Unfortunately, looking at these things separately, you don't really do much good.
To get CO2 out of the air, you need to tie up the carbon in heavier materials.
To stop from producing garbage, you need your heavier materials to break down into lighter materials. Bioplastics will give up their carbon in one form or another, and if it's an endothermic process, likely most of it is in the form of CO2 and methane (I'm not a biologist, maybe one can confirm?)
CO2 is an end product. You don't get energy out of it. The only way to convert it into anything else is to put energy in.
Putting energy into it by burning a fuel won't help you, because you're going to produce more CO2 through combustion than you'll store in the product of your endothermic reaction.
The only energy input to the system is the sun.
If we use more energy than the energy that hits the earth from the sun, we'll end up with more end product.
Pretty much, to best reduce the CO2 in the air, we need to let things turn back into petroleum and then leave it in the ground.
Just think about everything from an energy standpoint, and it makes a lot more sense.
If you actually look into it, it's not a "Home-built radio" any more than I'm typing this on a "Home-built computer"
The guys bought a radio, antenna, and rotator.
They bought some cables and hooked them up.
They called the ISS through the space station's amateur radio program, where they got a 10 minute slot to talk to an astronaut, just like tons of other schools.
It's not anything special, unfortunately. They weren't talking on NASA's comm channels or anything.
It's not any kind of technological first.
The sad part is that Canada's Telecommunications hall of fame is recognizing them too.
Assuming your position detection is really slow, you would be right.
The code wouldn't be all that difficult, most standard printers don't read the position off of the motor, they just read ticks off of an encoder strip. You would need to use a quadrature instead for this, in case the user makes a half pass, or stops mid stroke or something. The velocity calculation would need to be pretty quick, but fast microcontrollers are pretty cheap these days.
Agreed, There are LEDs which are just bright, plain and simple.
The classic "super bright" white 5mm LEDS do fit that Narrow beam, bright point stereotype. They don't actually make that much usable light.
Some of the newer high power leds are a different story entirely. I have a cree MC-E based flashlight. If I turn it on and stand it on my coffee table it lights the room up pretty well. Not brightly, but well enough to see. Probably around the same as a 40W bulb. (It's rated at 700 lumens. A 40W incandescent does about 500 lumens)
The colour is quite good too. Not like the old blueish spot with a yellow fringe that was common in early/conventional low power white leds.
Yep, I just wanted to emphasize that there are legit scientists hypothesizing on both sides. Not everyone's a corporate shill or a crazy eco-cultist.
I agree too that it's too early to start making laws specifically for climate change.
Any laws based on environmental reasons need to be well thought out. As an example of a huge failure: California's Volatile Organic Compound regulations don't allow electronics cleaners to contain more than 75% VOCs. So, 99% isopropyl alcohol is no-go.
Common HFC Propellants 134A and 152A are exempt.
So, in order to bring down their Isopropyl electronics cleaners to 75%VOC, manufacturers are mixing the alcohol down to 75% with a propellant and selling it as an aerosol instead.
Same amount of alcohol vapour gets into the air, but now they have to add some greenhouse gasses to make it legal.
And, as briefly mentioned in that Penn and Teller episode, there's the whole DDT thing. Mass overuse of DDT was an environmental problem, so it was banned outright.
Not a huge problem here in North America, but in many parts of the world where malaria is a serious problem, they lost one of the best defenses, and a lot of people died, and are still dying.
Environmental laws are important, but they need to be properly planned, and not hastily implemented by politicians who know nothing about it, except that it makes them look "green" and gets votes.
You're making the conclusion that "these people are full of %*!&" which is a huge generalization.
No doubt there's a lot of whacko environmental alarmists out there quoting BS pseudoscience and inventing statistics, but that doesn't mean that legit scientists can't come to the same conclusions through proper scientific methods.
If a known compulsive liar says the sky is blue, it doesn't make it any less true.
I don't think anyone knows for certain, and if there is someone out there who's done the science properly and has proof, they'll have a tough time being identified through all the BS on both sides of the argument.
My personal opinion is that "carbon footprint" is just one side of a many sided problem, and that problem is overconsumption of energy and materials.
Even if global warming does turn out to be untrue or isn't a big enough problem to worry about, energy use and pollution are issues that should be taken care of.
When you take care of them, you'll reduce carbon emissions anyways, and probably a lot more long term than buying carbon credits ever will.
Fine, if you want to donate some money to an environmental research or alternative energy organization that's awesome, but it's no alternative for being more efficient to begin with.
Carbon credits, as they are now are just a marketing tool. It allows a company to be "green" in trade for cash, instead of efficiency.
It's like hybrid cars. Hybrid cars aren't GOOD for the environment, they're just slightly less bad. It's not okay to waste energy just because you're wasting less of it.
Just because it's on TV doesn't make it true.
And just because Penn and Teller call anyone who disagrees with them 4$$holes doesn't add any credibility IMHO.
They just found someone from a credible sounding organization who says that everyone else is full of crap and there's no scientific basis. That doesn't mean he's right.
There's plenty of credible sounding "environmental" and "science" organizations that are paid by the oil companies to research this stuff. You think they're going to be perfectly scientific and objective when their paycheques are riding on it?
I think you're being a bit too pessimistic.
I think it's entirely possible that they are getting out more energy than they're putting in.
What's scary, though, is how many people are perceiving this as "creating" energy. All that it's doing is recovering a percentage of the energy that was put into creating the garbage (or energy equivalent to burning the raw materials at best). More garbage still == more wasted energy, but nobody's explaining it that way.
It certainly beats just piling up all of our trash, but we'd still be a lot better off making less garbage to begin with.
Rock Band seems to meet your criteria, assuming you're not tied up on the whole MMORPG thing. It can also teach you some real-life musical skills.
Little big planet probably mostly qualifies as well. Assuming the occasional comic punch, or jump on the head of a cartoon enemy isn't too "violent"
There's actually quite a few non violent games in general. Just not of the huge, lock you in, timesucker MMORPG type.
Except that timers could be easily omitted as a cause by the fact that there's lots of countdown timers on stuff, and they don't all blow up when they hit zero.
While a lot of correlation does not prove causation, it indicates a likely possibility. If you blew up several chunks of plutonium this way, you might assume the plutonium being compressed is the cause. If you want to prove it, you could repeat the test with a different chunk of metal in its place.
So you can nitpick the details, but if I saw the magno-gadget zap 10 patients, waking up 5 of them within an hour, while a control sample of 10 patients had 1 wake up in the same hour, I'd think it likely to be the cause, and would do some further tests to verify that it wasn't an amazing coincidence. After testing 100 people, and having 50 wake up within the first couple hours you should be able to compare either to statistical data, or a control group and clearly see that it's not just chance.
The obvious difference being that in the experimental bomb analogy, there's no chance of coincidence. Something happened without an obvious explanation, so you could reasonably theorize that jamming a chunk of plutonium together was the cause of the effect observed. Typically you don't get massive radioactive explosions spontaneously.
In the case of magnetic fields waking a guy from a coma, a simple alternative explanation is that he just happened to wake up at that time.
It certainly could have been due to the magnetic fields, but with no supporting evidence and a single sample, there's no way to know.
Of course, put a wedding ring across its terminals, and it will pretend it's a heating element and burn your finger off.
I'd prefer to say that wattage matters; if the battery won't deliver more than a dozen, you won't notice anything. If it'll deliver a few billion, at twelve volts.. it might be considered safe with precautions, but I'd be very very careful around it.
Yes, I've had a couple friends experience that. One did it with a 12v battery when working on his car. + terminal to wrench, wrench to ring, ring to body of the car. Gave himself some pretty bad burns, and had to get the ring cut off of his finger. The other was an electrician, that shorted between phases while wiring a breaker panel.
Safe with precautions, for sure. I wouldn't go near it with anything conductive. My point isn't that it couldn't be dangerous, just that it's not an electric shock hazard.
On a side note, the "normal 12V car battery" can kill you just as easily. If not easier (700+A vs 6.5A). Volts don't kill you, amps do.
If someone drops it on your head perhaps.
Seriously though. A 12V battery is pretty safe. That old saying "It's the amps that kill you" is always taken the wrong way.
Current flowing is what does the work. That's what the saying means.
Except for in cases where your current source is very small (a few milliamps for example) the rating of the battery doesn't make any difference.
A 12V battery is pretty much totally safe with respect to shocking you. Any injury they cause is secondary, either from the weight (drop on foot), burns from shorting/improper hookup of jumper cables, Acid splashing from battery overheat/bursting due to improper hookup of jumper cables/charger. Whatever.
a 300v battery, even if only rated for a couple hundred mA will give you a painful, and potentially lethal shock.
a 12v battery, even one rated for many thousand amps (or billion amps for that matter), will not have the voltage to push any significant current through you.
as others have mentioned, it's ohm's law. V=IR Making the assumption that your body's resistance is constant (not strictly correct, but close enough in this instance), and voltage is a known 12V you can calculate the current easily. The battery's amperage rating doesn't ever come into play.
Well, I agree that there is a lot more "organic" and healthier foods being made available, they are usually MUCH more expensive.
I'm not so sure it's that there's more junk food available, so much as the junk food being worse junk than it used to be.
It used to be about not eating too much sugar, or too much fat.
Now it's all about finding which foods actually have sugar, not artificial sweeteners (which some now say are more likely to make you fat than the sugar they replace), and Actual vegetable or animal fats, not chemically modified ones which are much worse for you.
The regular foods have gotten worse. Now you have to pay more not to eat chemicals.
I think the idea's not bad in concept, but there should certainly be some variance allowed with height. Someone who's 6'4 shouldn't be expected to have the same waist size as one who's 5'2.
Slashdot Mirror
To get CO2 out of the air, you need to tie up the carbon in heavier materials.
To stop from producing garbage, you need your heavier materials to break down into lighter materials. Bioplastics will give up their carbon in one form or another, and if it's an endothermic process, likely most of it is in the form of CO2 and methane (I'm not a biologist, maybe one can confirm?)
CO2 is an end product. You don't get energy out of it. The only way to convert it into anything else is to put energy in.
Putting energy into it by burning a fuel won't help you, because you're going to produce more CO2 through combustion than you'll store in the product of your endothermic reaction.
The only energy input to the system is the sun.
If we use more energy than the energy that hits the earth from the sun, we'll end up with more end product.
Pretty much, to best reduce the CO2 in the air, we need to let things turn back into petroleum and then leave it in the ground.
Just think about everything from an energy standpoint, and it makes a lot more sense.
It's their blog.
That's the problem. All the articles i've seen either say or imply they built it from scratch. "Home-Built" radio etc.
1 bad article, and everybody else who wrote one poached it for (bad) info.
They "built" the "radio station"
AKA bought stuff based on specs, and plugged it all in.
If you actually look into it, it's not a "Home-built radio" any more than I'm typing this on a "Home-built computer"
The guys bought a radio, antenna, and rotator.
They bought some cables and hooked them up.
They called the ISS through the space station's amateur radio program, where they got a 10 minute slot to talk to an astronaut, just like tons of other schools.
It's not anything special, unfortunately. They weren't talking on NASA's comm channels or anything.
It's not any kind of technological first.
The sad part is that Canada's Telecommunications hall of fame is recognizing them too.
Doesn't anyone do any fact checking?
Assuming your position detection is really slow, you would be right. The code wouldn't be all that difficult, most standard printers don't read the position off of the motor, they just read ticks off of an encoder strip. You would need to use a quadrature instead for this, in case the user makes a half pass, or stops mid stroke or something. The velocity calculation would need to be pretty quick, but fast microcontrollers are pretty cheap these days.
The classic "super bright" white 5mm LEDS do fit that Narrow beam, bright point stereotype. They don't actually make that much usable light.
Some of the newer high power leds are a different story entirely. I have a cree MC-E based flashlight. If I turn it on and stand it on my coffee table it lights the room up pretty well. Not brightly, but well enough to see. Probably around the same as a 40W bulb. (It's rated at 700 lumens. A 40W incandescent does about 500 lumens)
The colour is quite good too. Not like the old blueish spot with a yellow fringe that was common in early/conventional low power white leds.
I agree too that it's too early to start making laws specifically for climate change.
Any laws based on environmental reasons need to be well thought out. As an example of a huge failure: California's Volatile Organic Compound regulations don't allow electronics cleaners to contain more than 75% VOCs. So, 99% isopropyl alcohol is no-go.
Common HFC Propellants 134A and 152A are exempt.
So, in order to bring down their Isopropyl electronics cleaners to 75%VOC, manufacturers are mixing the alcohol down to 75% with a propellant and selling it as an aerosol instead.
Same amount of alcohol vapour gets into the air, but now they have to add some greenhouse gasses to make it legal.
http://www.mgchemicals.com/news/newsletterQ8/article101206.html
And, as briefly mentioned in that Penn and Teller episode, there's the whole DDT thing. Mass overuse of DDT was an environmental problem, so it was banned outright.
Not a huge problem here in North America, but in many parts of the world where malaria is a serious problem, they lost one of the best defenses, and a lot of people died, and are still dying.
Environmental laws are important, but they need to be properly planned, and not hastily implemented by politicians who know nothing about it, except that it makes them look "green" and gets votes.
You're making the conclusion that "these people are full of %*!&" which is a huge generalization.
No doubt there's a lot of whacko environmental alarmists out there quoting BS pseudoscience and inventing statistics, but that doesn't mean that legit scientists can't come to the same conclusions through proper scientific methods.
If a known compulsive liar says the sky is blue, it doesn't make it any less true.
I don't think anyone knows for certain, and if there is someone out there who's done the science properly and has proof, they'll have a tough time being identified through all the BS on both sides of the argument.
My personal opinion is that "carbon footprint" is just one side of a many sided problem, and that problem is overconsumption of energy and materials.
Even if global warming does turn out to be untrue or isn't a big enough problem to worry about, energy use and pollution are issues that should be taken care of.
When you take care of them, you'll reduce carbon emissions anyways, and probably a lot more long term than buying carbon credits ever will.
Carbon credits, as they are now are just a marketing tool. It allows a company to be "green" in trade for cash, instead of efficiency.
It's like hybrid cars. Hybrid cars aren't GOOD for the environment, they're just slightly less bad. It's not okay to waste energy just because you're wasting less of it.
Just because it's on TV doesn't make it true. And just because Penn and Teller call anyone who disagrees with them 4$$holes doesn't add any credibility IMHO. They just found someone from a credible sounding organization who says that everyone else is full of crap and there's no scientific basis. That doesn't mean he's right. There's plenty of credible sounding "environmental" and "science" organizations that are paid by the oil companies to research this stuff. You think they're going to be perfectly scientific and objective when their paycheques are riding on it?
I think you're being a bit too pessimistic.
I think it's entirely possible that they are getting out more energy than they're putting in.
What's scary, though, is how many people are perceiving this as "creating" energy. All that it's doing is recovering a percentage of the energy that was put into creating the garbage (or energy equivalent to burning the raw materials at best). More garbage still == more wasted energy, but nobody's explaining it that way.
It certainly beats just piling up all of our trash, but we'd still be a lot better off making less garbage to begin with.
Rock Band seems to meet your criteria, assuming you're not tied up on the whole MMORPG thing. It can also teach you some real-life musical skills. Little big planet probably mostly qualifies as well. Assuming the occasional comic punch, or jump on the head of a cartoon enemy isn't too "violent" There's actually quite a few non violent games in general. Just not of the huge, lock you in, timesucker MMORPG type.
Try /dev/random instead. /dev/urandom isn't as random.
Except that timers could be easily omitted as a cause by the fact that there's lots of countdown timers on stuff, and they don't all blow up when they hit zero. While a lot of correlation does not prove causation, it indicates a likely possibility. If you blew up several chunks of plutonium this way, you might assume the plutonium being compressed is the cause. If you want to prove it, you could repeat the test with a different chunk of metal in its place. So you can nitpick the details, but if I saw the magno-gadget zap 10 patients, waking up 5 of them within an hour, while a control sample of 10 patients had 1 wake up in the same hour, I'd think it likely to be the cause, and would do some further tests to verify that it wasn't an amazing coincidence. After testing 100 people, and having 50 wake up within the first couple hours you should be able to compare either to statistical data, or a control group and clearly see that it's not just chance.
The obvious difference being that in the experimental bomb analogy, there's no chance of coincidence. Something happened without an obvious explanation, so you could reasonably theorize that jamming a chunk of plutonium together was the cause of the effect observed. Typically you don't get massive radioactive explosions spontaneously. In the case of magnetic fields waking a guy from a coma, a simple alternative explanation is that he just happened to wake up at that time. It certainly could have been due to the magnetic fields, but with no supporting evidence and a single sample, there's no way to know.
Of course, put a wedding ring across its terminals, and it will pretend it's a heating element and burn your finger off.
I'd prefer to say that wattage matters; if the battery won't deliver more than a dozen, you won't notice anything. If it'll deliver a few billion, at twelve volts.. it might be considered safe with precautions, but I'd be very very careful around it.
Yes, I've had a couple friends experience that. One did it with a 12v battery when working on his car. + terminal to wrench, wrench to ring, ring to body of the car. Gave himself some pretty bad burns, and had to get the ring cut off of his finger. The other was an electrician, that shorted between phases while wiring a breaker panel. Safe with precautions, for sure. I wouldn't go near it with anything conductive. My point isn't that it couldn't be dangerous, just that it's not an electric shock hazard.
On a side note, the "normal 12V car battery" can kill you just as easily. If not easier (700+A vs 6.5A). Volts don't kill you, amps do.
If someone drops it on your head perhaps. Seriously though. A 12V battery is pretty safe. That old saying "It's the amps that kill you" is always taken the wrong way. Current flowing is what does the work. That's what the saying means. Except for in cases where your current source is very small (a few milliamps for example) the rating of the battery doesn't make any difference. A 12V battery is pretty much totally safe with respect to shocking you. Any injury they cause is secondary, either from the weight (drop on foot), burns from shorting/improper hookup of jumper cables, Acid splashing from battery overheat/bursting due to improper hookup of jumper cables/charger. Whatever. a 300v battery, even if only rated for a couple hundred mA will give you a painful, and potentially lethal shock. a 12v battery, even one rated for many thousand amps (or billion amps for that matter), will not have the voltage to push any significant current through you. as others have mentioned, it's ohm's law. V=IR Making the assumption that your body's resistance is constant (not strictly correct, but close enough in this instance), and voltage is a known 12V you can calculate the current easily. The battery's amperage rating doesn't ever come into play.
Well, I agree that there is a lot more "organic" and healthier foods being made available, they are usually MUCH more expensive. I'm not so sure it's that there's more junk food available, so much as the junk food being worse junk than it used to be. It used to be about not eating too much sugar, or too much fat. Now it's all about finding which foods actually have sugar, not artificial sweeteners (which some now say are more likely to make you fat than the sugar they replace), and Actual vegetable or animal fats, not chemically modified ones which are much worse for you. The regular foods have gotten worse. Now you have to pay more not to eat chemicals.
I think the idea's not bad in concept, but there should certainly be some variance allowed with height. Someone who's 6'4 shouldn't be expected to have the same waist size as one who's 5'2.