Some doctors have considered prescribing nicotine as a cure for a variety of ailments, including schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, attention deficit disorder and colitis.
There's an interesting comorbidity between ADD/ADHD symptoms and addiction to stimulants (caffeine, cocaine and nicotine).
Without a doubt, caffeine and nicotine help me concentrate. However, I think I'd keep caffeine down to a reasonable level (2 cups of coffee per day is my personal definition of "reasonable") and forgo smoking entirely.
Nicotine is a horrible addiction. I've been faced with the choice of sex or cigarettes - a really cute number told me "if you go without a cigarette for the rest of this party, I'll sleep with you". Well, I chose the cigarettes. And I still would.
Wanna find out, as a non-smoker, what it feels like to quit smoking? Easy. Quit peeing for a week and tell me how you feel.
I think, if I were a physician, I would have a *very* difficult time being convinced to prescribe nicotine to anyone who wasn't terminally ill (Alzheimers, etc.) or suffering horribly from something *other* than ADD/ADHD.
The very trademarks of ADD/ADHD (short attention span, impulsivity) make quitting nicotine (therapeutic or smoking) extremely difficult.
If you think you have ADD/ADHD,
don't try to self-diagnose with a DSM-IV if you've just quit smoking
don't take up smoking to see if it helps - even one cigarette can hook you
Instead, see a doctor. Preferably at a university medical center or some other place where they're familiar with the problems ADD/ADHD cause. Get a prescription for Ritalin or dexedrine or whatever. See if that helps. It's a lot safer than nicotine.
(Note, BTW. I don't think that ADD/ADHD is a bad thing; it appears to be hereditary and might well be a driving force behind hunters, explorers and creative people. It's just that it makes the nuts-and-bolts routines of school and modern life pretty tough. Thomas Edison had the symptoms but was able to use them to his advantage (over 1500 patents!). I personally take a short-acting Ritalin when I need to concentrate, otherwise I let my mind wander down whatever interesting paths it wants.)
You're neglecting the fact that a battery is not a perfect voltage source. To correctly model a battery you must put a resistance in series with the voltage source, since all batteries have a internal resistance.
A quick refresher on what I wrote is, perhaps, in order.
Yeah, your lowly little AA rechargable would happily dump 6,120A in 1 second if the short circuit had small enough resistance.
Supply-side internal resistance is still part of the circuit, short or not.
That having been said.. a standard D NiCd cell can put out almost 1000amps for short periods. This is why fuses and other standard short circuit protection devices were invented. Most battery packs have at least one internal fuse, larger ones will have several to handle the possibility of intra-pack shorts.
Sure. But the kind of electrical energy required to make even a dent in the load on a hybrid's internal combustion engine is massive enough to generate a hell of a lot of heat very quickly, even if it doesn't trip circuit breakers or pop fuses.
Then look it up.
<sarcasm>Thanks! That was really helpful. I'd never heard of this Google thing before - kinda neat how the word "google" stretches out as more and more search pages are returned.</sarcasm>
I didn't need to know the numbers to realize it was still more energy than I want stored chemically under my ass.
Hazardous waste? There are far more Superfund cleanup sites caused by leaking gasoline/oil storage than battery manufacture.
Interestingly enough, the volume of petroleum processed massively eclipses the volume of batteries processed. Maybe there's a connection there?
Note also that while gasoline is nasty stuff, it's relatively harmless when compared to the compounds inside batteries.
Lead Acid batteries are the most recycled item in the United States (more than AL cans).
The steel industry might disagree with you on that one.
95% of the battery itself can be recycled (the plastic case is often discarded. Lithium should ideally not be disposed of in the trash, but in a LiOH battery it is pretty stable. Lead Acid does offer the possibility of Acid burns, but the dilute acid is really only a problem is it gets in your eyes.. on the skin it typically only causes irration and a mild rash. And don't forget.. the explosive potential of the gasoline in your car is equal to almost 3 sticks of dynamite.
Must also remember that you won't get all the batteries back. Gasoline in a lake or river will eventaually evaporate and the HC compounds are fairly unstable in our atmosphere, so they will "combust" to yield CO2 and H2O on their own. However, a lead-acid battery from a car abandoned in a lake will slowly dissolve (water is the universal solvent), lead compounds leaching into the drinking water...
Whether the fuel is electricity or petroleum, the energy stored in your car's fuel system is extremely destructive if released accidentally. All other things being equal, if a gasoline car is carrying around three sticks of dynamite worth of gasoline, a similar electric car is carrying around three sticks of dynamite's worth of chemical potential energy in its batteries.
Fortunately, gasoline has a very narrow range of fuel/air mixture where it's explosive (you can see that for yourself by noticing how difficult it can be to tune a carburetor to make an engine start). Otherwise, it just burns with a really horrible smoky yellow flame until the tank is empty. Anecdotally, I've seen lots of car fires, but the only fuel tanks I've seen explode are propane, CNG and acetylene cylinders.
Not sure where you get your numbers... Lead Acid batteries charging in large strings is over 90% efficent. From powerplant to road electric cars are more than twice as efficent as burning gasoline in an internal combustion engine (more than 50% of the energy in the coal burned in the powerplant ends up moving the car, as opposed to only about 11% of the energy of gasoline). Better still i
There's no way one of today's AA batteries could deliver that kind of amperage, even for a second. All cells have some internal resistance which limits the current they're capable of delivering, even under a "short circuit."
Of course. A quick refresher on what I wrote is, perhaps, in order.
Yeah, your lowly little AA rechargable would happily dump 6,120A in 1 second if the short circuit had small enough resistance.
Supply-side internal resistance is still part of the circuit, short or not.
I agree with most of your sentiments, except one. The gun one. Would you be willing to sitting in the window seat, as a gun gets fired into the body of the aircraft right next to you, while the plane is between JFK and CDG?
...typical charger is 9 volts thats 20*9 so 1800 watts max of released energy + E stored in battery...
No, a better measure of the energy the battery is capable of storing is the mAh rating. If the battery says it's rated for 1000mAh, it can supply 1000mA for 1 hour, or 500mA for 2 hours, or 10mA for 100 hours. etc.
Note that you simply cannot look at the wattage (power) available from the battery, since power is a measure of work over time. And besides, you want to know what the total energy stored in a given battery is, since that's the total energy available for release in a catastrophic failure (ie, how hot will your kids' asses get when the wires between the motor and backseat Li-ion battery of your Civic Hybrid are frayed and shorted in an accident?)
So, how many joules of evergy are in that 1700mAh AA Ni-MH battery?
Well, work = power / time, where time is in seconds, power is in watts, and work (energy, potential or kinetic) is in joules. 1 hour has 3600 seconds. Therefore, 1700mAh = (1700*3600)mAs = 6,120,000mAs. Yeah, your lowly little AA rechargable would happily dump 6,120A in 1 second if the short circuit had small enough resistance.
Now, since we're going to employ a cancellation trick here, that work from the battery, for one second, is (6,120As * 1.2V) = (7,344 watts)*1s. Note again that this is 7,344 watts for one second. Note also that since work = power / time and time is taken to be one second, work = (7,344 watts * 1 s) / (1 s). We can now cancel time units and the division is effectively done, so the answer is expressed in joules: 7,344 joules.
7.3kJ released in my pocket if the battery fails catastrophically? No thank you.
I'd love to know the Ah specification for the battery in the back seat of the Honda Hybrids. It absolutely terrifies me to know that idiots are buying them and driving around.
(I love electricity enough to study it for four years of university hell. I say this, therefore, with some educational basis and reluctance at knocking my favorite energy: electric/hybrid cars are stupid. The batteries are time bombs, hazardous waste and chemical burn nightmares. The charging process is inefficient at best (<50%). How many new coal and nuclear power plants are gonna have to be built when 10,000,000 Los Angeles commuters start plugging in their electric cars every night?)
I can deal with the problem of smokers not being able to quit their filthy disgusting habit,
I think you fail to understand the nature of addiction. It must be a nice perspective that you have.
The craving for a cigarette feels every bit as instinctive, internal and hard-wired as the cravings for food, sex, and a trip to the bathroom when the bladder is full.
If you, presumably as someone who has never smoked, wishes to understand the agony of quitting smoking, I suggest that you simply deny yourself peeing for a week. Tell me how it feels. That's exactly what quitting smoking is like.
Most attempts to quit smoking never make it past the first day. The worst for me was always day three.
After a week or so, the brain starts to get over the cravings, but they never really completely go away.
Ever notice what happens when a smoker opens up a fresh pack? The plastic wrap goes onto the ground.
Not mine; even when I accidentally drop it, I pick it up and take it to the trash.
Then, once the smoke is finished, it goes onto the ground too.
That happens because all the anti-smokers ran around, from the depths of their ignorance about the nature of the nicotine addiction, screaming that "If we take the ashtrays out of public places people won't smoke!".
Bullshit. I have been in a situation where I could have sex or I could smoke - this was an ex who told me that we'd have sex if I didn't smoke that evening. Guess which one won out?
So, if flicking a butt on the ground - which is abhorrent to me - is the cost of having a cigarette, then it's a cost I will bear. Again, I've foregone sex for it.
I would use ashtrays if they were around. I'm not putting the butts in the garbage can; I'm sure you can appreciate the risk of fire.
When the pack is finished, it tends to end up on the ground too. In other words, smokers are some of the most sociopathic polluting assholes on the planet! Ever have a look around a typical smoking area around, say, a public building? Butts everywhere, despite the usual presence of buttcans and ashtrays. They don't use them or need them, because they consider the world as their ashtray!
When you smoke outside, you're so accustomed to the lack of an outdoor ashtray that you reflexively toss the butt on the ground. It's unfortunate.
Fucking assholes! These people don't need a vaccine to deal with their smoking problem. They need a simple boot in the ass, or several hundred as the case may be, to teach them a much needed lesson about simple politeness and courtesy!
I agree with the littering, but I wouldn't agree that smokers throw their empty packs or wrappers on the ground any more than the various sasquatches who throw gum wrappers and losing lottery tickets on the ground.
The only way to address the butt litter will be to have more ashtrays in more public places, but that's not going to happen because of all the idiots who will say it encourages smoking. (Heh... looking at an ashtray always grosses me out; if anything, it's a deterrent.)
All before even getting into the usual controversies about polluting the air that I have to breathe without my consent.
Well, for the most part, it will only affect you in a bar or restaurant. Smoking in the workplace is essentially verboten now.
Coping with it is very simple. If you don't like smoke, sit in the non-smoking section of that bar or restaurant. If they don't have a non-smoking section, go to a bar or restaurant which does.
"Quitting smoking is easy; I have done it a thousand times." - Mark Twain.
Smoking is:
extremely painful and difficult to quit
simultaneously a stimulant and a depressant
symptomatic of attention deficit disorder and almost as effective in the treatment of ADD/ADHD as Ritalin or dexedrine (talk to your doctor, don't start smoking for any reason)
beneficial in the prevention and control of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases (talk to your docto
How many sound effects have names and followings? =)
Forget the obvious ones like the Intel and NBC chimes.
There's the Ren and Stimpy Log jingle which is recognized by millions of Eudora users around the world.
But my favorite is from Growing Pains. Jeremy Miller, the kid who played Ben Seaver, had an awesome scream. Every time I heard it, I would just crack up. It just cracked and warbled in the right way to sound ridiculous. The Frantics were using it in their stand-up act for a while.
Sending out lawsuits to people just because the run the client wouldn't work. One could say "I share pictures of my nieces and nephews, Your Honour." leaving the onus on the RIAA/MPAA.
I dunno... There's a lot of time and money involved in getting to stand in front of the judge to tell him that all you share is pictures of your relatives.
Whether he believes you or not, the whole process has already cost you a load of time and money. Either way, the RIAA still wins.
What is "piping"? At first I thought this guy wanted some CAD software to design plumbing or something...
Even if they were talking about plumbing, don't be surprised. Lots of mechanical engineers are employed designing building plumbing, HVAC and fire suppression systems, while lots of electrical engineers are designing the building's wiring, alarms, emergency lighting, elevator controls, etc. (To say nothing of the obvious civil and structural engineers who are responsible for the foundations and structure.)
Fox might not send any XXX spam. What she did is not condemned by the church.
Sure it is! Do Unto Others.
She sends a million spams. She knows that it costs her nearly nothing and that the recipient is therefore paying to receive it. By her own stated understanding of response rate, she's making millions of people pay for something they don't want.
Is that doing unto others?
Not in my books.
Therefore, it *is* condemned by the church, and it demonstrates her hypocrisy.
Holy shit! That's a Valiant Brougham there with the hood up! I'd *kill* for another one of those! They have the world's most comfortable seats, get great gas mileage for a car of their size and weight, and the Slant-6 under the hood is probably the single toughest car engine ever made.
Mine's a '74 with 300,000 miles on it. It's not a quick car, but it's my favorite car for long trips. I'm gradually restoring it.
Sign her up for every catalog and physical mailing list you can find!
I'm sending her a Christmas card as we speak. It will bring tidings of comfort and joy. There will also be a wish that she gets colon cancer and that her granddaughters are raped by pedophiles.
(Why wish bad things happen to her granddaughters? Well, they obviously carry her defective genetics. But, more importantly, it's one of the few things you can write which will probably upset her very badly.)
Why is it that so many fundamentalist members of organized religions can fail to see blatant hypocrisy in their own actions? Can't she spot her own violation of "do unto others"? Forget the lowering of the signal to noise ratio in her mailbox, can't she figure out that it's crap being delivered postage due and that she's merely making everyone's ISP bills higher? Would she like it if people were sending her millions of viagara ads and cranking up her ISP bills?
Why is it that the poorer and less educated someone is, the stronger they embrace religion? If, as lots of them claim, "God helps those who help themselves", I'm sure God would be thrilled if she put down the Bible long enough to read a book which would teach her a useful skill. This is no different than kids in Afghanistan being forced to memorize the Koran - if they can memorize that, surely memorizing something useful would be easy *and* help them feed their fellow countrymen.
Where are the measurements? I'm guessing you built one of these already, so how wide is the top piece, and how deep?
The base is a 19" square made out of 1" on sides (sqrt(2) across hypotenuse) angle iron, mitred and welded at right angles. The rails are tack-welded to more angle iron, and these are braced triangularly with scrap bedframe iron. The rails' mounting centers are held 18.25" apart (this corresponds to a standard 19" wide rack with 0.75" between the rack-ear holes). (Double-check the numbers, I'm working from memory here.)
My bottom (and therefore the depth of the rack) is 19" square - that's 19" wide and 19" deep. I did that because it's adequate for my equipment, though it's a little tight for my old Sony VO-5600 (this one isn't mine). The rack is wide open; there are no front, side or rear panels, so the old U-Matic is free to overhang. It looks kinda like the OpenBSD rack, but a little shorter, more rugged, and a couple of Suns short of a server farm.:)
It's mounted to the floor with some large lead concrete shields and bolts.
Quick trick: when you're welding it together, bolt it loosely. Put some equipment into the rack - something heavy screwed down in the bottom and something light screwed down in the top position. Use a level to make sure the rails are at 90 degrees to the floor and 180 degrees to each other. Tighten the bolts, and then tack-weld the braces on. Take out the equipment and do a nice stitched bead. Chisel off the slag, wire brush it clean, and you're done.
If I were organized, I could probably build another simple rack like this in an afternoon.
I built myself a rack cabinet for my music gear about a year and a half ago. I built it out of 1/2" Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF), which is a pretty good, reasonably strong, all-purpose, cheap, and very consistent (because it's made out of sawdust glued together, basically )
Oh yeah, it's a great material, except that it's flammable.
(One can, of course, make that same argument about iron and steel - ever light steel wool on fire?)
The chances of my computers catching fire are minimal, but sh*t does happen, and I kinda like having a roof over my head.
Besides, if you're going to the trouble of building the thing, you may as well do it in metal. If you've got the tools, it's really no more effort.
In the music industry it is done all the time- just buy the rails and bolt them to the enclosure of your choosing. It aint rocket science!
That's right! Buy some rack rails. They should be available at large scrap metal yards, one can get used ones inexpensively.
Buy some tools. Absolutely required:
mitre box and a good hacksaw (preferably a Sawzall or similar), or better still a compound mitre saw
good drill and steel bits
WD-40 or real cutting oil to lubricate the drill bits and the saws
safety glasses
file
good measuring tape
lots of small nuts and bolts
angle iron - scrap metal yard, old bedframes, Home Depot
90 degree mending irons to brace corners together
bench vise
tin snips
scribe to mark sheetmetal along working lines or locations of holes
automatic center punch to make dimples so that drill bits don't skate
MIG welder with flux core wire or regular wire and an Argoshield bottle - nice to have but not essential
Measure, cut, drill. Use the mitre box and a level to make sure everything is straight, bolt the pieces together.
To make your own computer cases and rack-mount shelves, use sheet steel and/or sheet aluminum, and lots of small #6-32 machine screws and nuts to hold it all together. Buy a small sheet metal brake if you don't have one ($20-$40) so that you can make neat 90 degree bends. Pop rivets can be handy for stuff like holding the side braces onto your own shelves. I usually like to build things with machine screws and nuts. Once I've got all the sheet metal done, I either weld the seams or pop-rivet them, depending on what I need. Welds are very tough to cut, and pop-rivets have to be drilled out. Machine screws let you play with the design a little bit before making it final.
Sheet metal is dangerous to work with - it's sharp and little filings will get all over the place. A pair of good leather sheetmetal gloves will protect your hands.
Also, sheet steel comes coated with cosmolene or similar anti-corrosion coatings. You will need to wipe it off (a rag with rubbing alcohol usually works) before you spray-paint your finished cabinets. You need to paint the sheet steel (Tremclad is good for this) or else it will flash-rust in time.
If you're working with salvaged scrap steel (which I usually do), you will probably need to clean it. An angle grinder with a suitably-rated cup brush will do wonders. Remember to wear the safety glasses!
Measure twice, cut once! Take your time! This is no more difficult than carpentry.
actually, for those of us in the Northeast, it would be cool to vent it out to an ajoining room to get some of that heat.
Same thing up here in frigid Ottawa, Canada.
My servers and my main workstation are in the furnace room, adjacent to a cold air return duct on my forced-air furnace. Their heat is dragged out of the furnace room and distributed throughout the house.
I'm actually considering getting together about 30 computers to heat the house this winter. Given my furnace's estimated 70% efficiency and the cost of electricity ($0.043/kWh) and oil ($0.47/L), it's cheaper. I also calculated the heat output per unit of each fuel. I could just use baseboard heaters, but the electricity may as well do something useful (distributed clients?) on its way to becoming heat.
While my main workstation is in the furnace room, my home office is in an adjoining room. I simply put a small hole in the wall for the VGA, audio, keyboard, mouse and Palm cables. It's effectively silent in here now.
I mean, come on people. For a community that prides itself on free software, why is/. up in arms about Lindows, a company that is trying to make money off of a slight derivative of the Windows name?
More upsetting is the comments from people who don't realize my post was a joke.
Slashdot Mirror
Some doctors have considered prescribing nicotine as a cure for a variety of ailments, including schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, attention deficit disorder and colitis.
There's an interesting comorbidity between ADD/ADHD symptoms and addiction to stimulants (caffeine, cocaine and nicotine).
Without a doubt, caffeine and nicotine help me concentrate. However, I think I'd keep caffeine down to a reasonable level (2 cups of coffee per day is my personal definition of "reasonable") and forgo smoking entirely.
Nicotine is a horrible addiction. I've been faced with the choice of sex or cigarettes - a really cute number told me "if you go without a cigarette for the rest of this party, I'll sleep with you". Well, I chose the cigarettes. And I still would.
Wanna find out, as a non-smoker, what it feels like to quit smoking? Easy. Quit peeing for a week and tell me how you feel.
I think, if I were a physician, I would have a *very* difficult time being convinced to prescribe nicotine to anyone who wasn't terminally ill (Alzheimers, etc.) or suffering horribly from something *other* than ADD/ADHD.
The very trademarks of ADD/ADHD (short attention span, impulsivity) make quitting nicotine (therapeutic or smoking) extremely difficult.
If you think you have ADD/ADHD,
Instead, see a doctor. Preferably at a university medical center or some other place where they're familiar with the problems ADD/ADHD cause. Get a prescription for Ritalin or dexedrine or whatever. See if that helps. It's a lot safer than nicotine.
(Note, BTW. I don't think that ADD/ADHD is a bad thing; it appears to be hereditary and might well be a driving force behind hunters, explorers and creative people. It's just that it makes the nuts-and-bolts routines of school and modern life pretty tough. Thomas Edison had the symptoms but was able to use them to his advantage (over 1500 patents!). I personally take a short-acting Ritalin when I need to concentrate, otherwise I let my mind wander down whatever interesting paths it wants.)
Quoted from article:
maybe 'buy american' could be our new battle cryIs that a Honda in your driveway?
Obligatory quote from parent so that my karma-whoring isn't quite so blatant:
And you, sir, are most definately correct.You're neglecting the fact that a battery is not a perfect voltage source. To correctly model a battery you must put a resistance in series with the voltage source, since all batteries have a internal resistance.
A quick refresher on what I wrote is, perhaps, in order.
Yeah, your lowly little AA rechargable would happily dump 6,120A in 1 second if the short circuit had small enough resistance.
Supply-side internal resistance is still part of the circuit, short or not.
That having been said.. a standard D NiCd cell can put out almost 1000amps for short periods. This is why fuses and other standard short circuit protection devices were invented. Most battery packs have at least one internal fuse, larger ones will have several to handle the possibility of intra-pack shorts.
Sure. But the kind of electrical energy required to make even a dent in the load on a hybrid's internal combustion engine is massive enough to generate a hell of a lot of heat very quickly, even if it doesn't trip circuit breakers or pop fuses.
Then look it up.
<sarcasm>Thanks! That was really helpful. I'd never heard of this Google thing before - kinda neat how the word "google" stretches out as more and more search pages are returned.</sarcasm>
I didn't need to know the numbers to realize it was still more energy than I want stored chemically under my ass.
Hazardous waste? There are far more Superfund cleanup sites caused by leaking gasoline/oil storage than battery manufacture.
Interestingly enough, the volume of petroleum processed massively eclipses the volume of batteries processed. Maybe there's a connection there?
Note also that while gasoline is nasty stuff, it's relatively harmless when compared to the compounds inside batteries.
Lead Acid batteries are the most recycled item in the United States (more than AL cans).
The steel industry might disagree with you on that one.
95% of the battery itself can be recycled (the plastic case is often discarded. Lithium should ideally not be disposed of in the trash, but in a LiOH battery it is pretty stable. Lead Acid does offer the possibility of Acid burns, but the dilute acid is really only a problem is it gets in your eyes.. on the skin it typically only causes irration and a mild rash. And don't forget.. the explosive potential of the gasoline in your car is equal to almost 3 sticks of dynamite.
Must also remember that you won't get all the batteries back. Gasoline in a lake or river will eventaually evaporate and the HC compounds are fairly unstable in our atmosphere, so they will "combust" to yield CO2 and H2O on their own. However, a lead-acid battery from a car abandoned in a lake will slowly dissolve (water is the universal solvent), lead compounds leaching into the drinking water...
Whether the fuel is electricity or petroleum, the energy stored in your car's fuel system is extremely destructive if released accidentally. All other things being equal, if a gasoline car is carrying around three sticks of dynamite worth of gasoline, a similar electric car is carrying around three sticks of dynamite's worth of chemical potential energy in its batteries.
Fortunately, gasoline has a very narrow range of fuel/air mixture where it's explosive (you can see that for yourself by noticing how difficult it can be to tune a carburetor to make an engine start). Otherwise, it just burns with a really horrible smoky yellow flame until the tank is empty. Anecdotally, I've seen lots of car fires, but the only fuel tanks I've seen explode are propane, CNG and acetylene cylinders.
Not sure where you get your numbers... Lead Acid batteries charging in large strings is over 90% efficent. From powerplant to road electric cars are more than twice as efficent as burning gasoline in an internal combustion engine (more than 50% of the energy in the coal burned in the powerplant ends up moving the car, as opposed to only about 11% of the energy of gasoline). Better still i
There's no way one of today's AA batteries could deliver that kind of amperage, even for a second. All cells have some internal resistance which limits the current they're capable of delivering, even under a "short circuit."
Of course. A quick refresher on what I wrote is, perhaps, in order.
Yeah, your lowly little AA rechargable would happily dump 6,120A in 1 second if the short circuit had small enough resistance.Supply-side internal resistance is still part of the circuit, short or not.
I agree with most of your sentiments, except one. The gun one. Would you be willing to sitting in the window seat, as a gun gets fired into the body of the aircraft right next to you, while the plane is between JFK and CDG?
I think it would be very cold and windy...
I'd worry more about the bullet going through a fuselage skin. The puncture shouldn't tear, but shit does happen. (Remember Aloha Airlines Flight 243 and the ill-fated DeHavilland Comet...)
since power is a measure of work over time
Oops. Gotta never post before my third coffee of the day.
No, a better measure of the energy the battery is capable of storing is the mAh rating. If the battery says it's rated for 1000mAh, it can supply 1000mA for 1 hour, or 500mA for 2 hours, or 10mA for 100 hours. etc.
Note that you simply cannot look at the wattage (power) available from the battery, since power is a measure of work over time. And besides, you want to know what the total energy stored in a given battery is, since that's the total energy available for release in a catastrophic failure (ie, how hot will your kids' asses get when the wires between the motor and backseat Li-ion battery of your Civic Hybrid are frayed and shorted in an accident?)
So, how many joules of evergy are in that 1700mAh AA Ni-MH battery?
Well, work = power / time, where time is in seconds, power is in watts, and work (energy, potential or kinetic) is in joules. 1 hour has 3600 seconds. Therefore, 1700mAh = (1700*3600)mAs = 6,120,000mAs. Yeah, your lowly little AA rechargable would happily dump 6,120A in 1 second if the short circuit had small enough resistance.
Now, since we're going to employ a cancellation trick here, that work from the battery, for one second, is (6,120As * 1.2V) = (7,344 watts)*1s. Note again that this is 7,344 watts for one second. Note also that since work = power / time and time is taken to be one second, work = (7,344 watts * 1 s) / (1 s). We can now cancel time units and the division is effectively done, so the answer is expressed in joules: 7,344 joules.
7.3kJ released in my pocket if the battery fails catastrophically? No thank you.
I'd love to know the Ah specification for the battery in the back seat of the Honda Hybrids. It absolutely terrifies me to know that idiots are buying them and driving around.
(I love electricity enough to study it for four years of university hell. I say this, therefore, with some educational basis and reluctance at knocking my favorite energy: electric/hybrid cars are stupid. The batteries are time bombs, hazardous waste and chemical burn nightmares. The charging process is inefficient at best (<50%). How many new coal and nuclear power plants are gonna have to be built when 10,000,000 Los Angeles commuters start plugging in their electric cars every night?)
I can deal with the problem of smokers not being able to quit their filthy disgusting habit,
I think you fail to understand the nature of addiction. It must be a nice perspective that you have.
The craving for a cigarette feels every bit as instinctive, internal and hard-wired as the cravings for food, sex, and a trip to the bathroom when the bladder is full.
If you, presumably as someone who has never smoked, wishes to understand the agony of quitting smoking, I suggest that you simply deny yourself peeing for a week. Tell me how it feels. That's exactly what quitting smoking is like.
Most attempts to quit smoking never make it past the first day. The worst for me was always day three.
After a week or so, the brain starts to get over the cravings, but they never really completely go away.
Ever notice what happens when a smoker opens up a fresh pack? The plastic wrap goes onto the ground.
Not mine; even when I accidentally drop it, I pick it up and take it to the trash.
Then, once the smoke is finished, it goes onto the ground too.
That happens because all the anti-smokers ran around, from the depths of their ignorance about the nature of the nicotine addiction, screaming that "If we take the ashtrays out of public places people won't smoke!".
Bullshit. I have been in a situation where I could have sex or I could smoke - this was an ex who told me that we'd have sex if I didn't smoke that evening. Guess which one won out?
So, if flicking a butt on the ground - which is abhorrent to me - is the cost of having a cigarette, then it's a cost I will bear. Again, I've foregone sex for it.
I would use ashtrays if they were around. I'm not putting the butts in the garbage can; I'm sure you can appreciate the risk of fire.
When the pack is finished, it tends to end up on the ground too. In other words, smokers are some of the most sociopathic polluting assholes on the planet! Ever have a look around a typical smoking area around, say, a public building? Butts everywhere, despite the usual presence of buttcans and ashtrays. They don't use them or need them, because they consider the world as their ashtray!
When you smoke outside, you're so accustomed to the lack of an outdoor ashtray that you reflexively toss the butt on the ground. It's unfortunate.
Fucking assholes! These people don't need a vaccine to deal with their smoking problem. They need a simple boot in the ass, or several hundred as the case may be, to teach them a much needed lesson about simple politeness and courtesy!
I agree with the littering, but I wouldn't agree that smokers throw their empty packs or wrappers on the ground any more than the various sasquatches who throw gum wrappers and losing lottery tickets on the ground.
The only way to address the butt litter will be to have more ashtrays in more public places, but that's not going to happen because of all the idiots who will say it encourages smoking. (Heh... looking at an ashtray always grosses me out; if anything, it's a deterrent.)
All before even getting into the usual controversies about polluting the air that I have to breathe without my consent.
Well, for the most part, it will only affect you in a bar or restaurant. Smoking in the workplace is essentially verboten now.
Coping with it is very simple. If you don't like smoke, sit in the non-smoking section of that bar or restaurant. If they don't have a non-smoking section, go to a bar or restaurant which does.
"Quitting smoking is easy; I have done it a thousand times." - Mark Twain.
Smoking is:
All these cases are neat. Though I hate to be a killjoy, it's what I do best.
How is RFI suppression handled in these clear plastic cases?
Keeping your computer case closed to RF is generally a good idea.
How many sound effects have names and followings? =)
Forget the obvious ones like the Intel and NBC chimes.
There's the Ren and Stimpy Log jingle which is recognized by millions of Eudora users around the world.
But my favorite is from Growing Pains. Jeremy Miller, the kid who played Ben Seaver, had an awesome scream. Every time I heard it, I would just crack up. It just cracked and warbled in the right way to sound ridiculous. The Frantics were using it in their stand-up act for a while.
Sending out lawsuits to people just because the run the client wouldn't work. One could say "I share pictures of my nieces and nephews, Your Honour." leaving the onus on the RIAA/MPAA.
I dunno... There's a lot of time and money involved in getting to stand in front of the judge to tell him that all you share is pictures of your relatives.
Whether he believes you or not, the whole process has already cost you a load of time and money. Either way, the RIAA still wins.
What is "piping"? At first I thought this guy wanted some CAD software to design plumbing or something...
Even if they were talking about plumbing, don't be surprised. Lots of mechanical engineers are employed designing building plumbing, HVAC and fire suppression systems, while lots of electrical engineers are designing the building's wiring, alarms, emergency lighting, elevator controls, etc. (To say nothing of the obvious civil and structural engineers who are responsible for the foundations and structure.)
Something as simple as plumbing ceases to be simple when you're going more than a few storeys in the air. What's the head of your municipal water system? Chances are, you'll need a pump so that the people in the penthouse will have the flushing toilets they've come to expect.
:)
How soon they forget Battlefield Earth.
A very funny comedy could be made about the fast food industry, but Hamburger: The Motion Picture isn't it.
Fox might not send any XXX spam. What she did is not condemned by the church.
Sure it is! Do Unto Others.
She sends a million spams. She knows that it costs her nearly nothing and that the recipient is therefore paying to receive it. By her own stated understanding of response rate, she's making millions of people pay for something they don't want.
Is that doing unto others?
Not in my books.
Therefore, it *is* condemned by the church, and it demonstrates her hypocrisy.
Holy shit! That's a Valiant Brougham there with the hood up! I'd *kill* for another one of those! They have the world's most comfortable seats, get great gas mileage for a car of their size and weight, and the Slant-6 under the hood is probably the single toughest car engine ever made.
Mine's a '74 with 300,000 miles on it. It's not a quick car, but it's my favorite car for long trips. I'm gradually restoring it.
Place collect calls to this number.
Sign her up for every catalog and physical mailing list you can find!
I'm sending her a Christmas card as we speak. It will bring tidings of comfort and joy. There will also be a wish that she gets colon cancer and that her granddaughters are raped by pedophiles.
(Why wish bad things happen to her granddaughters? Well, they obviously carry her defective genetics. But, more importantly, it's one of the few things you can write which will probably upset her very badly.)
Why is it that so many fundamentalist members of organized religions can fail to see blatant hypocrisy in their own actions? Can't she spot her own violation of "do unto others"? Forget the lowering of the signal to noise ratio in her mailbox, can't she figure out that it's crap being delivered postage due and that she's merely making everyone's ISP bills higher? Would she like it if people were sending her millions of viagara ads and cranking up her ISP bills?
Why is it that the poorer and less educated someone is, the stronger they embrace religion? If, as lots of them claim, "God helps those who help themselves", I'm sure God would be thrilled if she put down the Bible long enough to read a book which would teach her a useful skill. This is no different than kids in Afghanistan being forced to memorize the Koran - if they can memorize that, surely memorizing something useful would be easy *and* help them feed their fellow countrymen.
[sigh] This just infuriates me.
Where are the measurements? I'm guessing you built one of these already, so how wide is the top piece, and how deep?
The base is a 19" square made out of 1" on sides (sqrt(2) across hypotenuse) angle iron, mitred and welded at right angles. The rails are tack-welded to more angle iron, and these are braced triangularly with scrap bedframe iron. The rails' mounting centers are held 18.25" apart (this corresponds to a standard 19" wide rack with 0.75" between the rack-ear holes). (Double-check the numbers, I'm working from memory here.)
My bottom (and therefore the depth of the rack) is 19" square - that's 19" wide and 19" deep. I did that because it's adequate for my equipment, though it's a little tight for my old Sony VO-5600 (this one isn't mine). The rack is wide open; there are no front, side or rear panels, so the old U-Matic is free to overhang. It looks kinda like the OpenBSD rack, but a little shorter, more rugged, and a couple of Suns short of a server farm. :)
It's mounted to the floor with some large lead concrete shields and bolts.
Quick trick: when you're welding it together, bolt it loosely. Put some equipment into the rack - something heavy screwed down in the bottom and something light screwed down in the top position. Use a level to make sure the rails are at 90 degrees to the floor and 180 degrees to each other. Tighten the bolts, and then tack-weld the braces on. Take out the equipment and do a nice stitched bead. Chisel off the slag, wire brush it clean, and you're done.
If I were organized, I could probably build another simple rack like this in an afternoon.
Um... is your post an elaborate, sarcastic way of saying it's more trouble than it's worth? You know how hard sarcasm is to detect in digital form.
Not at all! It's no more work than wood, just a less familiar material for most people.
If you're building something like this, you're gonna get some callouses. Expect it.
I built myself a rack cabinet for my music gear about a year and a half ago. I built it out of 1/2" Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF), which is a pretty good, reasonably strong, all-purpose, cheap, and very consistent (because it's made out of sawdust glued together, basically )
Oh yeah, it's a great material, except that it's flammable.
(One can, of course, make that same argument about iron and steel - ever light steel wool on fire?)
The chances of my computers catching fire are minimal, but sh*t does happen, and I kinda like having a roof over my head.
Besides, if you're going to the trouble of building the thing, you may as well do it in metal. If you've got the tools, it's really no more effort.
you can find a good review of the pros/cons here.
This AC hijacked my redirector for a goatse.cx link. Sorry.
Based on the time of the posting, this individual has a subscription and lives in Vermont. Check it out:
max4-190.greenmountainaccess.net - - [13/Dec/2003:18:13:42 -0500] "GETmax4-190.greenmountainaccess.net - - [13/Dec/2003:18:14:07 -0500] "GET
max4-190.greenmountainaccess.net - - [13/Dec/2003:18:14:21 -0500] "GET
max4-190.greenmountainaccess.net - - [13/Dec/2003:18:14:52 -0500] "GET
max4-190.greenmountainaccess.net - - [13/Dec/2003:18:15:59 -0500] "GET
max4-190.greenmountainaccess.net - - [13/Dec/2003:18:16:03 -0500] "GET
max4-190.greenmountainaccess.net - - [13/Dec/2003:18:16:17 -0500] "GET
max4-190.greenmountainaccess.net - - [13/Dec/2003:18:16:18 -0500] "GET
max4-190.greenmountainaccess.net - - [13/Dec/2003:18:16:29 -0500] "GET
max4-190.greenmountainaccess.net - - [13/Dec/2003:18:17:02 -0500] "GET
max4-190.greenmountainaccess.net - - [13/Dec/2003:18:17:14 -0500] "GET
max4-190.greenmountainaccess.net - - [13/Dec/2003:18:18:02 -0500] "GET
max4-190.greenmountainaccess.net - - [13/Dec/2003:18:20:16 -0500] "GET
In the music industry it is done all the time- just buy the rails and bolt them to the enclosure of your choosing. It aint rocket science!
That's right! Buy some rack rails. They should be available at large scrap metal yards, one can get used ones inexpensively.
Buy some tools. Absolutely required:
Measure, cut, drill. Use the mitre box and a level to make sure everything is straight, bolt the pieces together.
To make your own computer cases and rack-mount shelves, use sheet steel and/or sheet aluminum, and lots of small #6-32 machine screws and nuts to hold it all together. Buy a small sheet metal brake if you don't have one ($20-$40) so that you can make neat 90 degree bends. Pop rivets can be handy for stuff like holding the side braces onto your own shelves. I usually like to build things with machine screws and nuts. Once I've got all the sheet metal done, I either weld the seams or pop-rivet them, depending on what I need. Welds are very tough to cut, and pop-rivets have to be drilled out. Machine screws let you play with the design a little bit before making it final.
Sheet metal is dangerous to work with - it's sharp and little filings will get all over the place. A pair of good leather sheetmetal gloves will protect your hands.
Also, sheet steel comes coated with cosmolene or similar anti-corrosion coatings. You will need to wipe it off (a rag with rubbing alcohol usually works) before you spray-paint your finished cabinets. You need to paint the sheet steel (Tremclad is good for this) or else it will flash-rust in time.
If you're working with salvaged scrap steel (which I usually do), you will probably need to clean it. An angle grinder with a suitably-rated cup brush will do wonders. Remember to wear the safety glasses!
Measure twice, cut once! Take your time! This is no more difficult than carpentry.
actually, for those of us in the Northeast, it would be cool to vent it out to an ajoining room to get some of that heat.
Same thing up here in frigid Ottawa, Canada.
My servers and my main workstation are in the furnace room, adjacent to a cold air return duct on my forced-air furnace. Their heat is dragged out of the furnace room and distributed throughout the house.
I'm actually considering getting together about 30 computers to heat the house this winter. Given my furnace's estimated 70% efficiency and the cost of electricity ($0.043/kWh) and oil ($0.47/L), it's cheaper. I also calculated the heat output per unit of each fuel. I could just use baseboard heaters, but the electricity may as well do something useful (distributed clients?) on its way to becoming heat.
While my main workstation is in the furnace room, my home office is in an adjoining room. I simply put a small hole in the wall for the VGA, audio, keyboard, mouse and Palm cables. It's effectively silent in here now.
"Clean off windows the easy way with Windex Wipes!"
Windex Wipes - the Glass, Surface and Hard Disk Cleaner.
Shit. That was too good to happen, they've already been borgified.
They should do a joint marketing agreement and package of Windex surface wipes with the boxed Windex OS (ex-Lindows).
I like it!
"Clean off windows the easy way with Windex Wipes!"
I mean, come on people. For a community that prides itself on free software, why is
More upsetting is the comments from people who don't realize my post was a joke.