How many hillsides do you have to cover with windmills to match the power generation of a Grand Coulee or a Hoover Dam?
Not very many. You may question the source, but I've seen figures like this in enough places, and with no credible rebuttal, that I think we can accept them as reasonable ball-park figures:
Untapped wind potential of over 10,000 billion KWH (gawd what an ugly unit - why didn't they use quads?), which is some 3 times current US consumption.
The real problems with wind power aren't that it doesn't exist, it's that most sources are a long way from where consumers are (and nobody likes big transmission lines), and it can't be scheduled (you either use it when it's available or throw it away, and you need backup generation for your base load). If we had a much more opportunistic pattern of consumption we could get maximum benefit out of this, but right now our whole system is tied to consumers being able to flick loads on and off whenever they feel like it and most of them pay a flat rate regardless of the immediate supply/demand situation. Trying to re-engineer that to squeeze the most out of intermittent supplies like wind is going to be like pulling teeth on an irritable and unanesthetized orca.
It can be argued that nuclear waste containment costs are essentially infinite. You will spend money literally forever...
"Literally forever", to handle something which disappears by itself over time? Please do think about what "half-life" means.
Whether you are worried about chemical toxicity or terrorist actions, anything radioactive will someday become so dilute that it just isn't worth worrying about compared to other issues.
Geese have been observed to fly at up to 20,000 feet.
On the other hand, if you think that jetstreams occur anywhere near ground-level, you must have failed your earth-science course in junior high (or you went to a school which doesn't even teach that much science). Either way, it is an indictment of the educational system (of the USA, I presume). This has consequences all the way through the system, right down to public policy; if voters can't tell facts from bullshit, they'll vote for whoever's platform sounds "best" whether it's hard sanity or utter crap.
The only way you could say that is if you are completely ignorant of the facts. There have been many examples of environments changing around species, or species moving to new environments (e.g. the Hawiian wallaby) which created new selective pressures on them, which the species evolved to meet. In several cases, the strategy created a new species.
The problem with the fundamentalists and their "theories" is that they have to destroy people's ability to think before they can put forth their dogma. If someone analyzes the dogma for truthfulness and consistency, it fails; ergo, the victim must not be allowed to perform such analysis.
gi-tux shows signs of being such a victim.
There used to be a theory of gravity, it is now the law of gravity. It has been proven. It has been observed many times.
As before, you are wrong. The law of gravity was an observed fact (back to the days of Newton and Kepler in the 17th century) long before there was a theory to explain why gravity should exist (Einstein's theory of General Relativity in the 20th century). There are numerous phenomena which are observed, which are so consistent and without proven exception (despite our searching for them) that we call them "natural laws". These include the law of conservation of energy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and so forth.
If you had any idea of what you were talking about, you would know this. Instead, you are spouting drivel, such as one might get from some televangelist's radio program. When you have learned how to think critically, you will be able to participate meaningfully in discussions such as this; until then, you should stop repeating the dogma which has reduced you to the state in which you find yourself and start reading the background material which proved that the dogma was wrong.
The other poster has done a wonderful job of pointing you to facts. I won't presume to go over that material again; either you'll take the time to read it and learn, or you'll remain what you are.
But evolution is a theory. It can't be proven unless (according to the scientific process) someone sees it happen. To the best of my knowledge, no one has seen anything evolve into something else. Thus it remains a theory.
Are you saying that there is no theory of gravity, because it's been observed? (In other words, you're a sloppy thinker and a very poor troll.)
Evolution has been:
Observed to create new species in nature.
Observed to promote adaptation via selection both via natural and artificial forces.
Observed via living species (both from their morphology and their DNA) and the fossil record; there are heaps and heaps of evidence for evolution.
So, have you ever seen a species (or a universe) being created? Didn't think so. And if you're hearing voices in your head, medication can probably help you.
Heh, ask these questions, and you'll get uncomfortable feet-shuffling and red faces. Be prepared to be called a "zealot."
You mean "God shuffled his feet..." - Crash Test Dummies. His apologists do no better. And now I will address every one of the points you illustrated, mostly with knowledge gleaned from layman's publications and discussions on Usenet and the Web; you can see talkorigins.org for more comprehensive treatments.
1) Where are all of the transitional fossils?
It depends what you mean by "all". There are many organisms which probably never fossilized, or their fossils were in sedimentary rocks which have since eroded and been destroyed. We've only dug up a small fraction of the remainder, so we don't have "all of them" and never will.
However, the phrase "all of the transitional fossils" is usually used (dishonestly) by creationsts to claim that no such fossils exist. Of course, every time paleontologists find a transitional species between two other known species, this leaves two transitions to be filled instead of one... The fact that we have evidence of thousands and thousands of intermediate species, and that DNA evidence of living species backs up the morphological family tree to a degree which would be impossible save for common descent, is ironclad evidence that life on Earth evolved and continues to evolve.
2) How can you explain the presence of young comets in a solar system that is supposed to be "billions" of years old?
Comets which orbit in the Kuiper belt or further out remain "young" as long as they stay there. Until some gravitational perturbation changes their orbit to come close to a planet which slings their paths into the inner solar system, they never get "old". So yes, some comets we see could be billions of years old and still making their first passes near the Sun; this is why astronomers study them for evidence of the conditions prevailing in the early Solar System (and these astronomers are not creationists).
3) What caused the Big Bang?
We don't know yet. Science is never ashamed to admit lack of an answer where evidence is not available. Creationists have a disorder known in other contexts as Male Answer Syndrome and are unable to humble themselves to that point.
4) How do you explain the relative thinness of the layer of dust on the Moon? It should be much deeper if the Moon is billions of years old.
Dust is one thing, regolith is another. Solid rock on the Moon's surface is a rarity; most of it is material which has been bombarded and shattered dozens or thousands of times (look up "microbreccias" for an idea of what this produces). However, the surface of the Moon is in hard vacuum, and loose dust vacuum-welds together to form a more cohesive surface. It still has lots of open space and insulates extremely well, though; the Apollo heat-flow experiments had to sit for longer than their design lifetime for the heat of drilling to dissipate so that they could actually measure heat flow!
5) How do you reconcile the perfection of Scripture with the hoaxes and embarrassments of science (i.e., Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man, Lucy, etc.)
Funny you should mention that. Genesis has two distinct and contradictory creation stories, which religion has done a very poor job of even admitting, much less criticizing and correcting. As previously mentioned, the errors and hoaxes of science were found and corrected by scientists.
6) How do you counter the charge that modern Information Theory (IT) renders evolution all but impossible?
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."
There's a pretty good rebuttal of the IT claim in the Feb. 2001 post of the month. Or perhaps you should just walk your way through some of these Google search results; you might learn something if your mind is open to it.
The budget remained balanced until George W. Bush took office, cut taxes in a manner which was widely considered to be fiscally irresponsible, followed the events of 9/11 which led to increased spending and, and further exacerbated by the numerous corporate scandals and subsequent short-circuiting of the economic recovery which reduced revinue even more.
Au contraire, the budget was in surplus due to the bubble-economy of the Internet boom and the opposition between Republicans in the Congress and Clinton in the White House which kept them from agreeing on ways to spend all the revenue. (Gridlock is very often a good thing.) Bush I lost the election in no small part because of his tax increase (after running on a "No new taxes" pledge) and the recession it started; the recession was already going away in November 1992, but Clinton won the election anyway (and then he got to take credit for the expansion which followed). Clinton's poorly-advised "economic stimulus program" (pork-barrel spending) barely got out the door, and then there was 6 years of relatively stable economic policy, a welfare reform package which turned a lot of tax-consumers into taxpayers, and the aforementioned gridlock.
We would have lost the surplus anyway due to the bursting of the bubble economy; all you have to do to prove that to yourself is to look at the tax collections of the states, whether they cut taxes or not. They were also riding high on the capital-gains taxes of the.com economy, and when the.coms.bombed they went the same way as Washington; Bush II's tax cuts had nothing whatsoever do to with it, and could not have because the vast majority of them haven't even taken effect yet.
I do agree that we could be fighting the war against terrorism a lot more cheaply. The way to get rid of terrorists is to discredit the fundamentalists who need it to prop up their mind-share; we should be going after that entire segment of Asia with news reporting on shortwave and TV, education in the English language, and cultural propaganda in the form of Locke, Payne, Thoreau, Vogue and Playboy.
I'm a little hazy on that myself, but Perot no doubt set up the conditions for the Contract with America and a whole lot of limited-government, more-accountability electioneering. That in turn led to the Republicans capturing the House of Representatives in 1994 (with some help from Clinton's utter cluelessness on the issues of energy policy and health care). Perot dragged the Republican party away from the Religious Right for a little while and toward a more consistent stance on limited and efficient government (rather than "limited only where it doesn't offend our preachers"); unfortunately, it has fallen back.
You mentioned the problem inherent in your own proposition just there: ice crystals. The crystals would only have to be 5mm in area on one face to become as bad a problem as the space junk they are supposed to be deorbiting... and in the coldness of space on the dark-side of the earth, these would occur far too frequently.
Silly objection. Water ice sublimes rapidly in vacuum, and in order to get back to the tether it would have to make at least one complete orbit around the earth, at least half of which will be in full sunlight. Safe to say, it's not going to get back to the tether. (Water squirted out at the typical space-junk altitudes of 2000 miles and lower wouldn't get into orbit in the first place; they'd fall into the atmosphere. Might make a nice show on clear nights for people a bit to the east!)
when a piece of space junk impacts the outer shell, it makes a connection between the two plates of the capacitor, thus causing thousands of amps to flow through it - vaporizing it instantly.
The kinetic energy of most sand-grain sized space junk is enough to vaporize it if it's in a polar orbit; getting fancy with electrical discharges is just gilding the lily. The problem with that scheme is that the area you can sweep is limited to the area you can cover with matter, and you have to drag it through the upper atmosphere, avoid working satellites, and everything else. It's much more cost-efficient to have a laser "broom" to sweep stuff out of orbit; you can even keep most or all of the hardware on the ground.
If you are trying to enjoy your mobile computer lab in the country, running the engine (or even a generator) largely defeats the purpose of being somewhere peaceful and unpolluted. (The author did not say if he was working on vacation or touring schools and other events, so this might not be a factor.) The other detail is that most RV 12-volt electrical systems are run off the engine alternator, which probably puts out 150 amps for an extremely heavy-duty unit (typical HD is 70 amps). That's not going to run very many computers (1800 watts is only about 7 19-inch CRTs), so you can't run off the RV's engine very well; avoiding losses in the inverter is probably a smart move. A quick search found an ATX power supply which accepts 12 VDC in, and would probably be fine for this purpose.
There will be micrometeoroids in any event, which require a redundant tether (braided and interconnected) so that one hit doesn't take the whole thing out. The other factor is that the same transport network which allows easy access also allows systems to remove junk from orbit. Something as trivial as a squirtgun, hitting a passing piece of junk with a cloud of vapor and ice crystals, would destroy and/or deorbit most hazardous objects. You could use a laser system to detect and deorbit the ones which pass too far away to hit with material deflections.
Since everything is going to the same destination anyway, and the dynamics of e.g. the lunar and solar tides would tend to stress paired skyhooks pretty badly unless you winched them in and out to compensate, it's probably simpler to just have one.
Once you're up to the level of traffic which justifies multiple skyhooks, you might be better served by a launch loop or orbital ring, aka Skyrail. You could have a whole bunch of those operating simultaneously.
Researchers have been collecting samples of seawater for a lot longer than 20 years. The levels in historical data could have been relatively steady, for all that's in the article.
One thing for certain, if we are going to fight global warming we really can't afford substantial decreases in oceanic carbon fixation. We may have to do things like pumping nutrient-laden deep ocean water up to the surface to overcome the increased adverse thermal gradient and slowing winds (both of which tend to let the water stratify instead of mix).
I wasn't proposing to dump the load on warning (please read what I wrote). I proposed to prepare to dump load on warning, but not dump it until detection of a tremblor which was strong enough to actually produce damage. The warning system would not be superfluous; it would be used to vet inputs from local detectors so that a passing gravel hauler hitting a pothole doesn't cause the transmisson line going over the road to shut down.
Most of the damage to the grid in the past has come from the ground shaking uprooting and breaking stuff such as foundation bolts hold heavy stuff in place, or ceramic insulators on transformers or large power circuit breakers and transmission towers. Then this damage can cause an electrical short, which is then almost instantaneously isolated. The systems that are already in place can isolate shorts, grounds and opens in fractions of a second, on the order of a few cycles of a waveform of ac. I.e., the existing fault isolation systems and relays are already so fast a thirty second warning would be superfluous.
It depends what you are trying to do. If you are trying to prevent shorts between lines from setting off brush fires (making demands on a fire-fighting system which probably has its hands full already), killing the power before the shorts occur might still be a good idea; it would be saving things in general, rather than the grid in particular.
The thing you miss is that always-on pilot lights heat a thermocouple, which provides a small current to hold a valve open. If the pilot light goes out, the thermocouple cools and the gas supply shuts off; this is why you have to hold a button on the gas valve while lighting the pilot, and for long enough for the thermocouple to heat up.
I didn't include pilot-ignition systems in my account above because the cost of re-lighting them makes them a hassle in the event of false alarms. The idea is to incorporate quake-proofing measures into things where it adds a large amount of safety for little or no nuisance in the event of a false alarm.
Unfortunately, this looks like something that came out of the PR department rather than the engineering department. Spending $10,000 per year for power from a wind farm is one thing, but spending the same amount on the most-efficient available HVAC hardware might save money. Finding a way to day-light the building could eliminate electricity altogether for that purpose. Using ice-storage in the air-conditioning system would allow purchase of off-peak power, save a pile of dough and reduce the load on the overworked lines and transformers when they're being hit the hardest.
Unfortunately, none of that is quite as amenable to sexy sound bites as "wind-powered building".
It might take 30 seconds to leave your house, but it takes a lot less than that to go stand in a doorway. A list off the top of my head:
Electronic-ignition gas appliances could shut themselves off until the "all clear" sounded.
Trains, buses and other public transit could come to a halt before the rails or roadway ruptured.
Traffic signals could go 4-way red for half a minute.
Electrical systems could prepare for shutdown to prevent fires and other damage from short circuits (kill the circuit breakers at the first heavy shaking), and hospitals and the like could automatically start their emergency generators to prepare for cutover.
None of these things would have large costs from false alarms, but might prevent a lot of death and destruction if a real tremblor hit. Just being able to shut down the electrical grid would prevent transformers from being damaged by shorts and make it much easier to bring the system back up, and killing most open flames from water heaters and furnaces would prevent a lot of fires. This has real potential.
Lots of sailing boats have heat-exchanger pipes built into the keel. This lets them run a non-corrosive coolant through the engine and still cool it with water, while largely eliminating the barnacle problem (and of course, the keel can't clog). If you just tossed a copper loop over the side and ran coolant through it you'd accomplish more or less the same thing, though I would suggest running the loop under pressure (pump inlet is connected to header tank, pump outlet to seawater coil, seawater coil feeds computer and back to header tank) to avoid the possibility of seawater getting into the system through leaks.
If you own your home, you can put the foil on the back of a sheet of white fiberglass sheet instead of over foam insulation. You can then install this in place of a part of your roof, or as a roof over a south-facing deck or patio. It'll look like a poor man's skylight.
Fresnel zone plates reflect part of the signal, and pass part; this gives them the potential to have a focus point on either side (front of back) of the zone plate. For the deck or patio it would be good to design it so that the focus point was above the zone plate and right about at your house; you mount a little feed horn pointing down at the deck roof, and nobody's the wiser.
If you aren't into quite as much DIY+math you might be able to make a flat-plate antenna and find a way to masquerade it as something else (an awning? maybe a solar water heater?) but IIRC most satellite transmissions are circularly polarized and that might present some difficulties; I've never seen a non-linearly polarized flat-plate antenna before.
It's not economically feasible to run a french-fry operation for the waste-oil fuel, but since you're throwing away the spent fryer oil anyway it is cost-effective to burn it in an engine. The same thing with cow flop.
As others have noted, what's remarkable is that anyone thinks this is new. "Gobar gas" generators have been around for a quarter century or so, and the occasional sewage-plant worker has converted engines or whole vehicles (such as their personal cars) to run off of gas emitted by the decaying organic matter. That does include human waste, BTW...
Oddly, despite all the interest I've seen in composting toilets in various back-to-the-land magazines I cannot recall seeing one which is designed to produce methane as a byproduct. Maybe there is some liability issue, such as somebody would be certain to run a leaky gas-line indoors and poison themselves without the ethyl mercaptan additive to give the gas a strong warning smell.
Landfills also produce quite a bit of methane, which is burned off in most places. There are some projects going to convert this free fuel to useful energy; I don't have a URL handy but I've read a somewhat tedious PDF of a white paper about the power potential of a certain landfill (King county, WA I think) and how cost-effectively it could be harnessed. Food for thought.
Slashdot Mirror
Untapped wind potential of over 10,000 billion KWH (gawd what an ugly unit - why didn't they use quads?), which is some 3 times current US consumption.
Rosebud Sioux reservation is good for 35,000 megawatts (that's 35 gigawatts) in ONE COUNTY.
The real problems with wind power aren't that it doesn't exist, it's that most sources are a long way from where consumers are (and nobody likes big transmission lines), and it can't be scheduled (you either use it when it's available or throw it away, and you need backup generation for your base load). If we had a much more opportunistic pattern of consumption we could get maximum benefit out of this, but right now our whole system is tied to consumers being able to flick loads on and off whenever they feel like it and most of them pay a flat rate regardless of the immediate supply/demand situation. Trying to re-engineer that to squeeze the most out of intermittent supplies like wind is going to be like pulling teeth on an irritable and unanesthetized orca.
Whether you are worried about chemical toxicity or terrorist actions, anything radioactive will someday become so dilute that it just isn't worth worrying about compared to other issues.
On the other hand, if you think that jetstreams occur anywhere near ground-level, you must have failed your earth-science course in junior high (or you went to a school which doesn't even teach that much science). Either way, it is an indictment of the educational system (of the USA, I presume). This has consequences all the way through the system, right down to public policy; if voters can't tell facts from bullshit, they'll vote for whoever's platform sounds "best" whether it's hard sanity or utter crap.
The only way you could say that is if you are completely ignorant of the facts. There have been many examples of environments changing around species, or species moving to new environments (e.g. the Hawiian wallaby) which created new selective pressures on them, which the species evolved to meet. In several cases, the strategy created a new species.
gi-tux shows signs of being such a victim.
As before, you are wrong. The law of gravity was an observed fact (back to the days of Newton and Kepler in the 17th century) long before there was a theory to explain why gravity should exist (Einstein's theory of General Relativity in the 20th century). There are numerous phenomena which are observed, which are so consistent and without proven exception (despite our searching for them) that we call them "natural laws". These include the law of conservation of energy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and so forth.If you had any idea of what you were talking about, you would know this. Instead, you are spouting drivel, such as one might get from some televangelist's radio program. When you have learned how to think critically, you will be able to participate meaningfully in discussions such as this; until then, you should stop repeating the dogma which has reduced you to the state in which you find yourself and start reading the background material which proved that the dogma was wrong.
The other poster has done a wonderful job of pointing you to facts. I won't presume to go over that material again; either you'll take the time to read it and learn, or you'll remain what you are.
Evolution has been:
- Observed to create new species in nature.
- Observed to promote adaptation via selection both via natural and artificial forces.
- Observed via living species (both from their morphology and their DNA) and the fossil record; there are heaps and heaps of evidence for evolution.
So, have you ever seen a species (or a universe) being created? Didn't think so. And if you're hearing voices in your head, medication can probably help you.However, the phrase "all of the transitional fossils" is usually used (dishonestly) by creationsts to claim that no such fossils exist. Of course, every time paleontologists find a transitional species between two other known species, this leaves two transitions to be filled instead of one... The fact that we have evidence of thousands and thousands of intermediate species, and that DNA evidence of living species backs up the morphological family tree to a degree which would be impossible save for common descent, is ironclad evidence that life on Earth evolved and continues to evolve.
Comets which orbit in the Kuiper belt or further out remain "young" as long as they stay there. Until some gravitational perturbation changes their orbit to come close to a planet which slings their paths into the inner solar system, they never get "old". So yes, some comets we see could be billions of years old and still making their first passes near the Sun; this is why astronomers study them for evidence of the conditions prevailing in the early Solar System (and these astronomers are not creationists). We don't know yet. Science is never ashamed to admit lack of an answer where evidence is not available. Creationists have a disorder known in other contexts as Male Answer Syndrome and are unable to humble themselves to that point. Dust is one thing, regolith is another. Solid rock on the Moon's surface is a rarity; most of it is material which has been bombarded and shattered dozens or thousands of times (look up "microbreccias" for an idea of what this produces). However, the surface of the Moon is in hard vacuum, and loose dust vacuum-welds together to form a more cohesive surface. It still has lots of open space and insulates extremely well, though; the Apollo heat-flow experiments had to sit for longer than their design lifetime for the heat of drilling to dissipate so that they could actually measure heat flow! Funny you should mention that. Genesis has two distinct and contradictory creation stories, which religion has done a very poor job of even admitting, much less criticizing and correcting. As previously mentioned, the errors and hoaxes of science were found and corrected by scientists. "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."There's a pretty good rebuttal of the IT claim in the Feb. 2001 post of the month. Or perhaps you should just walk your way through some of these Google search results; you might learn something if your mind is open to it.
C6H12O6 + 6 H2O -> 6 CO2 + 12 H2
We would have lost the surplus anyway due to the bursting of the bubble economy; all you have to do to prove that to yourself is to look at the tax collections of the states, whether they cut taxes or not. They were also riding high on the capital-gains taxes of the .com economy, and when the .coms .bombed they went the same way as Washington; Bush II's tax cuts had nothing whatsoever do to with it, and could not have because the vast majority of them haven't even taken effect yet.
I do agree that we could be fighting the war against terrorism a lot more cheaply. The way to get rid of terrorists is to discredit the fundamentalists who need it to prop up their mind-share; we should be going after that entire segment of Asia with news reporting on shortwave and TV, education in the English language, and cultural propaganda in the form of Locke, Payne, Thoreau, Vogue and Playboy.
I'm a little hazy on that myself, but Perot no doubt set up the conditions for the Contract with America and a whole lot of limited-government, more-accountability electioneering. That in turn led to the Republicans capturing the House of Representatives in 1994 (with some help from Clinton's utter cluelessness on the issues of energy policy and health care). Perot dragged the Republican party away from the Religious Right for a little while and toward a more consistent stance on limited and efficient government (rather than "limited only where it doesn't offend our preachers"); unfortunately, it has fallen back.
If you are trying to enjoy your mobile computer lab in the country, running the engine (or even a generator) largely defeats the purpose of being somewhere peaceful and unpolluted. (The author did not say if he was working on vacation or touring schools and other events, so this might not be a factor.) The other detail is that most RV 12-volt electrical systems are run off the engine alternator, which probably puts out 150 amps for an extremely heavy-duty unit (typical HD is 70 amps). That's not going to run very many computers (1800 watts is only about 7 19-inch CRTs), so you can't run off the RV's engine very well; avoiding losses in the inverter is probably a smart move. A quick search found an ATX power supply which accepts 12 VDC in, and would probably be fine for this purpose.
There will be micrometeoroids in any event, which require a redundant tether (braided and interconnected) so that one hit doesn't take the whole thing out. The other factor is that the same transport network which allows easy access also allows systems to remove junk from orbit. Something as trivial as a squirtgun, hitting a passing piece of junk with a cloud of vapor and ice crystals, would destroy and/or deorbit most hazardous objects. You could use a laser system to detect and deorbit the ones which pass too far away to hit with material deflections.
Once you're up to the level of traffic which justifies multiple skyhooks, you might be better served by a launch loop or orbital ring, aka Skyrail. You could have a whole bunch of those operating simultaneously.
One thing for certain, if we are going to fight global warming we really can't afford substantial decreases in oceanic carbon fixation. We may have to do things like pumping nutrient-laden deep ocean water up to the surface to overcome the increased adverse thermal gradient and slowing winds (both of which tend to let the water stratify instead of mix).
I wasn't proposing to dump the load on warning (please read what I wrote). I proposed to prepare to dump load on warning, but not dump it until detection of a tremblor which was strong enough to actually produce damage. The warning system would not be superfluous; it would be used to vet inputs from local detectors so that a passing gravel hauler hitting a pothole doesn't cause the transmisson line going over the road to shut down.
I didn't include pilot-ignition systems in my account above because the cost of re-lighting them makes them a hassle in the event of false alarms. The idea is to incorporate quake-proofing measures into things where it adds a large amount of safety for little or no nuisance in the event of a false alarm.
Unfortunately, none of that is quite as amenable to sexy sound bites as "wind-powered building".
http://www.pressconnects.com/tuesday/news/stories/ ne081302s10797.shtml
- Electronic-ignition gas appliances could shut themselves off until the "all clear" sounded.
- Trains, buses and other public transit could come to a halt before the rails or roadway ruptured.
- Traffic signals could go 4-way red for half a minute.
- Electrical systems could prepare for shutdown to prevent fires and other damage from short circuits (kill the circuit breakers at the first heavy shaking), and hospitals and the like could automatically start their emergency generators to prepare for cutover.
None of these things would have large costs from false alarms, but might prevent a lot of death and destruction if a real tremblor hit. Just being able to shut down the electrical grid would prevent transformers from being damaged by shorts and make it much easier to bring the system back up, and killing most open flames from water heaters and furnaces would prevent a lot of fires. This has real potential.Lots of sailing boats have heat-exchanger pipes built into the keel. This lets them run a non-corrosive coolant through the engine and still cool it with water, while largely eliminating the barnacle problem (and of course, the keel can't clog). If you just tossed a copper loop over the side and ran coolant through it you'd accomplish more or less the same thing, though I would suggest running the loop under pressure (pump inlet is connected to header tank, pump outlet to seawater coil, seawater coil feeds computer and back to header tank) to avoid the possibility of seawater getting into the system through leaks.
Fresnel zone plates reflect part of the signal, and pass part; this gives them the potential to have a focus point on either side (front of back) of the zone plate. For the deck or patio it would be good to design it so that the focus point was above the zone plate and right about at your house; you mount a little feed horn pointing down at the deck roof, and nobody's the wiser.
If you aren't into quite as much DIY+math you might be able to make a flat-plate antenna and find a way to masquerade it as something else (an awning? maybe a solar water heater?) but IIRC most satellite transmissions are circularly polarized and that might present some difficulties; I've never seen a non-linearly polarized flat-plate antenna before.
It's not economically feasible to run a french-fry operation for the waste-oil fuel, but since you're throwing away the spent fryer oil anyway it is cost-effective to burn it in an engine. The same thing with cow flop.
Oddly, despite all the interest I've seen in composting toilets in various back-to-the-land magazines I cannot recall seeing one which is designed to produce methane as a byproduct. Maybe there is some liability issue, such as somebody would be certain to run a leaky gas-line indoors and poison themselves without the ethyl mercaptan additive to give the gas a strong warning smell.
Landfills also produce quite a bit of methane, which is burned off in most places. There are some projects going to convert this free fuel to useful energy; I don't have a URL handy but I've read a somewhat tedious PDF of a white paper about the power potential of a certain landfill (King county, WA I think) and how cost-effectively it could be harnessed. Food for thought.