy (such as an embedded flight simulator or whatnot), but not many.
I didn't post a big sign stating, "hey, there's an easter egg here!". I implemented it during the implementation of the task to add the dot to the scanner. I made the dot as a pixmap, and had the frog images in the same pixmap (nobody ever checked the pixmap to see what was in it, but again, they really didn't have reason to, it was just a pixmap). The value 42 was set into a define elsewhere in the code with a misleading name. I honestly don't remember if there was any code review practice on the project (it was a decade and a half ago), but if there was, it wasn't very formal. Overall the implementation was very simple - the code always drew the pixmap at the same spot, the only difference was the X offset into the pixmap used. If I remember right, I added confusion into the pixmap X offset by deliberately confusing the pixmap X offset and the X position of where the pixmap was supposed to be drawn on the screen, and thus using that to cycle the animation as the spectrum was swept across.
Everyone knows that the value of Flavor should have been "Flav"
I don't think that counts... that's almost like a humorous comment, and who hasn't written one of those? :)
Haha, love it ;)
I once worked on a government project codenamed "Bullfrog" back when I worked at Rockwell-Collins. I won't go into too much details (we were told that it was "sensitive" but not classified), but I'll just mention that part of the project involved a radio turner that could scan through frequencies. One of my tasks was to implement the frequency sweeper, which was supposed to have a dot that would show what frequency was currently being scanned. I also as part of a different task had to implement a subwindow that could be opened or closed, which showed snapshots of the past several sweeps. The easter egg would occur if you clicked on the open/close button for the snapshot window precisely 42 times: the dot would change into a hopping frog animation ;)
Nothing huge, but nothing evil either, and something that was easy to implement and easy to sneak into the code unnoticed.
Exactly. A person can buy an old inefficient junker for $500, but if you're having to pump $1500 of gasoline into it every year, and you have to swap out the transmission, then later the timing belt, then later the engine, and on and on.... you're not exactly paying just $500. It's total cost of ownership that matters:
* Purchase price
* Insurance
* Fuel costs
* Maintenance
* Resale
Electric cars perform poorly on purchase price, miscellaneous on insurance, excellent on fuel costs, excellent on maintenance except for the pack, good on maintenance including the pack (due to the long warranty periods and reduced purchase costs a decade+ in the future), and as a general rule, vehicles with low operating costs retain value better than those with high operating costs (because when people are buying a used car, they're doing so to save money).
If you want a 300 mile battery pack, yes.
A 100 mile battery pack for a car with the same level of streamlining would be $6,5k.
For that cost, versus a gas car you get:
* A simpler - and potentially cheaper in mass production - drivetrain
* A drivetrain that's far easier to boost to very high power levels, which with a gas drivetrain costs a lot and requires a very large, heavy engine
* A drivetrain that actually gets more efficient the more powerful it gets, not less (greater max power = fatter conductors = less resistance in normal driving conditions).
* Roughly 1/3rd the fuel cost per unit distance driven, give or take depending on your local gas and electricity prices. For the average US car's 12k miles per year, and say 30mpg comparative, with an average long-term gas price of... oh, let's say $2.40 a gallon... that's saving $640 a year. Given that the packs are usually warrantied for 8-10 years, this alone pays for itself.
* A better environmental impact almost anywhere in the first world even on grid power, with in some regions / countries, dramatically better impact.
* The ability to charge at home, aka, no trips to the gas stations. And side benefits, like having your car pre-heated (or cooled) for you when you arrive, off of grid power.
* Greatly reduced maintenance due to the greatly reduced number of moving parts - and we're not just talking about oil changes or the like. For example, you'll never have to swap out a transmission because there is no transmission (apart from a direct linkage). You're not going to have to replace a timing belt because there is no timing belt. And on and on and on, there's all sorts of things that can break in a gasoline car that don't even exist in an electric car.
Air launch usually isn't so much about the (small) extra delta-V as it is the greater flexibility on launch sites. Which is why I asked as to whether you have an equatorial site. :)
I'll definitely keep my eyes out! :)
The instant you feel you have to call your debate partner "fuckface", you have lost. Just letting you know. Rei's correlary.
Most people's perception of how airships should behave from holes is wrong, and it's based on their experience with party balloons. The reason for the differences are:
* Party balloons are pressurized - the skin is stretched taught. The skin on airships are loose.
* Skin area (and thus leak rate) scales proportional to the radius squared, while the volume scales proportional to the radius cubed. Airships are many, many orders of magnitude larger than party balloons. Consequently the rate in which gas can leak out of a hope is drastically lower.
Even large holes in airships don't take them down quickly. Even a moderate sized airship can generally continue flying to its destination and then fix the damage and refill there.
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