And for those people who suffer from chronic migraine headaches, like myself, flourescent lights are a completely non-option. The flicker they produce is horrible...
Your problem is not with the fluorescent lamp, it is with the ballast (power supply). A magnetic-ballast bulb is fed directly from the AC line, and input power goes through zero twice per cycle; this gives you the 120 Hz flicker and consequent stroboscopic effect whenever anything is moving across your visual field. An electronic-ballast CF (heft one, if it doesn't feel like it has a chunk of iron in it, it's not a magnetic ballast) may flicker at something like 20,000 Hz or even have a switcher-regulated constant current DC supply. You are very unlikely to notice any problems from one of those, so check 'em out.
I'd be very interested in outfitting my house in total LED, saving power form incandescent, and staying away from those horrible flourescent.
LEDs respond even faster to variations in input power than fluorescents; they can be turned on and off at megahertz rates. If the power supply for the LEDs is something simple and stupid like a bridge rectifier feeding a bunch of diodes through a resistor, you will have even more flicker than you have with standard fluorescents. Don't blame the light source, blame the power-supply technology!
Since fluorescent lamps are roughly 5x as efficient as incandescents, something around 1/5 the power should yield a similar light level (varying based on phosphor color balance and impact on quantum efficiency). I found a 55-watt CF torchiere in the first page of Google results.
The point isn't whether these things can be safe--they obviously can be. The question is whether NASA can be trusted to make them safe.
The words of someone with no information at all about the issue.
Look, the RTGs of the ALSEP unit from Apollo 13 were still in the LEM when the ship came back. The ALSEP, and its RTGs, came screaming in at the Pacific ocean at about 420 miles a minute; that is fast enough to go through the sensible atmosphere in about 6 seconds. Though sensors were looking out for it, no trace of the Pu-238 from the RTGs was ever detected; the cores of the units went to the bottom of the ocean, intact.
You could not make those units any safer if you tried.
All it takes is a single screw-up, like using the wrong kind of weld or material, for the thing to blow up.
Yeah, a unit made of solid oxide ceramic with multiple refractory coatings on top of it, and encased in solid-state thermoelectric converters and finally enclosed in a radiator, is going to blow up due to a bad weld. Somehow, it will do this despite having no source of stress and no internal pressure. Right. Sure. Uh-huh.
Dammit, Slashdot needs a "-1, Clueless" moderation.
One could hardly consider the methanol to be the main component of the reaction. Therefore, the hog waste is not the source of biodiesel.
(emphasis added) Okay. But since the fatty acids being esterified also have a non-fossil (and presumably renewable) origin, what's your argument? I think 100% bio-derived biodiesel is an advance (so long as it isn't ridiculously expensive).
I also think that the methanol would do just fine in vehicles, but I'll bet that the economics just aren't there (and of course the article doesn't even hint at the cost).
Disclaimer: I have a vested interest in biodiesel and this article raises my blood pressure. Go to www.biodiesel.org to learn about what biodiesel is or is not.
If anything, fatty-acid methyl esters produced from biogenic methanol (methanol made by oxidation of biogenic methane) is more "biodiesel" than esters made using methanol produced from fossil methane.
- Biodiesel can be produced from waste vegetable oil. This helps to "close the loop", meaning that that WVO doesn't end up in a landfill.
Biodiesel can also be produced from WAF (Waste Animal Fat). Say what you will about the desirability of mass-feeding and slaughter operations; using waste fat for fuel is better than putting it in landfills.
If across the road is "traversing Utah", I suppose so.
which carry pig... er... waste? From the farms to... where? Landfills?
To anaerobic digesters, where methanogenic bacteria convert some of the organic matter in the pig squat into gases. I understand that this gas is roughly half methane and half CO2. After that, the liquid seems to make decent fertilizer. (This technology has been written up in popular publications for at least 30 years now; check back issues of The Mother Earth News.)
Perhaps this should be required of all factory-sized animal feeding operations; open waste lagoons rupture, and the consequences are nasty whether the crap is coming from pigs, steers or chickens
An increase in the price of gasoline would hurt low-income families substantially because they need transportation like everybody else.
That was the same claim made for CAFE standards versus fuel taxes in the 1970's. Perhaps you didn't notice, but CAFE standards did nothing to discourage people from burning that next gallon of gasoline. That is the fatal flaw of CAFE, because in the grand scheme of things it is the marginal cost of consumption which determines what people do.
Mandating fleet fuel efficiency standards, in contrast, results in car manufacturers charging less for fuel efficient cars and charging more for gas guzzlers.
And it makes the gas-guzzlers cheap to run, so people feel few pangs in the wallet when they drive them 300 miles a week. That is why CAFE standards have failed to produce anything like energy independence for the United States. (Our policy failure to charge the cost of defense of the Persian Gulf to oil instead of to income taxes is another factor in this mis-allocation of resources.)
And it seems like a much better solution than raising the price of gasoline.
If it is actually a solution, why has the USA's dependence on foreign oil increased continuously for the last 20 years under the CAFE regime, and why can't Detroit turn the billion-dollar PNGV technologies into a marketable product? I'll give you a hint: it's because the policy of expensive vehicles, cheap fuel cannot achieve the purported goal of the policy.
The price of gas in my neighbourhood has increased about $0.30 over the past few weeks just from "worries about war with Iraq".
No, the price of gas in your neighborhood went up because of the supply disruption from Venezuela and the cold winter, which has pushed up the demand for heating oil and reduced the refinery capacity devoted to motor gasoline. Iraq is madly selling as much oil as it can (shipping through ports which are not allowed to move oil under the UN oil-for-food program), so arguably Iraq is helping to keep your pump price down.
You also have an issue with regard to understanding of short-term versus long-term market forces, but you should ask duffbeer to teach you about that.
When did global warming start?
Scientists who claim that they can accurately predict global weather trends with about 150 years of reasonable accurate data are kidding themselves.
Now it's my turn to be terribly amused. Records of ancient weather leave themselves in dozens of places, from the number and types of species living in a particular place to oxygen-isotope ratios in bones, teeth and shells to the ice layers in glaciers and the silica shells of pollen grains in sediment layers in lakes. We can be assured that the globe is warming. That much is beyond question.
We do not know what the daily average temperature was in 1812 or 1534. Western society was not even aware that California, Texas or Australia existed in the 1600's.
We have no scientific data available to determine how climates changed before the industrial era. So how can we assume that a periodic cooling/warming cycle is not normal.
We can also measure the historic levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, and from this we can arrive at a pretty good estimate of how much of it is our doing vs. the normal cycles of nature.
IANAclimatologist, just a studious layman. However, I do not make the mistake of trying to reduce everything to economics, as some economists like to pretend they can do.;)
What is wrong with letting the free market do the price raising? Is the adjusted-for-inflation price dropping (usually) too fast for you?
You may have noticed that free markets do a very poor job of pricing certain things, like the level of PCB in the water supply or the concentration of PM10 particulates in the air.
This is no different. There are a lot of hidden costs to carbon-based fuels in general and oil in particular, and one of the costs peculiar to oil is that it helps to finance some of the most religiously regressive, socially repressive and western-hostile forces on the face of this earth. The USA consumes roughly 100 billion gallons of motor gasoline a year, but we spend about USD 200 billion (roughly half the defense budget) to defend access to Persian Gulf oil. That's worth another $2/gallon at the pump right there, so that the free market can make the choice about what energy source to use rather than having government policy determine it for us.
I figure $5/gallon would be enough to get people to buy the PNGV technology that Detroit accepted a billion dollars to create, but can't turn into marketable product. It would also get people to retire their old, inefficient vehicles - which should make Detroit happy. I don't give it a snowball's chance in hell of happening, but it would give the market a lot more of a chance to work than failed "no pain" programs like CAFE standards.
Sorry, I just happen to appreciate my countrymen more than taxing them to death just because they need to drive to work or wish to drive their children to a library.
That's a pretty pathetic straw-man you got there... mind if I have a go at him? Man, he goes down easy, don't he?
Hybrids save a lot of petroleum, and electrics, bio-diesel and other technologies can wind up using almost none. They'll all get you to work and the library just fine.
he would call for increases in the price of oil-based products. That would encourage people to look for alternatives, without mandating what people ought to use. That would also give Detroit a market for all the technology they developed for the PNGV, but can't make money on under current market conditions.
Gasoline at $5/gallon would get rid of the SUV craze, and good riddance.
Are there any means of going back to a safe version of the firmware, or are there means of automatically rebooting the on-board computer?
You can bet that there is at least one level of safemode in that thing. DS1 had such, and both hardware and communications-loss watchdog timers. DS1 recovered from a total failure of its star tracker to boot, and was navigated for some time using only its science camera and on-board software hastily written and uploaded for the purpose.
Saving weight in the thruster section allows more solar cells, batteries, transponders and antennas for the same launch vehicle. That's where the money is made.
The DS1 mission also used a xenon-ion thruster, and had several recoveries from mishaps more severe than anything sustained by Artemis. See The DS1 home page.
That's why solar shingles were invented. It would take a pretty draconian local covenant to keep you from re-roofing with any of the available products.
Lots of asphalt shingles have crystals of many different colors on them. It might be quite possible to use the spheral cells in a matrix of a different color (anodize the aluminum red or yellow, perhaps) and change the average tint to something very un-solar looking. By the time you need a new roof, this kind of thing might be just the ticket.
I'd say a 50 story building at the edge of downtown would have more surface area than the roof for at least half the day.
And lots of the glass area of such buildings is already masked off for one purpose or another, and a goodly fraction of the remainder is tinted to reduce unwanted solar gain. If this area was instead covered with el-cheapo solar conversion stuff (you need the glass anyway, so the question is how expensive it becomes to make the glass do double-duty) you could make a reasonable dent in the electric requirements of the building.
Then again, you'd probably gain more from directing a little sunlight into the building where you want it lit (sunlight is perhaps 50% visible and 50% infrared with a trace of UV energy) and eliminating electric lights than from trying to power the electric lights with PV windows.
It's an excerpt of a Lawrence Livermore publication
Don't ignore a couple of possibilities:
The excerpt was chosen specifically to misrepresent the tenor of the whole report; it wouldn't be the first time selective quoting has been used to re-write the truth.
The excerpt may be accurately quoted, but the report might be put out there as bait. Nobody but a proliferator is actually going to try this, and the more effort a proliferator wastes on something which can't work, the better.
In a Google search I find entries for a Pakistani boosted uranium device, but nothing for a fusion bomb. Using tritium to create neutrons increases the fission yield of uranium, but it's not fusion.
I'd take the CCNR stuff with a grain of salt; they are an advocacy organization. Going through their main web page, I find a lot of stuff which practically screams "NO NUKES!", such as opposition to any site selection for disposal of nuclear waste.
Even with mixed isotopes of plutonium, it is possible to build a bomb. It's not going to be a terribly efficient device, but it would get the job done.
I've heard of one test device made using Pu from spent power-reactor fuel. It wasn't PWR leavings, either; it was from a British Magnox reactor, using a low (by current standards) burnup of about 20,000 megawatt-days per ton IIRC (current practice in PWRs is about 50,000 MWD/ton, again IIRC). And its "success" was supposedly iffy.
I'd almost be inclined to let the most determined of the bastards get some spent fuel and try. The most likely outcome is that they'd kill a lot of their people from the radiation without producing anything useful (to them), whether their aim was a nuclear explosive or just a "dirty bomb". Their activities would not be that easy to hide; gamma detectors, xenon sniffers and such would make them much easier to find than people making anthrax or VX.
Uranium bombs are a different beast. Without highly (isotopically) enriched uranium, it is flat out impossible to produce a useful explosion.
Use neutron irradiation to breed thorium-232 into uranium-233, then separate chemically. Bingo, you've got a highly purified fissionable isotope (but another bugger of a problem with short half-lives, not terribly much better than plutonium).
With chemically separated uranium--you can warm your toes.
If that uranium comes from a thorium breeder, you can do both.
BTW, I got a nuclear physicist to weigh in on the plausibility of the parent article. He says that it pins his bogosity meter (my words, not his).
Slashdot Mirror
Since fluorescent lamps are roughly 5x as efficient as incandescents, something around 1/5 the power should yield a similar light level (varying based on phosphor color balance and impact on quantum efficiency). I found a 55-watt CF torchiere in the first page of Google results.
Look, the RTGs of the ALSEP unit from Apollo 13 were still in the LEM when the ship came back. The ALSEP, and its RTGs, came screaming in at the Pacific ocean at about 420 miles a minute; that is fast enough to go through the sensible atmosphere in about 6 seconds. Though sensors were looking out for it, no trace of the Pu-238 from the RTGs was ever detected; the cores of the units went to the bottom of the ocean, intact.
You could not make those units any safer if you tried.
Yeah, a unit made of solid oxide ceramic with multiple refractory coatings on top of it, and encased in solid-state thermoelectric converters and finally enclosed in a radiator, is going to blow up due to a bad weld. Somehow, it will do this despite having no source of stress and no internal pressure. Right. Sure. Uh-huh.Dammit, Slashdot needs a "-1, Clueless" moderation.
I also think that the methanol would do just fine in vehicles, but I'll bet that the economics just aren't there (and of course the article doesn't even hint at the cost).
Check out the signature block in this post.
Perhaps this should be required of all factory-sized animal feeding operations; open waste lagoons rupture, and the consequences are nasty whether the crap is coming from pigs, steers or chickens
You also have an issue with regard to understanding of short-term versus long-term market forces, but you should ask duffbeer to teach you about that.
IANAclimatologist, just a studious layman. However, I do not make the mistake of trying to reduce everything to economics, as some economists like to pretend they can do. ;)
This is no different. There are a lot of hidden costs to carbon-based fuels in general and oil in particular, and one of the costs peculiar to oil is that it helps to finance some of the most religiously regressive, socially repressive and western-hostile forces on the face of this earth. The USA consumes roughly 100 billion gallons of motor gasoline a year, but we spend about USD 200 billion (roughly half the defense budget) to defend access to Persian Gulf oil. That's worth another $2/gallon at the pump right there, so that the free market can make the choice about what energy source to use rather than having government policy determine it for us.
I figure $5/gallon would be enough to get people to buy the PNGV technology that Detroit accepted a billion dollars to create, but can't turn into marketable product. It would also get people to retire their old, inefficient vehicles - which should make Detroit happy. I don't give it a snowball's chance in hell of happening, but it would give the market a lot more of a chance to work than failed "no pain" programs like CAFE standards.
That's a pretty pathetic straw-man you got there... mind if I have a go at him? Man, he goes down easy, don't he?Hybrids save a lot of petroleum, and electrics, bio-diesel and other technologies can wind up using almost none. They'll all get you to work and the library just fine.
Gasoline at $5/gallon would get rid of the SUV craze, and good riddance.
Saving weight in the thruster section allows more solar cells, batteries, transponders and antennas for the same launch vehicle. That's where the money is made.
The DS1 mission also used a xenon-ion thruster, and had several recoveries from mishaps more severe than anything sustained by Artemis. See The DS1 home page.
Lots of asphalt shingles have crystals of many different colors on them. It might be quite possible to use the spheral cells in a matrix of a different color (anodize the aluminum red or yellow, perhaps) and change the average tint to something very un-solar looking. By the time you need a new roof, this kind of thing might be just the ticket.
Then again, you'd probably gain more from directing a little sunlight into the building where you want it lit (sunlight is perhaps 50% visible and 50% infrared with a trace of UV energy) and eliminating electric lights than from trying to power the electric lights with PV windows.
- The excerpt was chosen specifically to misrepresent the tenor of the whole report; it wouldn't be the first time selective quoting has been used to re-write the truth.
- The excerpt may be accurately quoted, but the report might be put out there as bait. Nobody but a proliferator is actually going to try this, and the more effort a proliferator wastes on something which can't work, the better.
Just a note from a confirmed cynic.In a Google search I find entries for a Pakistani boosted uranium device, but nothing for a fusion bomb. Using tritium to create neutrons increases the fission yield of uranium, but it's not fusion.
You're already too late.
I'd take the CCNR stuff with a grain of salt; they are an advocacy organization. Going through their main web page, I find a lot of stuff which practically screams "NO NUKES!", such as opposition to any site selection for disposal of nuclear waste.
I'd almost be inclined to let the most determined of the bastards get some spent fuel and try. The most likely outcome is that they'd kill a lot of their people from the radiation without producing anything useful (to them), whether their aim was a nuclear explosive or just a "dirty bomb". Their activities would not be that easy to hide; gamma detectors, xenon sniffers and such would make them much easier to find than people making anthrax or VX.
Use neutron irradiation to breed thorium-232 into uranium-233, then separate chemically. Bingo, you've got a highly purified fissionable isotope (but another bugger of a problem with short half-lives, not terribly much better than plutonium). If that uranium comes from a thorium breeder, you can do both.BTW, I got a nuclear physicist to weigh in on the plausibility of the parent article. He says that it pins his bogosity meter (my words, not his).