Disney's made huge piles of cash off of the public domain. Look at what they raked in on Victor Hugo's work (the Hunchback of Notre Dame) after it went out of copyright. Ditto with Snow White and a pile of other, older works.
Of course, when it comes time for Disney to give something back to the commons from which they've drawn so much, it's "different".
Askjeeves says 115,000 BTU/gallon for gasoline, 84,000 BTU/gallon for ethanol.
An engine running on ethanol can have higher compression than a gasoline engine and can thus have somewhat higher thermal efficiency, but this is not possible for dual-fuel engines.
All of this becomes moot if you employ alcohol (either methanol or ethanol) in a fuel cell. When you consider that a huge fraction of all domestic trash is paper and paper is just polymerized sugar, the amount of fuel we are just throwing away becomes apparent. Someday you might ferment yesterday's newspaper and your junk mail to run your mini-commuter car.
Combined with the efficiency of modern gasoline engines and the dirty electricity it is quite likely that current electric cars produce more total polutants than gasoline powered.
I doubt that. Electricity increasingly comes from natural-gas fired gas turbines, which are both very efficient (upwards of 50% for combined-cycle plants) and very clean. Then there is the fact that electric cars have neither throttling losses nor idling losses.
The disposal problem is not as dire as the liberals in DC would have you believe, and AFAIK nuclear power byproducts are not very useful for weapon making.
s/not very useful/almost totally useless/ and I think you have it right. The paranoia promoted by anti-nukes that every power reactor is a bomb or can be used to make bombs is pure propaganda. Still, the American (hell, European too) public is so ignorant that they can't understand that significant quantities of Pu-240 and Pu-241 effectively prevent plutonium from being used to make bombs, and modern reactor fuel cycles yield spent fuel that's just loaded with them; bomb-grade material is made on very short cycles for the express purpose of reducing the load of those isotopes, and some Russian Pu has even been isotope-refined to reduce the concentration still further. This is not something that even Saddam Hussein could do; he has his hands full just trying to concentrate U-235. Your random terrorist group couldn't avoid getting killed by the residual radiation, let alone set up an isotope purification operation to make bomb-grade plutonium. Last, if the idea is to make a dirty bomb, there are a lot of poisions which are just as toxic and a lot easier to steal and transport. This whole issue is largely a distraction.
In the case of early automobiles, if memory serves they got by using the "existing infrastructure" in the form of shops which sold dry-cleaning fluid (naptha, aka white gasoline) and found the smooth paved pathways made for bicycles to be particularly nice for driving.
What lessons there are here for alternative energy cars, I don't know. Aside from the folks who burn used french-fry oil in their diesels, opportunities to run alternate-fuel vehicles without special support appear to be few and far between (save for block-heater-friendly Canadian cities being EV-friendly)
Also remember that this is a single axis gyro so that you need at least 3(4 if you want to avoid the dreaded gimbal lock) if you are interested in a complete orienation.
No, just three. Gimbal tables are used on rotating gyros so that you can't get two of the axes into the same plane (the "lock" condition) and then twist along the perpendicular axis. Using rate gyros like the AMD units, you are just sensing rotation rate around 3 axes referenced to your sensor array; there are no gimbals to lock and if your sensors are on 3 perpendicular axes (and why wouldn't they be?) you will always be getting data from 3 mutually perpendicular axes. The orientation of these axes will vary in space (unlike a gimballed table carrying rotating gyros), but you really don't care; you're unwinding your gyrations with arithmetic instead of wheels and bearings.
Me, I'm waiting for the cheap unit that's sensitive enough to measure the 24 hour rotation of the Earth. Not because I have any wonderful use for it, but just because I think it would be cool to have something that sensitive which I could buy for ten bucks.
At what point do you consider a baby to be a person? After birth? What about premature babies? They are being born and surviving earilier and earlier. Once you have to determine when to label a fetus 'a person' the logic gets fuzzy.
That's pretty simple, actually. If it has grown enough of a brain to be able to wake up and be conscious, it's a baby. Until then, it is less than a baby (and if it took a wrong term in development and doesn't have a functioning brain, it never was a baby). This definition works no matter how good your support technology gets.
As for your first sentence, why would it be considered wrong? A brain-dead person can't consent either. Bad argument.
No, you missed the argument. The next of kin make the donation. In the case of the frozen embryo, the next of kin are the sperm and egg donors (for IVF operations, they are the people who were trying to become parents and if they are done with IVF, have probably become parents enough times to be finished).
The only way you can argue that donation of a 16-cell blastocyst for stem-cell research is immoral is either to argue that organ donation from cadavers is also immoral, OR to claim that the 16-cell stage of humanity is morally worth more than any other stage even if they are all facing imminent and inevitable death. I think that anyone who holds this view is either unable to grasp the implications (and is therefore stupid and not to be taken seriously except as cannon fodder in someone's ideological war), or is simply evil.
The argument that an embryo is not human life has always seemed very "hand-wavey" to me, with heavy use of scientific terminology that can't do justice to the profound question of l-i-f-e.
The handwaving (fallacy of equivocation, in logic-speak) of the RTL crowd regarding the word "life" is far worse.
Let me describe the difference between life and A LIFE to you. Life is anything which respires, metabolizes, etc. If the living whatever came from human origins, it's human life in some sense. However, that definition makes no distinction between a Nobel laureate, a brain-dead gunshot victim or a 16-cell embryo. In other words, it is meaningless for the purpose of deciding the question you think is so important. So why do you continue to use it?
A human life is something human which also has a functioning brain. Once you have brain death, the human life is gone even if you have organs and tissues plugging away. This is why a 16-cell pre-embryo is not A LIFE. It has no ability to think or even feel, it has no self, and nobody should be required by anything other than their own personal desire or sense of obligation to give it one. It comes down to personal conscience. If someone would rather that their 16-cell cluster be part of a cure for someone's nasty disease instead of becoming a baby they don't want, that's their right to determine - not yours.
If you are so insistent that 16-cell pre-embryos are full human beings, you should therefore have a funeral for every one which winds up on a tampon instead of growing into a baby. I know that even you think that this is ridiculous, which means that you don't even take your own argument seriously. Hypocrite.
In this scenario, a fuel cell powered laptop would need a reactant cartridge that the user must throw away and replace periodically.
When refill kits for overpriced ink-jet cartridges have been the rage for years, how long do you think it would be before someone had a methanol refill kit for your fuel-cell cartridge?
that people should not be used as means to other people's ends. I consider embryos to be people, so if you use an embryo as a means (via research) to cure someone else, I consider that an immoral act.
If you'd like to use your own stem cells, from your own body to do research, please feel free. Just don't take them from someone else without his or her consent.
You leave two very important questions unanswered:
Because you consider embryos to be people, I should be bound by your beliefs? Does freedom of conscience extend only as far as the right to agree with you?
Ponder the consequences, starting with the tenets of some of the more radical animal-rights groups. If a large group of folks decided that cows and chickens were people, would you give up hamburgers and omelettes?
An infant cannot give consent to donate its organs any more than an embryo can. However, the parents of dying/dead infants often donate their organs to save other people's children. This is where babies with biliary atresia (a congenital malformation of the bile ducts which is uniformly fatal) get their donor livers and another chance at life.
Is that wrong, by your lights?
If not, what is your argument against the parents of frozen pre-embryos (16-cell clusters) donating those cells for use in stem-cell research or treatments, instead of just throwing them down the sewer if they aren't going to be used? Keep in mind that the pre-embryo is dead either way, and that throwing away the pre-embryos is not at all different from the normal implantation failures of the human reproductive scheme.
Just for your information, I have never seen a decent response to either of these questions from a member of the right-to-life persuasion. Feel free to be the first.
The AMA's campaign against abortion wasn't about enlightening anyone; it was about shutting down competition from non-AMA practitioners who were successfully "treating" conditions such as "obstructed menses".
Most of the arguments against abortion in those times had to do with danger to the woman from e.g. the use of unsanitary instruments. Antibiotics wouldn't be available for the better part of a century. Now that the death rate from legal first-trimester abortion is a small fraction of the death rate from full-term pregnancy, all of these arguments (which are circumstantial, not moral) point the other way. Accordingly, the argument of the antis has changed. The AMA is mostly staying out of it, because they get the business either way and have no axe to grind (delivery pays better than abortions, but liability premiums for OB-GYN practice eats the difference).
If you put your cats out there just to be eaten by foxes, I don't think you're having much respect for the cats. Why don't you keep the cats indoors and let them eat whatever gets in, let the foxes have the mice which are still outdoors, and never the twain shall meet?
Sure we can recycle paper (which uses energy and releases polutants) but would yo want a house built out of recycled wood?
We're pretty much there already. Have you looked at structural beams and floor joists lately? They are no longer solid wood. The beams are laid up of layers of veneer, and the joists are I-beams with small cap-strips of solid wood (finger-jointed) joined by a web of waferboard. You can practically crank out floor joists out of debarked scrub timber and the chips and shavings you get from milling the cap strips.
We already make insulation out of used newsprint. If the price of wood goes much higher, it may become economical to make joists and beams out of recycled paper.
Steel and Aluminum are becoming more popular building materials, but those have to come from somewhere. How do you feel about mining?
Looks to me like a steel building could be recycled fairly easily, and a huge fraction of the earth's crust is aluminum (in the form of aluminum silicates). Then there are the low-tech standbys of adobe and rammed earth. How do you feel about digging up your building materials wherever you happen to be? Regardless of how primitive our methods are now, they won't remain so any more than aluminum remained more precious than gold.
What if something weird happens and the CO2 gets released in massive amounts?
That's rather unlikely, due to the depths we're talking about here, but... what if it doesn't get released?
The pH of the ocean is moderated by a carbonate/bicarbonate buffer. If you add acid to the ocean (including carbonic acid, H2CO3), some of the carbonate (CO3--) ions soak up hydrogen ions and become bicarbonate (HCO3-) ions. This is okay, but a lot of ocean organisms require carbonate ion to build their skeletons, including corals, molluscs, and a host of smaller things. Cut the fraction of carbonate in the ocean (and add acid, which tends to eat the carbonate they've already laid down) and they have a tough time surviving. The last thing we need at the moment is to put extra pressures on the surviving coral reefs, clam and oyster beds, and everything else out there.
Dumping CO2 where it changs the ocean chemistry may be a bad idea.
Using CO2 to extract the oil better (by pressurizing depleted oil fields)
If I understand correctly, the CO2 provides a lot more than just pressurization (otherwise, water would be just as good and a lot cheaper). Liquid CO2 is a solvent, and can dissolve and transport oil which would otherwise remain stuck in the pores of rocks. It offers a way to recover oil from "tapped out" fields (where water has infiltrated between the remaining spots of oil and keeps them from being pushed save by density differences), and of course - if the CO2 is there under the ground, it isn't in the atmosphere and might even form carbonate rocks to lock it into place permanently.
And we aren't talking about airliners here. I don't know of any accounts of airliners going missing in the Bermuda Triangle. Mostly military and light aircraft. These planes may be flying low and may not cruise faster than 150 knots.
Cessna 152, cruises at 95-106 knots depending on model. Stalls at 48 knots no flaps. That's a very healthy margin above the stall speed even if your air density suddenly drops by half.
Stalling has very little to do with speed, it's about angle of attack. A wing moving at 2x Vs with a 90 degree AOA is stalled, no? A sudden 50 knot updraft could result in a 30 degree change in AOA. You could go from straight and level to full stall with no warning, and your nose pointed at the horizon.
I've flown accelerated stalls before, I know what they feel like and how to recover the aircraft. Any pilot worth his salt is not going to lose control in an event like this.
You've probably also read of planes crasing due to severe turbulence. Wind shear is also a big factor.
Wind shear takes down aircraft on takeoff and approach to landing, because it deprives them of flying speed when they are low, slow and unable to recover in time to avoid the terrain. This is a very different case from an aircraft in cruise, where the biggest danger from severe turbulence is in-flight airframe failure.
Even an airframe failure would probably leave wreckage in the water (e.g. foam seat cushions), giving a hint as to what happened. That's why I discount things like this; there are too many ways for "normal" errors to account for the observations without having to posit methane bubbles or ET.
I checked your link. The fact that it's a personal web-page on RoadRunner should tell you something about its reliability, and the spelling and grammar errors ought to give you pause too. If it came from one of the national laboratories (such as nrel.doe.gov) I'd take it seriously, but not this.
You did notice that the qsl.net author says that you'll degauss your motor if you shut it down connected to a load, and that you need capacitance to excite it? You'd also lose voltage and frequency regulation if you weren't connected to the grid, and unless the outage was very localized you'd be trying to back-feed many times as much demand as your generator could satisfy. That would cause frequency to sag, followed by collapse of voltage when the frequency fell below resonance. At that point your line relay should drop out. This is not a problem for a properly-designed system, even a simple one.
The cleverest thing I ever saw along those lines is a micro-hydro system designed for the third world. It used an induction generator with a small inverter to supply magnetizing current; the inverter also acted as a dump load to maintain system frequency on spec. The entire system had one moving part.
It's safe to say that alot of people here have switching power supplies.
My point exactly. They are worse for the grid waveform than induction motors are. I did forget what may be the worst offender: SCR-based motor controls.
Actually, alot of- if not most induction motors hold enough residual magnetism to exite themselves up to generating even after a pretty good amount of time of inactivity...
I believe you are thinking of DC generators. Induction motors are fed AC, and degauss themselves as they operate.
Your everyday asynchronous generator/induction motor does NOT cease to generate when it looses it's excitation from the grid.
I'm very interested in anything you have to back this assertion; it contradicts everything I have learned about induction machines.
I am not talking about any kind of generator with a system to shut down based on frequency variations, etc. I am talking about some of the idiotic stuff the "gurella alternative power" nutcases out there try to pull. (No permits, no regulations, etc...so lets turn this motor into a genset and jack it into the grid!) That kinda crap gets linemen zapped...that's why those regulations exist. People tend not to be so responsible all too often. Hell...I wouldn't do it myself and I think I have at least a LITTLE clue what's going on.
The "guerrilla solar" things I've seen tend to use inverters which are designed to be grid-interactive; they are only bypassing obstructive permit procedures. I've also heard of induction generators being used on large wind turbines, so there must not be too many problems with them. Last, maybe if you did a bit more study of the issue you might conclude that the safety issues are negligible and that more important things, such as having an engine to run, a place to put it or a use for the waste heat keep you from bothering with it. (That's what's stopping me.)
But the bubble of methane would be rising at considerable speed.
It is not unusual for airliners to encounter currents of air rising at considerable speed.
The resultant updraft would cause a sudden increase in angle of attack almost certainly resulting in a stall.
Let's see. Suppose you're cruising at 35,000 feet with an air density of 1/4 sea level and a true air speed (TAS) of 500 knots, and an indicated air speed (IAS) of 250 knots. Your aircraft stalls clean (no flaps, no slats) at ~150 KIAS, so you have a whopping 100 knot IAS difference. If the methane bubble was rising at 50 knots, you might have to point the nose down about 5-8 degrees to hold altitude. This would effectively be soaring on the rising methane bubble.
A sudden stall warning during cruise is not a common occurance. The updraft would probably be short lived and by the time the pilot begins the stall recovery he may be out of it. He might wind up in a steep dive and not be able to recover.
I believe I've read of stall warnings activating during severe turbulence. Furthermore, a stalled wing still generates some lift, and during this entire event the aircraft would be moving forward at close to 500 knots; the pilot would have considerable airflow over the rudder and elevator and plenty of control authority in pitch and yaw even if the ailerons were stalled (unlikely, the root would stall first). Keeping the aircraft under control until it flew out of the bubble (and then re-lighting the flamed-out engines) wouldn't be difficult so long as the pilot was okay; if you got a flammable slug of methane-air mix into the cabin pressurization system, all bets are off.
If an induction motor is used as a generator on it's own (once exited, etc) and you through any substancial load at it, the waveform goes all to hell, etc.
Actually, no. No more than induction motors do. Induction generators draw magnetizing current (lagging waveform) from the grid, but they don't generate much in the way of nasty harmonics; to get really bad waveforms you need switching power supplies or SCR-based lamp dimmers.
It's a bad thing. Those induction generators are counting on the fact that the power company has more generating capacity than all of the induction motor generators out there by a large margin....you change that, and your gonna have trouble....
Nah. You put a capacitor across the line and generate some leading VARs to balance out the lagging VARs that the induction generator makes, and you're all set.
If the main power goes out, and your induction genny is still plugging...
It won't be. As soon as the induction generator loses its magnetizing current, it shuts down. If you put a capacitor on your end to move your load factor closer to 1 you might need an auto-shutdown based on frequency variation, because the capacitor might allow the generator to auto-excite.
This is such basic stuff....why do you people have to fuck it up?
The biggest landfill-gas operations only produce a few tens of megawatts (see this paper), which is nowhere near enough to meet the electrical needs of even the area served by the landfill. In addition to this, landfill gas is highly impure; if you want to do anything but use it on-site, you need expensive purification. Since there is more than enough electrical demand to consume all the gas, piping it elsewhere seems to be a waste of money.
If we were trying to do our best to avoid global warming, what we'd do is harvest the undersea methane, crack it into hydrogen gas and carbon compounds (such as CO2, but graphite would be preferable), and bury the carbon in a form which prevents it from being released for a very long time. We could do whatever we wanted with the hydrogen without worrying about climate change.
At depth, the pressure is high, the temp is about 4 degrees and methane will freeze solid just by the water pressure since its on the solid side of the triple point.
... and you cannot have a solid substance above the critical temperature anyway; the critical temperature for pure methane is -82.4 C. The only reason the methane can solidify is because it combines with water to form a clathrate.
Methane has a molecular weight of 16; air has a molecular weight of about 29. If you were going at more than about 1.4 times stall speed (and most aircraft do cruise quite a bit faster than that), the wing would not stall. Even if it did, all the pilot would have to do is point the nose down a bit to gain some airspeed and the plane would be flying again.
I don't watch the Discovery Channel, but if they didn't have anyone on staff with enough knowledge to rule out such obviously impossible failure modes you should not be using them as a source of information (at least not on a more trusted level than the National Enquirer).
Unfortunately, a pilot in the midst of a huge bubble of methane might not be able to manage that, plus the engine quitting or backfiring (and if the methane was mixed with enough air to be flammable, BOOM!), and even if neither of those things happened the pilot would be breathing toxic amounts of methane and might not be able to control the aircraft.
The main problem is that we actually get so much wind-generated electricity during a storm that we cannot get rid of it, this unbalances the power-grid and results in voltage and frequency instabilities.
If you can't handle this by shutting turbines down, you might have a hidden opportunity looking you in the face: find things to do with those watts. Some ideas:
Heat water. Over-heat the domestic hot water systems, if necessary (control outlet temperature with a tempering valve); if you get things hot enough you may not need any electricity for water heating for some time afterward. You could also dump some of this excess heat as space heat via radiators, allowing fossil-fired heating to be turned back or shut down for a while.
Charge batteries of hybrid vehicles. Most hybrids are designed to be independent of the electrical grid, but if your nation's fleet could be plugged in you could drain the batteries just as you got to your destination and then plug in to drive on wind power instead of oil. You'd need improved information systems to be able to do this - there would be no point in draining the vehicle battery if there was no charging facility where it was going, so the vehicle system has to know both the state of the grid and the destination of the current trip.
If you can keep energy-hungry systems like aluminum smelters on standby, use them to suck down the excess watts when you have them.
People keep suggesting that you make hydrogen, but the efficiency of electrolysis isn't all that great and the systems to make use of the hydrogen aren't there either. That makes it a much bigger infrastructure project than anything I suggested above.
The maximum energy transfer capacity along a line is mainly limited by its thermal capacity. (Crudely said: As long as the lines don't melt, they function).
I think you forgot transformers, which are often (if not usually) the limiting factors. A transformer can only move so many volt-amperes with a given size core at a certain frequency. It doesn't matter if they are real power or volt-amperes-reactive (VARs), they load the transformer just the same. You can generate VARs with reactance, which usually consumes little power, but it still costs money to do it and you need to up-grade the transformers from the load back to the point where you generate those VARs.
Another thing is that most switching power supplies use a bridge rectifier feeding a capacitive filter; these draw no current at the zero crossing, suddenly start drawing amps as the line voltage exceeds the capacitor voltage plus the diode drop(s), and then stop drawing current again shortly after the waveform peaks and the line voltage falls faster than the power supply draws down the filter cap. The harmonic content of such current waveforms is horrendous, and it really messes with transformers (and everything else in the system).
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Of course, when it comes time for Disney to give something back to the commons from which they've drawn so much, it's "different".
An engine running on ethanol can have higher compression than a gasoline engine and can thus have somewhat higher thermal efficiency, but this is not possible for dual-fuel engines.
All of this becomes moot if you employ alcohol (either methanol or ethanol) in a fuel cell. When you consider that a huge fraction of all domestic trash is paper and paper is just polymerized sugar, the amount of fuel we are just throwing away becomes apparent. Someday you might ferment yesterday's newspaper and your junk mail to run your mini-commuter car.
What lessons there are here for alternative energy cars, I don't know. Aside from the folks who burn used french-fry oil in their diesels, opportunities to run alternate-fuel vehicles without special support appear to be few and far between (save for block-heater-friendly Canadian cities being EV-friendly)
Me, I'm waiting for the cheap unit that's sensitive enough to measure the 24 hour rotation of the Earth. Not because I have any wonderful use for it, but just because I think it would be cool to have something that sensitive which I could buy for ten bucks.
The only way you can argue that donation of a 16-cell blastocyst for stem-cell research is immoral is either to argue that organ donation from cadavers is also immoral, OR to claim that the 16-cell stage of humanity is morally worth more than any other stage even if they are all facing imminent and inevitable death. I think that anyone who holds this view is either unable to grasp the implications (and is therefore stupid and not to be taken seriously except as cannon fodder in someone's ideological war), or is simply evil.
Let me describe the difference between life and A LIFE to you. Life is anything which respires, metabolizes, etc. If the living whatever came from human origins, it's human life in some sense. However, that definition makes no distinction between a Nobel laureate, a brain-dead gunshot victim or a 16-cell embryo. In other words, it is meaningless for the purpose of deciding the question you think is so important. So why do you continue to use it?
A human life is something human which also has a functioning brain. Once you have brain death, the human life is gone even if you have organs and tissues plugging away. This is why a 16-cell pre-embryo is not A LIFE. It has no ability to think or even feel, it has no self, and nobody should be required by anything other than their own personal desire or sense of obligation to give it one. It comes down to personal conscience. If someone would rather that their 16-cell cluster be part of a cure for someone's nasty disease instead of becoming a baby they don't want, that's their right to determine - not yours.
If you are so insistent that 16-cell pre-embryos are full human beings, you should therefore have a funeral for every one which winds up on a tampon instead of growing into a baby. I know that even you think that this is ridiculous, which means that you don't even take your own argument seriously. Hypocrite.
- Because you consider embryos to be people, I should be bound by your beliefs? Does freedom of conscience extend only as far as the right to agree with you?
- An infant cannot give consent to donate its organs any more than an embryo can. However, the parents of dying/dead infants often donate their organs to save other people's children. This is where babies with biliary atresia (a congenital malformation of the bile ducts which is uniformly fatal) get their donor livers and another chance at life.
Just for your information, I have never seen a decent response to either of these questions from a member of the right-to-life persuasion. Feel free to be the first.Ponder the consequences, starting with the tenets of some of the more radical animal-rights groups. If a large group of folks decided that cows and chickens were people, would you give up hamburgers and omelettes?
Is that wrong, by your lights?
If not, what is your argument against the parents of frozen pre-embryos (16-cell clusters) donating those cells for use in stem-cell research or treatments, instead of just throwing them down the sewer if they aren't going to be used? Keep in mind that the pre-embryo is dead either way, and that throwing away the pre-embryos is not at all different from the normal implantation failures of the human reproductive scheme.
Most of the arguments against abortion in those times had to do with danger to the woman from e.g. the use of unsanitary instruments. Antibiotics wouldn't be available for the better part of a century. Now that the death rate from legal first-trimester abortion is a small fraction of the death rate from full-term pregnancy, all of these arguments (which are circumstantial, not moral) point the other way. Accordingly, the argument of the antis has changed. The AMA is mostly staying out of it, because they get the business either way and have no axe to grind (delivery pays better than abortions, but liability premiums for OB-GYN practice eats the difference).
If you put your cats out there just to be eaten by foxes, I don't think you're having much respect for the cats. Why don't you keep the cats indoors and let them eat whatever gets in, let the foxes have the mice which are still outdoors, and never the twain shall meet?
We already make insulation out of used newsprint. If the price of wood goes much higher, it may become economical to make joists and beams out of recycled paper.
Looks to me like a steel building could be recycled fairly easily, and a huge fraction of the earth's crust is aluminum (in the form of aluminum silicates). Then there are the low-tech standbys of adobe and rammed earth. How do you feel about digging up your building materials wherever you happen to be? Regardless of how primitive our methods are now, they won't remain so any more than aluminum remained more precious than gold.The pH of the ocean is moderated by a carbonate/bicarbonate buffer. If you add acid to the ocean (including carbonic acid, H2CO3), some of the carbonate (CO3--) ions soak up hydrogen ions and become bicarbonate (HCO3-) ions. This is okay, but a lot of ocean organisms require carbonate ion to build their skeletons, including corals, molluscs, and a host of smaller things. Cut the fraction of carbonate in the ocean (and add acid, which tends to eat the carbonate they've already laid down) and they have a tough time surviving. The last thing we need at the moment is to put extra pressures on the surviving coral reefs, clam and oyster beds, and everything else out there.
Dumping CO2 where it changs the ocean chemistry may be a bad idea.
Even an airframe failure would probably leave wreckage in the water (e.g. foam seat cushions), giving a hint as to what happened. That's why I discount things like this; there are too many ways for "normal" errors to account for the observations without having to posit methane bubbles or ET.
You did notice that the qsl.net author says that you'll degauss your motor if you shut it down connected to a load, and that you need capacitance to excite it? You'd also lose voltage and frequency regulation if you weren't connected to the grid, and unless the outage was very localized you'd be trying to back-feed many times as much demand as your generator could satisfy. That would cause frequency to sag, followed by collapse of voltage when the frequency fell below resonance. At that point your line relay should drop out. This is not a problem for a properly-designed system, even a simple one.
The cleverest thing I ever saw along those lines is a micro-hydro system designed for the third world. It used an induction generator with a small inverter to supply magnetizing current; the inverter also acted as a dump load to maintain system frequency on spec. The entire system had one moving part.
If we were trying to do our best to avoid global warming, what we'd do is harvest the undersea methane, crack it into hydrogen gas and carbon compounds (such as CO2, but graphite would be preferable), and bury the carbon in a form which prevents it from being released for a very long time. We could do whatever we wanted with the hydrogen without worrying about climate change.
I don't watch the Discovery Channel, but if they didn't have anyone on staff with enough knowledge to rule out such obviously impossible failure modes you should not be using them as a source of information (at least not on a more trusted level than the National Enquirer).
Unfortunately, a pilot in the midst of a huge bubble of methane might not be able to manage that, plus the engine quitting or backfiring (and if the methane was mixed with enough air to be flammable, BOOM!), and even if neither of those things happened the pilot would be breathing toxic amounts of methane and might not be able to control the aircraft.
- Heat water. Over-heat the domestic hot water systems, if necessary (control outlet temperature with a tempering valve); if you get things hot enough you may not need any electricity for water heating for some time afterward. You could also dump some of this excess heat as space heat via radiators, allowing fossil-fired heating to be turned back or shut down for a while.
- Charge batteries of hybrid vehicles. Most hybrids are designed to be independent of the electrical grid, but if your nation's fleet could be plugged in you could drain the batteries just as you got to your destination and then plug in to drive on wind power instead of oil. You'd need improved information systems to be able to do this - there would be no point in draining the vehicle battery if there was no charging facility where it was going, so the vehicle system has to know both the state of the grid and the destination of the current trip.
- If you can keep energy-hungry systems like aluminum smelters on standby, use them to suck down the excess watts when you have them.
People keep suggesting that you make hydrogen, but the efficiency of electrolysis isn't all that great and the systems to make use of the hydrogen aren't there either. That makes it a much bigger infrastructure project than anything I suggested above.Another thing is that most switching power supplies use a bridge rectifier feeding a capacitive filter; these draw no current at the zero crossing, suddenly start drawing amps as the line voltage exceeds the capacitor voltage plus the diode drop(s), and then stop drawing current again shortly after the waveform peaks and the line voltage falls faster than the power supply draws down the filter cap. The harmonic content of such current waveforms is horrendous, and it really messes with transformers (and everything else in the system).