"I have no idea if you personally are guilty of any of these"
Wow. Way to cast the debate in non-prejudicial terms.
Bottom line: I do not care to debate whether God exists. I think the rational pursuit of a proof for or against is a waste of time. I'm rational enough to know that humans are not entirely rational beings, and I do not choose to submit my faith to rational scrutiny. I also don't use my faith as a crutch to patch up holes in scientific hypotheses.
The thing I can and will debate is my contention that MY faith has nothing to do with YOUR freedom to do whatever you damn well please, and MY faith isn't responsible for starving children in Africa, bird flu, war, strife, pestilence, death, and tooth decay.
"The Second Law does not say you cannot use heat to do work"
Of course not. However, you cannot exploit a temperature differential between a warmish computer battery and the room, and get a USEFUL amount of work out of it. (I'm using work in the technical "energy per unit time" sense, not in the "I had to go to work today" sense). I would be very, very surprised if you get longer battery runtime by running your cooling fans off of the trivial amount of electricity generated by these types of devices.
Could I be mistaken? Might this company be on to a revolutionary new way to generate electricity? Absolutely! Anything is possible.
However, until I see evidence of such, I will remain (what was that word? Oh yeah.) skeptical. We're not talking about heating your tea, or baking your potato on an exhaust header that you might notice gets a little hotter than your laptop. We're not talking about drying your clothes or boiling water to cool your room. Those were all examples you raised to argue with me, and I don't really understand why.
I do not accept the claims in this article at face value. I do not believe they are doing anything other than trying to drum up money from investors who understand physics poorly.
Except the existence of God. According to Dawkins (the self-appointed Atheist poster boy) belief in God is the root of all evil and strife and badness, and people who believe in God are morally and intellectually defective.
He's entitled to his opinion. I don't agree with him, and I don't think he's particularly rational on the topic, so there's no point in me debating him.
If you boil a pot of water, you dump a bunch of waste heat into the room, raising the air temperature. The evaporative cooling that will come from the evaporation of the water that condenses from the steam you let into the room is going to be less than the temperature increase you created by putting waste heat into the room.
You can't cool a room by opening the door to your refrigerator. There is no such thing as free energy. "waste" heat is called "waste" because it cannot be used to do useful work. Could you power a cooling fan with a Peltier device? Sure, but it's more efficient to just use mains power.
You can't replace your alternator with a wind turbine on the outside of your car and make your car more fuel efficient. That idea on/. a while ago to power streetlights with a treadle system in the street did not capture "wasted" energy. The Second Law doesn't care how clever you are. There is still no such thing as a free lunch.
If these guys have a device that works similar to a Peltier cooler, and is more efficient than a Peltier cooler, that would be an interesting development, and is certainly not a hard thing to imagine. But a more efficient Peltier device isn't likely to replace batteries, which is what they're alleging.
I deny the Religious Right the authority to define "Christian" as "Those people who agree with us". Similarly, I deny the current Republican party the label of "conservative". Both of these words have been changed in common parlance, but I am tilting at windmills and defining them in my own terms, for my own reasons.
That's really my point: Judging all persons who self-identify as Christians (or Democrats or Slashdotters or immigrants or single parents) as homogenous wholes, as opposed to groups of individuals who may share a few particular traits, leads to sloppy thinking and incorrect conclusions. I recommend you be less promiscuous with your labels.
Excellent. My coursework was in jet engines, which are rated in terms of Thrust Specific Fuel Consumption. It makes perfect sense to me that there's a parallel concept in internal combustion engines, but since I've never done a rigorous study of the problem I didn't have the vocabulary. Thank you for clarifying my point.
"But it's got little to do with modern Christianity."
It's got everything to do with the modern Christians with whom I'm familiar. Unfortunately, reasonable people who care about one another and the people around them don't usually make the evening news, and they certainly don't show up on the 700 Club.
You seem to be conflating what I believe with what the reactionary religious freaks think. I deny them my imprimatur. They do not speak for me, they do not define my faith, they don't know a thing about my relationship with God. You may dispense with the comparisons between me and them, they are irrelevant.
I happen to think that people who believe like I do vastly outnumber people who agree with those sorts of "Christians". Again...we don't make the news.
""factitious", which means "made up"."
"Factitious" doesn't mean anything. I don't know if you're going for "facetious" or "fictitious", which do not mean the same thing.
I don't much care what you, or they, label me. If you are a person of intellectual integrity, you will realize that the loud people and the smart people are not always the same people, and apply your labels accordingly.
"My question to you would be, how do you select Jesus' teachings from any other teachings in the world? "
Why do you care? My choice is my own. I choose my path. You choose yours.
"See, the way I see it, you can be a "good christian" (or, as I prefer just a good, moral person) without ever having to appeal to God or Jesus or any religion."
OK. I agree with you. You don't have to. But my choice to follow the teachings of Jesus are not a failure of intellect or morality or imagination on my part"
You seem to think that Jesus shunned fornicators (which you might note is not the same thing as saying that fornication is perhaps not the best idea in the universe), which leads me to believe that your understanding is faulty. I am absolutely certain that you do not have a good understanding of my spirituality, which I call Christian, but is not very similar to the "Christianity" that you see on TV all the time.
You also seem to think I've got some sort of investment in the integrity and/or historicity of the Bible, which I do not.
The medium is not the message. The message is the message. "Love thy neighbor" is a good idea. The Beatitudes are a good idea. I don't care if this is a philosophy espoused by Christ, or a guy named Floyd. They're still good ideas.
Jesus said, "Love thy neighbor as thyself." I really, really want you to explain to me how that idea is the root of all the badness you rant about.
You come up with something Jesus is reported to have said that is really a bad idea, and we've got a philosophical discussion on our hands. I like those.
Heck, I'll start. I think that Jesus' "I am the way, the Truth, and the light" is problematic, since I believe that other teachers are valuable too. However, it is hard for me to understand how somebody who lived according to Jesus' teachings (note: I did not say "religious fundamentalists' teachings misattributed to Jesus") would be a Bad Person.
Maybe I've got a blind spot. Maybe you know something I don't. But I really think that you're just reacting to an ideology that you don't understand very well. (You're in good company, by the way. The President is the president of that club.)
I'm not a Christian because of religion. I'm a Christian because I believe that "love thy neighbor" is a pretty good way to live your life. What's twisted about that? Is that a belief unique to Christianity? Certainly not. Jesus is the teacher I happen to follow, but that doesn't diminish or de-value the teachings of anybody else.
Dawkins' aggressive sort of atheism seems to me to be evangelism in a different coat. My spirituality has nothing to do with him, so what's his beef with me?
Do you seriously believe that if everybody magically became Dawkinsite atheists tomorrow, that there would be no strife? If you do believe that, I think you're way more deluded than the craziest snake-handling evangelical bible-thumper.
"Exactly. Whereas with a gear driven supercharger you will have to burn an extra 5 hp worth of fuel to stay even. That's why people put up with the viscisitudes of turbochargers in the first place. They're "free." Compared to superchargers."
OK, no. You've dramatically changed the boundary conditions for the power cycle of the engine. They are not "free" compared to gear- or belt-driven superchargers...they operate on exactly the same principles. Whether the crankshaft has a pulley on the front that drives the supercharger, or the pistons have to increase the pressure in the headers to drive the turbocharger, there is no "free". The energy to compress the air comes from increased fuel burn per piston stroke.
"extra 5 hp worth of fuel" is a null concept. One particular supercharger setup may be different than one particular turbocharger setup, but the setup is EVERYTHING. You can't just take a certain fuel delivery profile on a certain engine block, bolt on a supercharger, get some numbers, replace the supercharger with a turbocharger, get some different numbers, and compare them. The optimizations and performance characteristics are just not the same.
Does one particular engine design lend itself more towards turbochargers than superchargers? Maybe. Does that mean that superchargers are inferior, and it certainly doesn't mean that superchargers in general are less efficient. They're just different.
"At this point I haven't a clue why."
They're saying they can get useful amounts of work out of battery waste heat. I am skeptical. I will remain so until I see decent schematics of their work cycle, or get one on my test bench so I can play with it.
"there are a small number of very vocal people who are total assholes"
And here, my friends, you have the explanation for literally all the ills of the world. Forget FOSS, this is the truism of Life, The Universe, and Everything. There are a small number of vocal assholes. Every phenomenon of our existence is driven by that fact.
"I was comparing energy taken from the flow of exhaust gases to energy taken from the turning of the crankshaft."
Same energy. The back pressure from a turbocharger increases the work done by the engine system upstream.
The turbocharger is not powered by waste heat. As a matter of fact, header temperatures typically increase when you add a turbocharger.
If you take Engine A, and optimize its fuel delivery for a given requirement (say, max peak power), and then add a turbocharger and tune it again for max peak power, you will consume more fuel to produce max power in the turbocharged engine. You will probably burn slightly more fuel (very, very slightly more fuel) to produce the normally aspirated engine's max peak power with the turbocharged engine, but that is more a function of how the engine is tuned.
"And that is what these people are talking about when they say their device could be used to turn a computer's cooling fans. It isn't something for nothing, but it is more something without anything more. It doesn't increase the efficiency of the CPU, but it does increase the efficiency of the system."
"But turning the compressor is "magic" in the sense that it does not require the burning of any additional fuel to accomplish it."
Well sure you do. The stoichiometry of the combustion doesn't change. You don't get more motive power out of a given volume of fuel. You just burn more of it per piston stroke to get more power.
Now, there are a BUNCH of performance optimizations you can do to change the shape of your power delivery curve, and get some desired combination of improved fuel economy and improved power, but you're not dramatically increasing the thermodynamic efficiency of the motor (which would take magic).
A turbocharger changes the set of performance trade-offs you can make, but it's not free power.
Well, heck! Why don't you hook two of them thar Peltier things together, and you could generate an infinite amount of electricity! That's even better than the cat-buttered-toast generator idea.
Slashdot Mirror
"I have no idea if you personally are guilty of any of these"
Wow. Way to cast the debate in non-prejudicial terms.
Bottom line: I do not care to debate whether God exists. I think the rational pursuit of a proof for or against is a waste of time. I'm rational enough to know that humans are not entirely rational beings, and I do not choose to submit my faith to rational scrutiny. I also don't use my faith as a crutch to patch up holes in scientific hypotheses.
The thing I can and will debate is my contention that MY faith has nothing to do with YOUR freedom to do whatever you damn well please, and MY faith isn't responsible for starving children in Africa, bird flu, war, strife, pestilence, death, and tooth decay.
"The Second Law does not say you cannot use heat to do work"
Of course not. However, you cannot exploit a temperature differential between a warmish computer battery and the room, and get a USEFUL amount of work out of it. (I'm using work in the technical "energy per unit time" sense, not in the "I had to go to work today" sense). I would be very, very surprised if you get longer battery runtime by running your cooling fans off of the trivial amount of electricity generated by these types of devices.
Could I be mistaken? Might this company be on to a revolutionary new way to generate electricity? Absolutely! Anything is possible.
However, until I see evidence of such, I will remain (what was that word? Oh yeah.) skeptical. We're not talking about heating your tea, or baking your potato on an exhaust header that you might notice gets a little hotter than your laptop. We're not talking about drying your clothes or boiling water to cool your room. Those were all examples you raised to argue with me, and I don't really understand why.
I do not accept the claims in this article at face value. I do not believe they are doing anything other than trying to drum up money from investors who understand physics poorly.
"Atheists do have one major advantage though:
Everything is open to debate."
Except the existence of God. According to Dawkins (the self-appointed Atheist poster boy) belief in God is the root of all evil and strife and badness, and people who believe in God are morally and intellectually defective.
He's entitled to his opinion. I don't agree with him, and I don't think he's particularly rational on the topic, so there's no point in me debating him.
Are you being intentionally dense?
/. a while ago to power streetlights with a treadle system in the street did not capture "wasted" energy. The Second Law doesn't care how clever you are. There is still no such thing as a free lunch.
If you boil a pot of water, you dump a bunch of waste heat into the room, raising the air temperature. The evaporative cooling that will come from the evaporation of the water that condenses from the steam you let into the room is going to be less than the temperature increase you created by putting waste heat into the room.
You can't cool a room by opening the door to your refrigerator. There is no such thing as free energy. "waste" heat is called "waste" because it cannot be used to do useful work. Could you power a cooling fan with a Peltier device? Sure, but it's more efficient to just use mains power.
You can't replace your alternator with a wind turbine on the outside of your car and make your car more fuel efficient. That idea on
If these guys have a device that works similar to a Peltier cooler, and is more efficient than a Peltier cooler, that would be an interesting development, and is certainly not a hard thing to imagine. But a more efficient Peltier device isn't likely to replace batteries, which is what they're alleging.
I deny the Religious Right the authority to define "Christian" as "Those people who agree with us". Similarly, I deny the current Republican party the label of "conservative". Both of these words have been changed in common parlance, but I am tilting at windmills and defining them in my own terms, for my own reasons.
That's really my point: Judging all persons who self-identify as Christians (or Democrats or Slashdotters or immigrants or single parents) as homogenous wholes, as opposed to groups of individuals who may share a few particular traits, leads to sloppy thinking and incorrect conclusions. I recommend you be less promiscuous with your labels.
Excellent. My coursework was in jet engines, which are rated in terms of Thrust Specific Fuel Consumption. It makes perfect sense to me that there's a parallel concept in internal combustion engines, but since I've never done a rigorous study of the problem I didn't have the vocabulary. Thank you for clarifying my point.
Um, OK. You lost me here.
"But it's got little to do with modern Christianity."
It's got everything to do with the modern Christians with whom I'm familiar. Unfortunately, reasonable people who care about one another and the people around them don't usually make the evening news, and they certainly don't show up on the 700 Club.
You seem to be conflating what I believe with what the reactionary religious freaks think. I deny them my imprimatur. They do not speak for me, they do not define my faith, they don't know a thing about my relationship with God. You may dispense with the comparisons between me and them, they are irrelevant.
I happen to think that people who believe like I do vastly outnumber people who agree with those sorts of "Christians". Again...we don't make the news.
""factitious", which means "made up"."
"Factitious" doesn't mean anything. I don't know if you're going for "facetious" or "fictitious", which do not mean the same thing.
Fortunately, I do not subject myself to your judgement. You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but my faith isn't open to your criticism.
You seem to think that the Christian God and the Muslim God are different. If you think that, you're mistaken.
I don't much care what you, or they, label me. If you are a person of intellectual integrity, you will realize that the loud people and the smart people are not always the same people, and apply your labels accordingly.
If you're not, well, that's up to you, isn't it?
"My question to you would be, how do you select Jesus' teachings from any other teachings in the world? "
Why do you care? My choice is my own. I choose my path. You choose yours.
"See, the way I see it, you can be a "good christian" (or, as I prefer just a good, moral person) without ever having to appeal to God or Jesus or any religion."
OK. I agree with you. You don't have to. But my choice to follow the teachings of Jesus are not a failure of intellect or morality or imagination on my part"
Oh, I see. You're assuming that I take all the things that the apostles wrote as Gospel (pardon the pun). A frequent misconception.
I'm a Christian. Not a Paulian.
You seem to think that Jesus shunned fornicators (which you might note is not the same thing as saying that fornication is perhaps not the best idea in the universe), which leads me to believe that your understanding is faulty. I am absolutely certain that you do not have a good understanding of my spirituality, which I call Christian, but is not very similar to the "Christianity" that you see on TV all the time.
You also seem to think I've got some sort of investment in the integrity and/or historicity of the Bible, which I do not.
The medium is not the message. The message is the message. "Love thy neighbor" is a good idea. The Beatitudes are a good idea. I don't care if this is a philosophy espoused by Christ, or a guy named Floyd. They're still good ideas.
No, it's a gray area to the people who understand that market theories presuppose that duplication is difficult, and that that is no longer the case.
But nice try.
Way to move the goal posts to avoid my point.
Jesus said, "Love thy neighbor as thyself." I really, really want you to explain to me how that idea is the root of all the badness you rant about.
You come up with something Jesus is reported to have said that is really a bad idea, and we've got a philosophical discussion on our hands. I like those.
Heck, I'll start. I think that Jesus' "I am the way, the Truth, and the light" is problematic, since I believe that other teachers are valuable too. However, it is hard for me to understand how somebody who lived according to Jesus' teachings (note: I did not say "religious fundamentalists' teachings misattributed to Jesus") would be a Bad Person.
Maybe I've got a blind spot. Maybe you know something I don't. But I really think that you're just reacting to an ideology that you don't understand very well. (You're in good company, by the way. The President is the president of that club.)
I'm not a Christian because of religion. I'm a Christian because I believe that "love thy neighbor" is a pretty good way to live your life. What's twisted about that? Is that a belief unique to Christianity? Certainly not. Jesus is the teacher I happen to follow, but that doesn't diminish or de-value the teachings of anybody else.
Dawkins' aggressive sort of atheism seems to me to be evangelism in a different coat. My spirituality has nothing to do with him, so what's his beef with me?
Do you seriously believe that if everybody magically became Dawkinsite atheists tomorrow, that there would be no strife? If you do believe that, I think you're way more deluded than the craziest snake-handling evangelical bible-thumper.
"Exactly. Whereas with a gear driven supercharger you will have to burn an extra 5 hp worth of fuel to stay even. That's why people put up with the viscisitudes of turbochargers in the first place. They're "free." Compared to superchargers."
OK, no. You've dramatically changed the boundary conditions for the power cycle of the engine. They are not "free" compared to gear- or belt-driven superchargers...they operate on exactly the same principles. Whether the crankshaft has a pulley on the front that drives the supercharger, or the pistons have to increase the pressure in the headers to drive the turbocharger, there is no "free". The energy to compress the air comes from increased fuel burn per piston stroke.
"extra 5 hp worth of fuel" is a null concept. One particular supercharger setup may be different than one particular turbocharger setup, but the setup is EVERYTHING. You can't just take a certain fuel delivery profile on a certain engine block, bolt on a supercharger, get some numbers, replace the supercharger with a turbocharger, get some different numbers, and compare them. The optimizations and performance characteristics are just not the same.
Does one particular engine design lend itself more towards turbochargers than superchargers? Maybe. Does that mean that superchargers are inferior, and it certainly doesn't mean that superchargers in general are less efficient. They're just different.
"At this point I haven't a clue why."
They're saying they can get useful amounts of work out of battery waste heat. I am skeptical. I will remain so until I see decent schematics of their work cycle, or get one on my test bench so I can play with it.
When people tried to start selling magazines about it.
If their "creation" is a physical object, it should be illegal to take it away from them. Everything else is a gray area.
Let me cut out the extraneous parts of your post.
"there are a small number of very vocal people who are total assholes"
And here, my friends, you have the explanation for literally all the ills of the world. Forget FOSS, this is the truism of Life, The Universe, and Everything. There are a small number of vocal assholes. Every phenomenon of our existence is driven by that fact.
"which are inherently broken."
Speak for yourself. I'm just fine, thank you!
"I was comparing energy taken from the flow of exhaust gases to energy taken from the turning of the crankshaft."
Same energy. The back pressure from a turbocharger increases the work done by the engine system upstream.
The turbocharger is not powered by waste heat. As a matter of fact, header temperatures typically increase when you add a turbocharger.
If you take Engine A, and optimize its fuel delivery for a given requirement (say, max peak power), and then add a turbocharger and tune it again for max peak power, you will consume more fuel to produce max power in the turbocharged engine. You will probably burn slightly more fuel (very, very slightly more fuel) to produce the normally aspirated engine's max peak power with the turbocharged engine, but that is more a function of how the engine is tuned.
"And that is what these people are talking about when they say their device could be used to turn a computer's cooling fans. It isn't something for nothing, but it is more something without anything more. It doesn't increase the efficiency of the CPU, but it does increase the efficiency of the system."
That is indeed their claim. I am skeptical.
"But turning the compressor is "magic" in the sense that it does not require the burning of any additional fuel to accomplish it."
Well sure you do. The stoichiometry of the combustion doesn't change. You don't get more motive power out of a given volume of fuel. You just burn more of it per piston stroke to get more power.
Now, there are a BUNCH of performance optimizations you can do to change the shape of your power delivery curve, and get some desired combination of improved fuel economy and improved power, but you're not dramatically increasing the thermodynamic efficiency of the motor (which would take magic).
A turbocharger changes the set of performance trade-offs you can make, but it's not free power.
Well, heck! Why don't you hook two of them thar Peltier things together, and you could generate an infinite amount of electricity! That's even better than the cat-buttered-toast generator idea.
"If they publish properly they will protect any patent position they wish to pursue."
Cogent alliteration for the win! Gold star!