Everyone suggests that these could be used in toasters, fridges, etc. etc... But would you actually run cables to all of these devices?
I can just picture Old Man Stevens handing his wife a juicer for her birthday. Old Lady Stevens lets out a little sigh and grabs a crimper and a spool of Cat5.
Following in the grand tradition of "Taiko no Tatsujin" Japanese game developers are ready to flood the market with serious tests of hardware capability and user ingenuity.
The predicted hit of the gaming year is "Peanut Butter Toast". Gamers must attempt to evenly apply a series of different peanut butters onto a diverse selection of bread products. The genius of the game is apparently in the way that peanut butter boundaries are compared with the virtual toast layout. Gamers will lose points for having large wells of peanutty goodness as well as only slightly-browned toast edges.
Developers are hard at work on a sequel said to involve drinking a glass of juice. Early reports state that a GeForce 5 will be the minimum required video adapter.
There's at least one movie that I can use to thumb my nose at you. The Last Starfighter. It used a Cray X-MP to do 36000 frames.
In any case, I was trying to be a funny little shit with regards to the crap that they've produced. I wasn't trying to be technically correct. But thanks for the education.
Well, Hollywood has used supercomputers and large clusters to do effects for movies like Star Wars: Episode II, Resident Evil, and the upcoming Terminator 4.
You said that people think there's some arbitrary maximum efficiency of engines. I said that there is, for heat engines at least.
However, even taking the Carnot efficiency into consideration, "waste" heat can equally be turned into energy with a little ingenuity, and some long proven techniques (steam).
You can recover a great deal of heat, but at the cost of efficiency of your engine/system. Take the nuclear reactor, for example. You have hot steam before the turbine, and cool air above the cooling tower. When the steam passes through the cooling tower, you could quite easily rig a set of heat collection pipes which would grab heat from the steam. The problem is, this would reduce the temperature gradient between the hot steam and the cool air, since you pulled heat out of the steam. A smaller gradient means that your turbines won't spin as fast, and you won't produce as much electricity. The heat has to leave the system at some point.
If all energy degrades to heat, then some people might a little surprized to find that nuclear power plants turn atomic energy into heat, which turns water into steam, which powers generators, which creates electricity (i.e. energy->heat->energy).
Well, I didn't say that heat was useless.
Nor am I stating that you can get out more than you put in (Sidenote: Of course it depends upon the viewpoint of how you measure what you "put in". I'm sure there are those who would claim that simple uranium enriched pellets contain very little energy, however they might be a little surprized by the truth: Every atom contains a tremendous amount of energy, and a teaspoon of gasoline contains tremendous atomic energy, but not via the basic oxidization method that we use to utilize it)
Regardless of how you measure the potential energy, you aren't getting more out than you put it. When you collect heat from a fissioning atom, the atom is losing potential energy. So the pellets in the nuclear reactor aren't ever-flowing fountains of energy - they won't give off heat forever.
And here's where we disagree : A hybrid car does exactly that - When the momentum is no longer needed or wanted, it uses the momentum to generate power, rather than discharging it as waste heat via brake pads. Said generated power is then used to propel the car at a later time.
A hybrid car does not break thermodynamics, it merely uses what it has better than most cars. I agree, it's a much better idea to recover energy from the deceleration of the car than to just convert it into heat via brake pads. But it isn't a perfect recovery of energy. If you take a car with this system, drive it for a while, stop it, then start it again, you won't return to the same speed that you were cruising at.
Indeed, the complex workings of a hybrid car (that a gas engine turns a generator which then powers electric motors) not only adds extra weight to the car, but it introduces potentially even more friction and heat loss, yet magically the cars get fuel economy 30% or greater than a regular car.
There's no magic to it, just good engineering. It's a really great idea to recover some of the braking energy. There are many ways to make modern cars much more efficient, I wholly agree with that. The difference between the cars you speak of and the one mentioned in the article is a very big one: the hybrid cars recover energy that would be wasted when braking, the car in the article is trying to recover the energy that it uses to propel the car. You just can't recover any appreciable amount of energy that way without seriously reducing the efficiency of the engine/system.
And I just thought up the perfect example:) You know those little generators you can hook to your bike wheel so you can power a little flashlight while you pedal? If you only attach the generator when you are about you brake, it acts like the system in the hybrid cars, recovering energy that would otherwise have been converted to waste heat. It isn't costing you any extra effort to power that light while you're braking. BUT, if you have the generator on all the time, you have to pedal much harder to keep the wheel spinning at the same speed. It isn't exactly the same situation as the car in the article, but it's good enough for this discussion.
I appreciate what you are saying that there is no perpetual motion machine (and that such a energy reclamation device would consume more than it reclaimed if the car actually would like to currently make use of the energy), and I am not claiming that there is, however my problem is with the fact that many confuse the conservation of energy as being some sort of status quo that there cannot be a conservation of said energy, because any amount less than the status quo must represent a contravention of the laws of thermodynamics. This is proposterous.
I really don't know what you're saying here. But we agree that the car in the article is bullshit, so that's okay.
A compact flourescent lightbulb doesn't contravene the laws of thermodynamics. A spaceship floating silently and effortlessly in outer space doesn't either.
How would anyone suggest that they are breaking the laws?
My point (which was not specific to this car) was that, in essence, in outer space a car can go forever on only a short burst of energy (well, technically it will slowly slow down due to space debris, etc, but you get the point). Does this defy the laws of thermodynamics? No, of course it doesn't: Objects in motion tend to stay in motion, and it is the least energy state for them to maintain said motion (i.e. it actually takes energy to slow down).
Right. But unfortunately, we live with a gaseous atmosphere, so we have drag. We also want to go in more than one direction, so we need to change our velocity quite often. A change in velocity is an acceleration, which requires the application energy.
I was specifically replying to your earlier post, not to the article in question.
For a heat engine, there IS a maximum efficiency, namely the Carnot Efficiency.
With respect to the article, people are citing the 2nd Law for a very good reason. Assuming that this car is powered by the 12 batteries, and assuming that the batteries are in turn charged by the car while in motion, it is obvious that something is fishy. A very large amount of power is required to put the car in motion and keep it at any real speed; the car will experience the effects of drag from the air and friction from the wheels and the bearings. These forces cause a net deceleration, so power must always be applied to the motors if one wishes to maintain a constant speed.
Now, if we were to add a device which took some of the power applied to the motors and used it to recharge the batteries, the effect would be that more power must be applied to the motors to achieve the same acceleration. The presence of this charging device would therefore decrease the efficiency of the vehicle. More power would be converted to waste heat, therefore decreasing the amount of power available for moving the vehicle.
What it boils down to is that a car which recovers power by skimming it off of its own momentum will travel a shorter distance than a similar car with no recovery device. If the car mentioned in the article can travel farther than an equivalent car with no recovery device, it is breaking thermodynamics.
So, no, citing the laws of thermodynamics in this case is not grossly inappropriate.
...is running two games of Freecell at the same time, different monitors.
It gives me the feeling of being some huge Chess champion, absently milling about and conquering other players- except that I'm really bad at it and play by myself.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone suggests that these could be used in toasters, fridges, etc. etc... But would you actually run cables to all of these devices?
I can just picture Old Man Stevens handing his wife a juicer for her birthday. Old Lady Stevens lets out a little sigh and grabs a crimper and a spool of Cat5.
FIGHT THE FUTURE!
I hear some positions in Iraq will be opening up real soon...
Carleton students represent... ...Carleton University... I guess...
Woo Us.
and still maintain a full-time job with a semiconductor.
Tell us, what sort of job do you have with a dwarfish locomotive employee?
It's tired of hearing about Linux kernel releases every ten minutes.
V-K wasn't a lie detection system, it was designed to test the replicants for emotional response.
ie. their lack of it.
Read the story, watch the movie.
He'll run the country without having any idea of how it actually works, fire anyone who doesn't follow his vision, steal ideas from other countries...
By God, he might be the best president yet!
Pfff, they did this in Short Circuit way back in the 80's.
And THOSE things had lasers, fix you right, mate!
I guess my bedroom full of 486 cases and broken monitors isn't what they had in mind...
I doubt anyone would bother attending this event...
John Romero's gonna win everything anyway.
"I'm a very experienced software engineer (7+ years) with a MSEE and lots of great work experience."
You messed up. If you had gotten an MCSE you'd be set.
- DasBub >:-)
Following in the grand tradition of "Taiko no Tatsujin" Japanese game developers are ready to flood the market with serious tests of hardware capability and user ingenuity.
The predicted hit of the gaming year is "Peanut Butter Toast". Gamers must attempt to evenly apply a series of different peanut butters onto a diverse selection of bread products. The genius of the game is apparently in the way that peanut butter boundaries are compared with the virtual toast layout. Gamers will lose points for having large wells of peanutty goodness as well as only slightly-browned toast edges.
Developers are hard at work on a sequel said to involve drinking a glass of juice. Early reports state that a GeForce 5 will be the minimum required video adapter.
If it were to gain consciousness, it'd just start watching hockey, eating poutine, and wearing toques... ...but really really fast.
Man, if I had a nickel for every time I've heard THAT one. You silver-tongued magnet boys are all the same!
There's at least one movie that I can use to thumb my nose at you. The Last Starfighter. It used a Cray X-MP to do 36000 frames.
In any case, I was trying to be a funny little shit with regards to the crap that they've produced. I wasn't trying to be technically correct. But thanks for the education.
Er, 3. Terminator 3...
But we all know there'll be a T4.
SkyNet probably sends Vin Diesel back in time to beat a 27-year-old John Connor at a game of pick-up-sticks, thereby destroying his ego.
Well, Hollywood has used supercomputers and large clusters to do effects for movies like Star Wars: Episode II, Resident Evil, and the upcoming Terminator 4.
So, no, there haven't been any good uses.
...how about this:
"MAN USES OFF-THE-SHELF COMPONENTS TO TRAVEL BACK IN TIME"
Story: 34-year-old Miami resident tapes Thursday's Weakest Link for viewing on Saturday morning.
I'd mod you up if I could :)
I really wanted to go to bed earlier this... morning. But I had to speak my mind.
Thank God for NewsBin; it's kept me alive with gigs of fresh pr0n.
I never mentioned heat engines. You did.
:) You know those little generators you can hook to your bike wheel so you can power a little flashlight while you pedal? If you only attach the generator when you are about you brake, it acts like the system in the hybrid cars, recovering energy that would otherwise have been converted to waste heat. It isn't costing you any extra effort to power that light while you're braking. BUT, if you have the generator on all the time, you have to pedal much harder to keep the wheel spinning at the same speed. It isn't exactly the same situation as the car in the article, but it's good enough for this discussion.
You said that people think there's some arbitrary maximum efficiency of engines. I said that there is, for heat engines at least.
However, even taking the Carnot efficiency into consideration, "waste" heat can equally be turned into energy with a little ingenuity, and some long proven techniques (steam).
You can recover a great deal of heat, but at the cost of efficiency of your engine/system. Take the nuclear reactor, for example. You have hot steam before the turbine, and cool air above the cooling tower. When the steam passes through the cooling tower, you could quite easily rig a set of heat collection pipes which would grab heat from the steam. The problem is, this would reduce the temperature gradient between the hot steam and the cool air, since you pulled heat out of the steam. A smaller gradient means that your turbines won't spin as fast, and you won't produce as much electricity. The heat has to leave the system at some point.
If all energy degrades to heat, then some people might a little surprized to find that nuclear power plants turn atomic energy into heat, which turns water into steam, which powers generators, which creates electricity (i.e. energy->heat->energy).
Well, I didn't say that heat was useless.
Nor am I stating that you can get out more than you put in (Sidenote: Of course it depends upon the viewpoint of how you measure what you "put in". I'm sure there are those who would claim that simple uranium enriched pellets contain very little energy, however they might be a little surprized by the truth: Every atom contains a tremendous amount of energy, and a teaspoon of gasoline contains tremendous atomic energy, but not via the basic oxidization method that we use to utilize it)
Regardless of how you measure the potential energy, you aren't getting more out than you put it. When you collect heat from a fissioning atom, the atom is losing potential energy. So the pellets in the nuclear reactor aren't ever-flowing fountains of energy - they won't give off heat forever.
And here's where we disagree : A hybrid car does exactly that - When the momentum is no longer needed or wanted, it uses the momentum to generate power, rather than discharging it as waste heat via brake pads. Said generated power is then used to propel the car at a later time.
A hybrid car does not break thermodynamics, it merely uses what it has better than most cars. I agree, it's a much better idea to recover energy from the deceleration of the car than to just convert it into heat via brake pads. But it isn't a perfect recovery of energy. If you take a car with this system, drive it for a while, stop it, then start it again, you won't return to the same speed that you were cruising at.
Indeed, the complex workings of a hybrid car (that a gas engine turns a generator which then powers electric motors) not only adds extra weight to the car, but it introduces potentially even more friction and heat loss, yet magically the cars get fuel economy 30% or greater than a regular car.
There's no magic to it, just good engineering. It's a really great idea to recover some of the braking energy. There are many ways to make modern cars much more efficient, I wholly agree with that. The difference between the cars you speak of and the one mentioned in the article is a very big one: the hybrid cars recover energy that would be wasted when braking, the car in the article is trying to recover the energy that it uses to propel the car. You just can't recover any appreciable amount of energy that way without seriously reducing the efficiency of the engine/system.
And I just thought up the perfect example
I appreciate what you are saying that there is no perpetual motion machine (and that such a energy reclamation device would consume more than it reclaimed if the car actually would like to currently make use of the energy), and I am not claiming that there is, however my problem is with the fact that many confuse the conservation of energy as being some sort of status quo that there cannot be a conservation of said energy, because any amount less than the status quo must represent a contravention of the laws of thermodynamics. This is proposterous.
I really don't know what you're saying here. But we agree that the car in the article is bullshit, so that's okay.
A compact flourescent lightbulb doesn't contravene the laws of thermodynamics. A spaceship floating silently and effortlessly in outer space doesn't either.
How would anyone suggest that they are breaking the laws?
My point (which was not specific to this car) was that, in essence, in outer space a car can go forever on only a short burst of energy (well, technically it will slowly slow down due to space debris, etc, but you get the point). Does this defy the laws of thermodynamics? No, of course it doesn't: Objects in motion tend to stay in motion, and it is the least energy state for them to maintain said motion (i.e. it actually takes energy to slow down).
Right. But unfortunately, we live with a gaseous atmosphere, so we have drag. We also want to go in more than one direction, so we need to change our velocity quite often. A change in velocity is an acceleration, which requires the application energy.
I was specifically replying to your earlier post, not to the article in question.
For a heat engine, there IS a maximum efficiency, namely the Carnot Efficiency.
With respect to the article, people are citing the 2nd Law for a very good reason. Assuming that this car is powered by the 12 batteries, and assuming that the batteries are in turn charged by the car while in motion, it is obvious that something is fishy. A very large amount of power is required to put the car in motion and keep it at any real speed; the car will experience the effects of drag from the air and friction from the wheels and the bearings. These forces cause a net deceleration, so power must always be applied to the motors if one wishes to maintain a constant speed.
Now, if we were to add a device which took some of the power applied to the motors and used it to recharge the batteries, the effect would be that more power must be applied to the motors to achieve the same acceleration. The presence of this charging device would therefore decrease the efficiency of the vehicle. More power would be converted to waste heat, therefore decreasing the amount of power available for moving the vehicle.
What it boils down to is that a car which recovers power by skimming it off of its own momentum will travel a shorter distance than a similar car with no recovery device. If the car mentioned in the article can travel farther than an equivalent car with no recovery device, it is breaking thermodynamics.
So, no, citing the laws of thermodynamics in this case is not grossly inappropriate.
Have you ever heard of Carnot Efficiency?
Get educated.
But what if we don't want any milt?
You linux freaks...
For the Copy & Paste impaired:
Knoppix, a feature-rich GNU/Linux distro that boots from and lives on a CD.
...is running two games of Freecell at the same time, different monitors.
It gives me the feeling of being some huge Chess champion, absently milling about and conquering other players- except that I'm really bad at it and play by myself.