Cool.. I thought the numbers would work out to something like that. I'm just a mining engineer, so the exact power conversion is beyond my calculation ability.
But if you want some coal to add to your engine... I can dig you some. Last I heard, Alberta had 100 yrs of reserves for Canada's use just using today's technology.
Coal makes up most of the USA's electric generating capacity. If you want a hydrogen powered car that uses "electricity cracked water", then what you have is (largely) a coal powered car.
However, if you use hydrogen from "steam cracking" of natural gas (CH3), then you have a natural gas powered car.
I'm aware of two economic methods of generating H2. The least economic is from cracking water using electricity (the topic of this article). The most economic is by cracking natural gas - this is the method used by everybody I know of in the chemical industry.
Natural gas, mostly methane (CH3) is reacted with steam (H2O) such that CH3 + 2H2O = CO2 + 3.5H2
So, when somebody says he wants a hydrogen powered vehicle, what he really means is he wants a natural gas powered vehicle.
Not all diamonds are expensive. Only the 'gem' quality ones will set you back the price of a water-cooled Athlon system. Gems constitute roughly 10% of a diamond orebody; the rest are classified as 'industrial' diamonds and sold much cheaper to people like Boart-Longear for use in mining drills.
at which a Bose-Einstein-type condensate of electron pairs forms.
This is the dead give-away that something is happening that the author can't explain. Bose-Einstein condensates are a form of matter that only exists around absolute-zero. The fact the author is using it to explain something in a common, room temperature diamond means he doesn't have a clue!
Will this technology ever be useful? Beats me, but scientists need to be able to explain it better than this.
Uh, do ever bother to explain why not for doing addresses and timekeeping? Palms have done an admirable job of that for me for 6 years now
No problem, I'm glad you use it for that. My work doesn't require diligent timekeeping and my addresses are sitting in a stack of business cards (in dead tree format).
Most people automatically assume that Palms are ONLY useful for timekeeping. The Tungsten does much more and that was the point of my article.
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Re:SonyEricsson P800 or Palm Tungsten W?
on
Palm PDA Roundup
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I use the Palm T-T and can say I'm amazed at the battery life. I can listen to 3 hours of OGG music files, read 3 online newpapers and still have 50% of the battery life remaining. Battery isn't replaceable so you have charge the one that's onboard.
The keyboard wouldn't do it for me; I use little graffi typing and am usually reading or listening to downloaded content.
Check out my journal entry on my Tungsten. Love the little guy, but not for doing addresses and timekeeping. I read newspapers, listen to OGG files and flip through databases at work.
The reason the gold price is skyrocketing is that people don't trust the government to keep their paws off the printing presses. You can't print gold, therefore the value of it is assured in spite of how much paper is spewed out by the Federal Reserve (or Exchequer, ECB, etc).
Yes, it is a sad event when people die. All forms of transport involve risk but space flight is very spectacular when it goes wrong. Seven people died in the shuttle and the entire world knows about it. Seven people died the same day in an avalanche in western Canada that swept over a group of teenage skiers from south of Calgary. A crowded passenger train collided with a freight train in northwestern Zimbabwe... 42 people were killed and another 60 injured. Transportation of any form involves risk and people will continue to die in train, car, airplane, and spacecraft mishaps. Society will not stop moving people about in spite of the risk, therefore it makes sense to take all reasonable precautions and then "just do it". The question the American taxpayers need to ask is are shuttles the best way of moving people and cargo to orbit?
The shuttles are 1970's technology. My palm pilot has more memory than the shuttle's main computers (they were designed about 5 years before the Apple//+, remember it?). Computers are easy to upgrade, but what about the structure of the vehicle? The airframes of the shuttles undergo much harsher treatment than your typical military jet... airframe fatigue caused Canada has retired 25% of the CF-18s they bought in the early 1980's. Columbia was planned for retirement sometime after 2010 making it a rather geriatric craft.
Aside: Canada can be proud that our Sea King helicopters may still be operating in 2010 and thus continue to hold the 'old age award' for military aircraft. There is still no sign that the federal government is going to award the replacement contract for these choppers.
The US shuttles are old and still serviceable but they are risky to run. The old Soviet method of launching 'Soyuz' module is arguably more expensive, but you don't worry about fatigue (each module is used once and discarded). The Soyuz sit on top of an industrial launch vehicle (the Proton rocket) that has one of the best launch records in the world. The Protons are 1960s design, but each is, again, built brand new for each launch. The vehicles wear out but the design doesn't. Nasa abandoned the disposable launcher concept when they moved into shuttles and now the US space program is completely dependent upon the shuttles for moving humans back and forth from space. Nasa will likely ground the shuttle fleet until the investigations are done, so the Russians and the Soyuz vehicles are the only passage back and forth to the ISS. Now ask the question: who has the better design? The Chinese are in the process of building a manned space program -- their manned module looks more like a Soyuz capsule than anything in the US inventory.
So why is the loss of a US space shuttle important? Because space flight is vital to the survival of our species. Humans are vulnerable to extinction so long as we are bottled up on this one planet. Any of a number of events can kill us off: a large asteroid impact, instability in our Sun, or local cosmic radiation bursts. Items one and two would not spell the end of our species if humans had a sustainable society operating, for example, in the asteroid belt. The shuttle has focused people's attention on the dangers of space flight and may result in even more conservative designs in US space vehicles to mitigate the danger. The cost of this diminished return for safety will be delay and fewer missions flown. Fewer missions means it will take longer to achieve the interplanetary 'sustainable society' that will protect humanity from disaster.
And that would be the biggest disaster of all. Humans need to break free of the Earth and our species is at risk until we do. Individual people will be at risk during the journey. People will continue to die in space the same as they die on motorways and in railroad mishaps. Don't think for a moment that the journey into space is not worth the risk. It is the only way to ensure our survival.
Yes, the folks at TD Canada Trust run OS/2 on their desk top terminals. And before you make fun of them running 'old' technology; consider they use something like a VT100 terminal program to connect to a mainframe.
Would you trust your money to a bank that doesn't run Windows?
Anything you wanna send to space has to be lifted into orbit; the 'gravity well'. That means anything that has mass, like $100/tonne structural steel, needs to be lifted at an outrageous cost ($1000's per kg).
How to mitigate? Well, one way might be to build space structures without structures by planting them on top of something. What kind of something? How about an asteroid; send a robot solar sail to the Asteroid belt to fetch a small one (250m is good enough) then jockey it into orbit from above. Then you can just lift stuff like solar panels and radio transmitters from Earth and spread them out over the rock. Less structural bits == more electronic bits with flashing lights.
Don't underestimate the Soviet/Russian ability to develop really great technologies. The ISS is the NINTH space station they have worked on. They likely learned a thing or two during this period.
And consider the other countries getting caught in the crossfire: the Canadians contributed a cool robot arm, the ESA is putting up a whole module . The really sucky part is other countries that took part in good faith are gonna lose their research time because the station won't be operating at peak performance.
*> I'm not saying, btw, that this is a negative intention on the part of these countries. It's just that the US is self-sufficient in most things (food, etc) so we have a lot to sell, but not a whole lot to buy.
Umm, the USA has a huge trade imbalance where it imports more than it exports. The 2001 deficit was $346.3 billion
So, YES, the US does have a whole lot to buy, and usually from countries that don't inflict a minimum wage on their employers.
Regarding India; consider that the country has a bigger middle class (~100M people) than Canada does (~35M).
Opera (win 6.0x) works but won't remember settings between sessions. I have to keep typing in my account numbers because the 'onFocus()' method of the checkbox that remembers your account immediately calls 'blur()' and unfocuses the checkbox and prevents the cookies getting set.
I'm a mining consultant and have worked around Arsenic containing effuents in the past. Typical way to 'treat' arsenic is to fix it into a stable, non water soluble form. We typically use ferric sulphate to treat effuents containing arsenic, resulting in a 'reasonably' stable arsenic ferrosulpate sludge. This you can dump soil on and plant trees as the arsenic is not likely to spontaneously jump out of the solid into solution.
Another more brute force way of doing the same thing is using a high-pressure autoclave to achieve the same result. Not naming names, but there is a mine located inside the city limits of a Canadian provincial/territorial capital that uses an autoclave the fix arsenic from both a solid trioxide form and a mineral arsenopyrite form. The device works so well that the federal gov't has considered asking this mine to assist cleanup of a neighbouring arsenic contaminated site.
The use of bioreator tanks for sulphide leaching is practised in Africa. I don't think they accept arsenic in the plant feeds, but it is only a matter of time before they find the right thermophile bugs to fix arsenic, then there will be another industrial route for getting the stuff into the tailings pond where it belongs!
I was at an emerency preparedness presentation in Edmonton today. Seems that the cell phone system during the Pine Lake tornado was crashed by a bunch of media reporters. I suspect they are the real target of this jamming.
During Pine Lake, "individuals" decided that they needed to use the 12 available Cell channels in the remote town to do Live reports back to the Big Cities... so they grabbed the cell frequencies and NEVER HUNG UP! These press people are not terribly popular when they hogged resources that ambulance and SAR people might also want to use!
Fortunately there are a lot of HAM operators in Alberta and they were able to provide radio relays to the SAR people and bypass the phone service.
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Re:Yeah, we think highly of foreigners here.
on
Greenbacks No More
·
· Score: 1
Hindu, actually.
The Arabs learned 'our' number system from the Hindus and then taught the Europeans.
Slashdot Mirror
Cool.. I thought the numbers would work out to something like that. I'm just a mining engineer, so the exact power conversion is beyond my calculation ability.
But if you want some coal to add to your engine... I can dig you some. Last I heard, Alberta had 100 yrs of reserves for Canada's use just using today's technology.
-AD
Yes, you are correct. I was operating from memory to get on the board quick.
Thanks for getting the right formulae!
-AD
Natural gas will always be available.
You herd of Cows?
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Coal makes up most of the USA's electric generating capacity. If you want a hydrogen powered car that uses "electricity cracked water", then what you have is (largely) a coal powered car.
However, if you use hydrogen from "steam cracking" of natural gas (CH3), then you have a natural gas powered car.
Nobody said the hydrogen was free!
-AD
I'm aware of two economic methods of generating H2. The least economic is from cracking water using electricity (the topic of this article). The most economic is by cracking natural gas - this is the method used by everybody I know of in the chemical industry.
Natural gas, mostly methane (CH3) is reacted with steam (H2O) such that CH3 + 2H2O = CO2 + 3.5H2
So, when somebody says he wants a hydrogen powered vehicle, what he really means is he wants a natural gas powered vehicle.
-AD
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Here is a sample of a diamond orebody valuation study from one of the Canadian companies mining diamonds in the Arctic.
-AD
PS, yes, I'm a mining engineer.
This is the dead give-away that something is happening that the author can't explain. Bose-Einstein condensates are a form of matter that only exists around absolute-zero. The fact the author is using it to explain something in a common, room temperature diamond means he doesn't have a clue!
Will this technology ever be useful? Beats me, but scientists need to be able to explain it better than this.
-AD
No problem, I'm glad you use it for that. My work doesn't require diligent timekeeping and my addresses are sitting in a stack of business cards (in dead tree format).
Most people automatically assume that Palms are ONLY useful for timekeeping. The Tungsten does much more and that was the point of my article.
-AD
I use the Palm T-T and can say I'm amazed at the battery life. I can listen to 3 hours of OGG music files, read 3 online newpapers and still have 50% of the battery life remaining. Battery isn't replaceable so you have charge the one that's onboard.
The keyboard wouldn't do it for me; I use little graffi typing and am usually reading or listening to downloaded content.
-AD
-AD
c) The government has a monopoly on money
The reason the gold price is skyrocketing is that people don't trust the government to keep their paws off the printing presses. You can't print gold, therefore the value of it is assured in spite of how much paper is spewed out by the Federal Reserve (or Exchequer, ECB, etc).
-AD
Yes, it is a sad event when people die. All forms of transport
//+, remember it?). Computers
involve risk but space flight is very spectacular when it goes
wrong. Seven people died in the shuttle and the entire world
knows about it. Seven people died the same day in an avalanche
in western Canada that swept over a group of teenage skiers from
south of Calgary. A crowded passenger train collided with a
freight train in northwestern Zimbabwe... 42 people were killed
and another 60 injured. Transportation of any form involves
risk and people will continue to die in train, car, airplane,
and spacecraft mishaps. Society will not stop moving people
about in spite of the risk, therefore it makes sense to take all
reasonable precautions and then "just do it". The question the
American taxpayers need to ask is are shuttles the best way of
moving people and cargo to orbit?
The shuttles are 1970's technology. My palm pilot has more
memory than the shuttle's main computers (they were designed
about 5 years before the Apple
are easy to upgrade, but what about the structure of the
vehicle? The airframes of the shuttles undergo much harsher
treatment than your typical military jet... airframe fatigue
caused Canada has retired 25% of the CF-18s they bought in the
early 1980's. Columbia was planned for retirement sometime
after 2010 making it a rather geriatric craft.
Aside: Canada can be proud that our Sea King helicopters may
still be operating in 2010 and thus continue to hold the 'old
age award' for military aircraft. There is still no sign that
the federal government is going to award the replacement
contract for these choppers.
The US shuttles are old and still serviceable but they are risky
to run. The old Soviet method of launching 'Soyuz' module is
arguably more expensive, but you don't worry about fatigue (each
module is used once and discarded). The Soyuz sit on top of an
industrial launch vehicle (the Proton rocket) that has one of
the best launch records in the world. The Protons are 1960s
design, but each is, again, built brand new for each launch.
The vehicles wear out but the design doesn't. Nasa abandoned
the disposable launcher concept when they moved into shuttles
and now the US space program is completely dependent upon the
shuttles for moving humans back and forth from space. Nasa will
likely ground the shuttle fleet until the investigations are
done, so the Russians and the Soyuz vehicles are the only
passage back and forth to the ISS. Now ask the question: who
has the better design? The Chinese are in the process of
building a manned space program -- their manned module looks
more like a Soyuz capsule than anything in the US inventory.
So why is the loss of a US space shuttle important? Because
space flight is vital to the survival of our species. Humans
are vulnerable to extinction so long as we are bottled up on
this one planet. Any of a number of events can kill us off: a
large asteroid impact, instability in our Sun, or local cosmic
radiation bursts. Items one and two would not spell the end of
our species if humans had a sustainable society operating, for
example, in the asteroid belt. The shuttle has focused people's
attention on the dangers of space flight and may result in even
more conservative designs in US space vehicles to mitigate the
danger. The cost of this diminished return for safety will be
delay and fewer missions flown. Fewer missions means it will
take longer to achieve the interplanetary 'sustainable society'
that will protect humanity from disaster.
And that would be the biggest disaster of all. Humans need to
break free of the Earth and our species is at risk until we do.
Individual people will be at risk during the journey. People
will continue to die in space the same as they die on motorways
and in railroad mishaps. Don't think for a moment that the
journey into space is not worth the risk. It is the only way to
ensure our survival.
Yes, the folks at TD Canada Trust run OS/2 on their desk top terminals. And before you make fun of them running 'old' technology; consider they use something like a VT100 terminal program to connect to a mainframe.
Would you trust your money to a bank that doesn't run Windows?
-AD
I too run OS/2 on my 'server'. Come Slashdot me... :-)
http://206.75.228.38/
I'm also running a webmail app, a series of REXX based CGI scripts (web counters for my Clients), an FTP server and my fax server.
The machine is a 200 MHz Pentium Pro; works absolutely great... And I don't need to worry about re-registering the software every 18 months!
Anything you wanna send to space has to be lifted into orbit; the 'gravity well'. That means anything that has mass, like $100/tonne structural steel, needs to be lifted at an outrageous cost ($1000's per kg).
How to mitigate? Well, one way might be to build space structures without structures by planting them on top of something. What kind of something? How about an asteroid; send a robot solar sail to the Asteroid belt to fetch a small one (250m is good enough) then jockey it into orbit from above. Then you can just lift stuff like solar panels and radio transmitters from Earth and spread them out over the rock. Less structural bits == more electronic bits with flashing lights.
-AD
And consider the other countries getting caught in the crossfire: the Canadians contributed a cool robot arm, the ESA is putting up a whole module . The really sucky part is other countries that took part in good faith are gonna lose their research time because the station won't be operating at peak performance.
-AD
Umm, the USA has a huge trade imbalance where it imports more than it exports. The 2001 deficit was $346.3 billion So, YES, the US does have a whole lot to buy, and usually from countries that don't inflict a minimum wage on their employers.
Regarding India; consider that the country has a bigger middle class (~100M people) than Canada does (~35M).
-AD
HSBC in Canada does work with Opera and Mozilla
-AD
Re, TD Canada Trust web banking (EasyWeb)
Mozilla works in both Win & OS/2 configurations.
Opera (win 6.0x) works but won't remember settings between sessions. I have to keep typing in my account numbers because the 'onFocus()' method of the checkbox that remembers your account immediately calls 'blur()' and unfocuses the checkbox and prevents the cookies getting set.
-AD
I'm a mining consultant and have worked around Arsenic containing effuents in the past. Typical way to 'treat' arsenic is to fix it into a stable, non water soluble form. We typically use ferric sulphate to treat effuents containing arsenic, resulting in a 'reasonably' stable arsenic ferrosulpate sludge. This you can dump soil on and plant trees as the arsenic is not likely to spontaneously jump out of the solid into solution.
Another more brute force way of doing the same thing is using a high-pressure autoclave to achieve the same result. Not naming names, but there is a mine located inside the city limits of a Canadian provincial/territorial capital that uses an autoclave the fix arsenic from both a solid trioxide form and a mineral arsenopyrite form. The device works so well that the federal gov't has considered asking this mine to assist cleanup of a neighbouring arsenic contaminated site.
The use of bioreator tanks for sulphide leaching is practised in Africa. I don't think they accept arsenic in the plant feeds, but it is only a matter of time before they find the right thermophile bugs to fix arsenic, then there will be another industrial route for getting the stuff into the tailings pond where it belongs!
-AD
I was chatting with a bunch of HAM operators today in Edmonton. The agency that governs the allocation of the radio spectrum is:
** Industry Canada **
So much for the idea of not selling spectrum...
-AD
This is the original 'mission statement' of Canada.
Where in this do you infer Canadians have rights if they infringe on the first 3 concepts?
-AD
I was at an emerency preparedness presentation in Edmonton today. Seems that the cell phone system during the Pine Lake tornado was crashed by a bunch of media reporters. I suspect they are the real target of this jamming.
During Pine Lake, "individuals" decided that they needed to use the 12 available Cell channels in the remote town to do Live reports back to the Big Cities... so they grabbed the cell frequencies and NEVER HUNG UP! These press people are not terribly popular when they hogged resources that ambulance and SAR people might also want to use!
Fortunately there are a lot of HAM operators in Alberta and they were able to provide radio relays to the SAR people and bypass the phone service.
-AD
Hindu, actually.
The Arabs learned 'our' number system from the Hindus and then taught the Europeans.
-AD