On the lab bench, such conversions are trivial. With megawatt generators and 99% efficiency, you've got the additional problem of moving 10kW of heat out of the conversion equipment on a continuous basis. And including over-heating and over-voltage protections...
The chemistry of pouring liquid hydrocarbons fuel onto a fire is fundamentally the same as that of the diesel engine ; the engineering is a little different.
aggressively prosecute officers like the one who killed a guy here (should be murder 2)
What do you mean "aggressively prosecute"? There has been a homicide. The person responsible gets prosecuted (assuming detected) to the full extent of the law, and any mitigation (e.g., "I'm a police officer") is only applied after guilt has been determined by jury trial. Or do you have special courts where certain classes of people are tried but not other people?
We used to have that. It was one of the injustices that weren't addressed by Magna Carta.
Nope, as soon as you feel your manhood threatened you pull out your penis-substitute and let rip in full-auto on anyone within several hundred metres. It's the American Dream!
The power hub would send electricity over a long-distance cable to the UK and Netherlands, and possibly later to Belgium, Germany, and Denmark.
International cooperation - nope, that's something that the British government and Brexiting majority would never accept. Gunboats will be dispatched to defend our borders from these filthy foreigners and their disgusting non-1950s stereotype ideas. And we'll man the gunboats with Dad's Army volunteers and get Gibraltar to pay for it!
As you say, it's a busy area. Having been working at sea, originally in the North Sea, for over 30 years, it's a real problem. Laying pipelines or cables, you still have to do a detailed seabed survey (sidescan sonar, to a resolution of a few centimetres, and bottom-penetrating shallow seismic to at least the base of the glacial "drift"). It's not optional - you won't get a pipe- or cable-lay vessel to run the risks of snags damaging their lifting and lowering equipment without it. You have to (not optional) explain to the client your reasoning why any seabed instability structures (e.g. "pock marks") are not being avoided. Just in Aberdeen, there are around a thousand people employed in seabed surveying - a number of whom I was at university with.
Wrecks - if they turn up on your planned route, then you can choose to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of the client's money on investigating them, or go around the problem at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars. for additional survey kilometreage. That's several months before you even place the order for the steel (plain pipe, vacuum-walled insulated pipe, 4-core power cable, 72 cored data cable + hydraulic lines + flow lines) or what ever it is you're surveying for this quarter. It's part of the process of deciding how long your pipe/ cable/ whatever is going to be.
We've been doing this for decades. The palaeontologists have a place in the system. It's not a big place, and most of the time they don't have the funding to actually excavate anything, because barge time is so expensive. So, trenched aside it will be. With sea-level rise, it's not as if we're going to see it at surface any millennium soon.
The UK has lots of space to put wind turbines in windy places.
Well, that's quite contentions. Most of the UK's windier places are in the remote highlands and peninsulas of Scotland. Where you have several other real concerns, like the energy cost of long transmission lines to market.
The old rural NIMBYs just don't want them, so the UK government (whose support base is mostly older, rural-er, NIMBYer people) has decided not to approve any wind turbine projects on land.
That's a genuine problem, I agree, but you're over-egging the pudding. Plenty of wind turbine projects are being installed on land, but not all projects that apply for construction permission get it. Nimbyism is definitely a problem, but it's not the only one. There is, for example, real resistance (sorry, couldn't resist it!) to the idea of solving England's electricity (and nimbyism) problems by sacrificing Scotland's landscapes. The Brexit insanity is providing a real boost to the independence movement, and the prospect of the "United" Kingdom schisming into two or three countries is really on the cards in the coming decade. (Personally, I'm securing my European citizenship and looking to leave the country to stew in it''s own shit.)
by aberglas:Can the turbines directly generate the DC and avoid a conversion step?
jittles : Have you never heard of a bridge rectifier?
I'd obviously differ with jittles on this, but I'd class a bridge rectifier (or indeed, any rectifier) as a conversion step. I can't think of any technology for rectification which doesn't involve an appreciable forward voltage drop, and therefore an energy cost.
I'm not even sure that by splitting the rotor into multiple coils on a commutator would help a lot. If you only brush on one coil of the commutated set, you'll get a fragment of the AC sinusoid, approximating to DC, but you'd lose the rest of the waveform and therefore some of the shaft energy supplied. If you use several segments of the commutator, you improve efficiency but ned something to prevent high-voltage segments from driving current through lower voltage segments.
How much power you lose in conversion at the power plant is a balance you play off against how much power you lose in the distribution system. Electrical systems are not as simple as anyone would like them to be. Of necessity.
Is "Dutch Oven" an American term? I've never heard any of my many Dutch colleagues use it, nor in the 4 months I spent living and working in the Netherlands, nor anywhere else in Europe.
It sounds like some sort of sexual prevresion which I'm not familiar with, and that always attracts attention.
hence the saying "a pint's a pound the world 'round".
I've heard this one from Americans before. It's true IF AND ONLY IF "the word `round" EQUALS "America".
In Britain, the back of our log tables, approved by the exam boards for use in exams, included definitions of various units which you might need to know in exams. From that, I memorised that a gallon is the volume of ten pounds of fresh water at NTP (also defined, in centigrade!), and that there are eight pints per gallon. Therefore, a pint of fresh water weighs 1.25 lb (at the Earth's surface, of course).
"a pint's a pound" is a great example of why "customary" units need strangling in this generation.
Fine. So Tag have divers in their design teams. Not every company selling "dive watches", and certainly not many people in watch shops, do have.
A dive buddy years ago (I took him on his first handful of dives, and loaned him my gags for his first few cave dives) was brought a fancy watch by his parents - a Sekoia or Sekonda or something - spending the thick part of a month's income on the dangerous (bi-directional bezel) bauble. I was using a watch that had cost me about a day's income. My buddy and I went for a first-dive-after-the-winter when the water temperature got into double-digits, including playing "tag" underwater ; kelp strand under the wrist band ; "ping" ; "bye-bye, expensive bauble" ; much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then another 3 days diving over following weekends, trying to finger-tip search the area. No joy. Since my buddy was needing his parents to stump up cash to help him and his girlfriend buy an apartment together, he decided to bite the bullet, buy a replacement of the same model watch, and keep his mouth shut.
After that, he also got a cheap-but-effective watch to actually dive with.
Different details, same logic : my wife brought me a diving watch some birthdays ago. Electronic, works fine, nicely geeky, fully waterproof, but too fiddly to actually use underwater. So I'm still using my far-cheaper old watch for diving, and a dive computer for secondary (plus decompression tables written on the back-side of my wrist-slate). If I break the old watch, very minor wailing and gnashing of teeth, followed by a short search for a replacement. Replacing the wife's present is not possible.
Most businesses that deal with cash have to pay their bank a cash processing fee,
Which is why offering cashback at the counter is becoming so popular. The business already has the infrastructure for processing card payments, and they get to reduce their banking costs. Win-win.
Downside : streetside ATMs are starting to suffer. Slowly decreasing numbers of them.
and to save the most powerful platform in human history.
If that's what Zuckerwhateverhisnameis actually believes, then a couple of Ayatollahs, several Muftis, a Bodhisatva or two, the Bishop of Rome and the head of the Orthodox church are waiting in a dark alley for him with baseball bats. After a re-education at their hands (and slippers, and censers), they'll throw his pain-wracked self into the Pit of Protestants, where numbers and insecurity will really make him seriously at-risk.
Many people want to hide themselves in a crowd - which is what platforms are for. It's also why they're becoming increasingly eroded, as the cult of the Overinflated Ego becomes the working paradigm for more and more people. Facebook may well be a major player to the overinflation of egos, but it's far from entering an empty playing field, and the competition have centuries more practice at practical human psychology.
That said, I often like to convert volumetric measurements like cups
If "cups" are a volumetric measure, then they're the weirdest volumetric measure out there because they have no defined volume. If I've understood this correctly (and I'll excuse myself by saying that I have had no training in cooking at all, though I did do a 3 month course in the chemistry of food and cooking), as long as you use the same cup to measure your eggs, flour, sugar, diced armadillo, whatever, then you're going to get the same proportions (volumetrically, if not by mass), but the volume of the cup is never defined. So you just use any cup you happen to have to hand, and wash and dry it between every measurement, tripling the length of time you need to gather ingredients for a recipe.
I was quite ambivalent about "customary units" until I had to try to understand that shit during the chemistry course. That was what convinced me that customary units should always be deprecated in favour of their SI equivalents, and should never be used in front of people with a longer life expectancy than yours. As Roy Batty put it, "Wake up! Time to die!"
This is indeed one of the strategies they are following. The export is temporary, under the heading of "technical consultant to X Project", not under "sent to Africa to get fucked and keep out of causing trouble at home", but the problem is being temporarily exported nonetheless.
By the time the men come back after spending their 20s in a basic barracks in a foreign country with a half-day off per fortnight and not speaking the local language, they're thirty-something and much less likely to cause trouble at home. Plus, the Mother Country has a huge amount of influence in a resource-rich country and the roads/ railways/ ports needed to export those resources.
It's an old strategy. In Europe we used to call it "Empire Building", and later "colonisation". Outside the Philipenes, Banana-vile, Puerto Rico and Hawaii, I'm not sure Americans have mastered it. Certainly, the Chinese are beating the Americans at this game hands-down for the last couple of decades.
If someone can work that out to hogsheads per fathom, I'd appreciate it.
42.
I dunno, I converted to Islam to marry my wife,
You're in deep trouble. Not only have you passed a non-return valve in your legal status, but you've also, by your statement that " I'm probably less religious now that I was when I was technically Christian," laid yourself open to charges of apostasy and thereby capital charges in around a dozen countries in the world. Be very careful about your travel arrangements, including possible diversion routes (I nearly got re-routed through a lethal country a few years ago when my scheduled plane got struck by lightning and had to do an emergency landing in a 4th country. First option out would have put me with a 6-hour stop over in a lethal country. I took the option of an extra 18 hours in the departure lounge and a direct flight to Europe.)
By making a statement like that in a public forum, you've provided an excuse for lunatic co-religionist who wants to kill you for undermining his (almost always) faith in his interpretation of your shared religion. That includes in your home country.
Exactly how do you propose to provide protective gear to cosmic rays? The higher you are from the earth's mean sea level the greater your exposure to cosmic rays.
PPE isn't the only way of managing exposure.
TFS (I didn't RTFA, because I'm already reading up on related matters, to a far higher level than businessinsider's target audience would pay) talks about the altitude effect - which is real enough. But pretty much as important is the latitude effect : the closer you are to the magnetic poles, the higher your radiation dose.
One way of managing exposure, if PPE is not a feasible option, is by rostering. If you roster pilot X to spend one week of each month on high-altitude flights over the poles (London - Tokyo, for example) and the other three weeks of the month on low altitude (short-haul) flights (e.g. London - Schipol), then you can reduce the average dose that X receives to around 1/3 of what she would receive working the polar route all the time.
Of course pilots hate it. They mostly get higher pay scales for long haul flights. And they're also used to having their flying hours dictated by regulation, so this is well within what they have to put up with. The opinions of the management don't matter.
If you are diving, you already have a much more functional "watch" on your wrist (or hanging close by).
No. I dive with my Tag. It was kind of the point of those spinning bezels.
I can't say I've ever seen (or rather, "observed") a Tag Heuer watch. But anything that is to be considered as a dive watch should have a bezel which will only spin one way (towards increased elapsed dive time). Cheap and shitty dangerous imitation "dive watches" with bezels which rotate in both directions are cheap, shitty and dangerous. If they're brought for you by a well-meaning but ignorant friend or relative, glue a thorn on the inside of the strap, to remind you to remove them as soon as possible when you've finished with sparing their feelings. Certainly, don't let them get wet while attached to yourself.
Potentially useful for killing unwanted spouses or relatives though. Or giving them finance-destroying brain damage.
The iWatch? "Update (09/12/17): The Apple Watch Series 3 is listed as "swimproof." The fine print on apple.com notes that [blah]"
Either someone in apple.com doesn't believe their own specifications (perfectly plausible to me - not a fanboi), or they don't believe in Apple's ability to adhere to non-Apple specifications.
Their waterproofing would probably be improved by being encased in 10kg of under-wetted concrete. Probably improve the appearence too.
Search for Casio watches and they all look classy with silver or gold metal chrome.
I can't say that I've looked - or needed to look - for something like a decade. But the Casio GW-056E on my wrist has a plastic strap - the third in it's lifetime.
and the batteries are designed to last 10 years.
Said watch has been on my wrist for about 9 years now (birthday present - only comes off when scuba diving, because its too fiddly to use with wetsuit gloves on) without change of batter, and should last another 30 or 40 years. There's enough solar cells on the margin of the watch face to keep it powered up, except in a long stretch of winter weather with me wearing long sleeves.
Now, since we can only generate antimatter a few atoms at a time - tops
We don't generate antimatter a few atoms at a time, we generate it a few sub-atomic particles at a time. Which are relatively easy to handle since they have electrical charges.
Then you react (say) anti-protons and anti-electrons to create an atom of anti-hydrogen. Which is great - one step forward. And terrible - you throw away your main "handle" for controlling the movement of the newly minted atoms, which are now electrically neutral. Trillions (qunitillions? quintillions of trillions??) of anti-particles have been generated deliberately, but the number of anti-atoms generated and controlled is down in the billions.
It's not impossible. But it is really fucking difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
The chemistry of pouring liquid hydrocarbons fuel onto a fire is fundamentally the same as that of the diesel engine ; the engineering is a little different.
The only acceptable non-shooting stance being dead on the floor?
What do you mean "aggressively prosecute"? There has been a homicide. The person responsible gets prosecuted (assuming detected) to the full extent of the law, and any mitigation (e.g., "I'm a police officer") is only applied after guilt has been determined by jury trial. Or do you have special courts where certain classes of people are tried but not other people?
We used to have that. It was one of the injustices that weren't addressed by Magna Carta.
One fewer hostage to worry about. Simpler situation now. Promotion for that officer.
Nope, as soon as you feel your manhood threatened you pull out your penis-substitute and let rip in full-auto on anyone within several hundred metres. It's the American Dream!
International cooperation - nope, that's something that the British government and Brexiting majority would never accept. Gunboats will be dispatched to defend our borders from these filthy foreigners and their disgusting non-1950s stereotype ideas. And we'll man the gunboats with Dad's Army volunteers and get Gibraltar to pay for it!
(sgd) Swivel-Eyed Loon
Wrecks - if they turn up on your planned route, then you can choose to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of the client's money on investigating them, or go around the problem at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars. for additional survey kilometreage. That's several months before you even place the order for the steel (plain pipe, vacuum-walled insulated pipe, 4-core power cable, 72 cored data cable + hydraulic lines + flow lines) or what ever it is you're surveying for this quarter. It's part of the process of deciding how long your pipe/ cable/ whatever is going to be.
We've been doing this for decades. The palaeontologists have a place in the system. It's not a big place, and most of the time they don't have the funding to actually excavate anything, because barge time is so expensive. So, trenched aside it will be. With sea-level rise, it's not as if we're going to see it at surface any millennium soon.
Well, that's quite contentions. Most of the UK's windier places are in the remote highlands and peninsulas of Scotland. Where you have several other real concerns, like the energy cost of long transmission lines to market.
That's a genuine problem, I agree, but you're over-egging the pudding. Plenty of wind turbine projects are being installed on land, but not all projects that apply for construction permission get it. Nimbyism is definitely a problem, but it's not the only one. There is, for example, real resistance (sorry, couldn't resist it!) to the idea of solving England's electricity (and nimbyism) problems by sacrificing Scotland's landscapes. The Brexit insanity is providing a real boost to the independence movement, and the prospect of the "United" Kingdom schisming into two or three countries is really on the cards in the coming decade. (Personally, I'm securing my European citizenship and looking to leave the country to stew in it''s own shit.)
I'd obviously differ with jittles on this, but I'd class a bridge rectifier (or indeed, any rectifier) as a conversion step. I can't think of any technology for rectification which doesn't involve an appreciable forward voltage drop, and therefore an energy cost.
I'm not even sure that by splitting the rotor into multiple coils on a commutator would help a lot. If you only brush on one coil of the commutated set, you'll get a fragment of the AC sinusoid, approximating to DC, but you'd lose the rest of the waveform and therefore some of the shaft energy supplied. If you use several segments of the commutator, you improve efficiency but ned something to prevent high-voltage segments from driving current through lower voltage segments.
How much power you lose in conversion at the power plant is a balance you play off against how much power you lose in the distribution system. Electrical systems are not as simple as anyone would like them to be. Of necessity.
It sounds like some sort of sexual prevresion which I'm not familiar with, and that always attracts attention.
But make sure you cull the population at the yearling age group - before the ones that don't understand traffic get a chance to breed.
I've heard this one from Americans before. It's true IF AND ONLY IF "the word `round" EQUALS "America".
In Britain, the back of our log tables, approved by the exam boards for use in exams, included definitions of various units which you might need to know in exams. From that, I memorised that a gallon is the volume of ten pounds of fresh water at NTP (also defined, in centigrade!), and that there are eight pints per gallon. Therefore, a pint of fresh water weighs 1.25 lb (at the Earth's surface, of course).
"a pint's a pound" is a great example of why "customary" units need strangling in this generation.
A dive buddy years ago (I took him on his first handful of dives, and loaned him my gags for his first few cave dives) was brought a fancy watch by his parents - a Sekoia or Sekonda or something - spending the thick part of a month's income on the dangerous (bi-directional bezel) bauble. I was using a watch that had cost me about a day's income. My buddy and I went for a first-dive-after-the-winter when the water temperature got into double-digits, including playing "tag" underwater ; kelp strand under the wrist band ; "ping" ; "bye-bye, expensive bauble" ; much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then another 3 days diving over following weekends, trying to finger-tip search the area. No joy. Since my buddy was needing his parents to stump up cash to help him and his girlfriend buy an apartment together, he decided to bite the bullet, buy a replacement of the same model watch, and keep his mouth shut.
After that, he also got a cheap-but-effective watch to actually dive with.
Different details, same logic : my wife brought me a diving watch some birthdays ago. Electronic, works fine, nicely geeky, fully waterproof, but too fiddly to actually use underwater. So I'm still using my far-cheaper old watch for diving, and a dive computer for secondary (plus decompression tables written on the back-side of my wrist-slate). If I break the old watch, very minor wailing and gnashing of teeth, followed by a short search for a replacement. Replacing the wife's present is not possible.
Which is why offering cashback at the counter is becoming so popular. The business already has the infrastructure for processing card payments, and they get to reduce their banking costs. Win-win.
Downside : streetside ATMs are starting to suffer. Slowly decreasing numbers of them.
If that's what Zuckerwhateverhisnameis actually believes, then a couple of Ayatollahs, several Muftis, a Bodhisatva or two, the Bishop of Rome and the head of the Orthodox church are waiting in a dark alley for him with baseball bats. After a re-education at their hands (and slippers, and censers), they'll throw his pain-wracked self into the Pit of Protestants, where numbers and insecurity will really make him seriously at-risk.
Many people want to hide themselves in a crowd - which is what platforms are for. It's also why they're becoming increasingly eroded, as the cult of the Overinflated Ego becomes the working paradigm for more and more people. Facebook may well be a major player to the overinflation of egos, but it's far from entering an empty playing field, and the competition have centuries more practice at practical human psychology.
If "cups" are a volumetric measure, then they're the weirdest volumetric measure out there because they have no defined volume. If I've understood this correctly (and I'll excuse myself by saying that I have had no training in cooking at all, though I did do a 3 month course in the chemistry of food and cooking), as long as you use the same cup to measure your eggs, flour, sugar, diced armadillo, whatever, then you're going to get the same proportions (volumetrically, if not by mass), but the volume of the cup is never defined. So you just use any cup you happen to have to hand, and wash and dry it between every measurement, tripling the length of time you need to gather ingredients for a recipe.
I was quite ambivalent about "customary units" until I had to try to understand that shit during the chemistry course. That was what convinced me that customary units should always be deprecated in favour of their SI equivalents, and should never be used in front of people with a longer life expectancy than yours. As Roy Batty put it, "Wake up! Time to die!"
By the time the men come back after spending their 20s in a basic barracks in a foreign country with a half-day off per fortnight and not speaking the local language, they're thirty-something and much less likely to cause trouble at home. Plus, the Mother Country has a huge amount of influence in a resource-rich country and the roads/ railways/ ports needed to export those resources.
It's an old strategy. In Europe we used to call it "Empire Building", and later "colonisation". Outside the Philipenes, Banana-vile, Puerto Rico and Hawaii, I'm not sure Americans have mastered it. Certainly, the Chinese are beating the Americans at this game hands-down for the last couple of decades.
42.
You're in deep trouble. Not only have you passed a non-return valve in your legal status, but you've also, by your statement that " I'm probably less religious now that I was when I was technically Christian," laid yourself open to charges of apostasy and thereby capital charges in around a dozen countries in the world. Be very careful about your travel arrangements, including possible diversion routes (I nearly got re-routed through a lethal country a few years ago when my scheduled plane got struck by lightning and had to do an emergency landing in a 4th country. First option out would have put me with a 6-hour stop over in a lethal country. I took the option of an extra 18 hours in the departure lounge and a direct flight to Europe.)
By making a statement like that in a public forum, you've provided an excuse for lunatic co-religionist who wants to kill you for undermining his (almost always) faith in his interpretation of your shared religion. That includes in your home country.
Uber don't operate within about 150 km of home. The nearest emergency room is about 2.5km away. Thoroughly useless.
PPE isn't the only way of managing exposure.
TFS (I didn't RTFA, because I'm already reading up on related matters, to a far higher level than businessinsider's target audience would pay) talks about the altitude effect - which is real enough. But pretty much as important is the latitude effect : the closer you are to the magnetic poles, the higher your radiation dose.
One way of managing exposure, if PPE is not a feasible option, is by rostering. If you roster pilot X to spend one week of each month on high-altitude flights over the poles (London - Tokyo, for example) and the other three weeks of the month on low altitude (short-haul) flights (e.g. London - Schipol), then you can reduce the average dose that X receives to around 1/3 of what she would receive working the polar route all the time.
Of course pilots hate it. They mostly get higher pay scales for long haul flights. And they're also used to having their flying hours dictated by regulation, so this is well within what they have to put up with. The opinions of the management don't matter.
I wasn't aware that Saudi Arabia and it's US minions had banned women from flying.
I can't say I've ever seen (or rather, "observed") a Tag Heuer watch. But anything that is to be considered as a dive watch should have a bezel which will only spin one way (towards increased elapsed dive time). Cheap and shitty dangerous imitation "dive watches" with bezels which rotate in both directions are cheap, shitty and dangerous. If they're brought for you by a well-meaning but ignorant friend or relative, glue a thorn on the inside of the strap, to remind you to remove them as soon as possible when you've finished with sparing their feelings. Certainly, don't let them get wet while attached to yourself.
Potentially useful for killing unwanted spouses or relatives though. Or giving them finance-destroying brain damage.
Either someone in apple.com doesn't believe their own specifications (perfectly plausible to me - not a fanboi), or they don't believe in Apple's ability to adhere to non-Apple specifications.
Their waterproofing would probably be improved by being encased in 10kg of under-wetted concrete. Probably improve the appearence too.
I can't say that I've looked - or needed to look - for something like a decade. But the Casio GW-056E on my wrist has a plastic strap - the third in it's lifetime.
Said watch has been on my wrist for about 9 years now (birthday present - only comes off when scuba diving, because its too fiddly to use with wetsuit gloves on) without change of batter, and should last another 30 or 40 years. There's enough solar cells on the margin of the watch face to keep it powered up, except in a long stretch of winter weather with me wearing long sleeves.
If that is what it sounds like to you, then I do not want you installing fibre anywhere near me and mine.
We don't generate antimatter a few atoms at a time, we generate it a few sub-atomic particles at a time. Which are relatively easy to handle since they have electrical charges.
Then you react (say) anti-protons and anti-electrons to create an atom of anti-hydrogen. Which is great - one step forward. And terrible - you throw away your main "handle" for controlling the movement of the newly minted atoms, which are now electrically neutral. Trillions (qunitillions? quintillions of trillions??) of anti-particles have been generated deliberately, but the number of anti-atoms generated and controlled is down in the billions.
It's not impossible. But it is really fucking difficult.