Some years ago I heard a BOOM from an unknown source, and when next I went down the road, there lay the remains of my neighbour's [two miles away] garage and windbreak.
Seems his travel trailer's 5 gallon propane tank had gone up (probably the result of mutual leaks between the propane lines and an ammonia fridge). All that was left of the trailer was the frame. The two-car garage to one side was totally flattened (thus saving the house) as was the row of mature pines to the other side.
And that was just a little bitty propane tank, probably more empty than not.
At a reasonable guess, 90% of the gasoline used in California each day is consumed by folks who must commute more than 100 miles** to work EVERY DAY. Presently, the average vehicle needs the gas tank refilled about twice a week.
However, if all you get from a tank of fuel is about 100 miles, that means refills once or even twice a day. Lines at the fuel station are long enough as it is -- no one is going to willingly spend an extra half-hour every day just to fuel up, unless it is seriously cost effective.
** Don't tell us to "live closer to work" -- in CA, such housing either doesn't exist, is such a slum you wouldn't dare live there, or is so expensive you can't afford to live there. The last "affordable" [sub-$300k] housing in SoCal is now 65 miles (about two hours each way during rush hour) from downtown L.A., in an area with almost no jobs above $8/hr. (and not many of those), and with very limited commuter train access.
But with an average daily commute now costing around $600/month (whether you drive or take the train)... either we come up with some much-cheaper alternative in a hurry, or we're going to have a massive new population of the unemployed here, who can no longer *afford* to go to work.
A further downside is that those who most need the commute cost break are those least able to afford a new vehicle that uses some cheaper fuel.
Not only does reducing bauxite to aluminum take a lot of energy (as many have pointed out, to the point of being totally impractical unless you have cheap electricity available), someone must first mine the bauxite and transport it to the production plant (as no one has yet seemed to notice). And while hardly rare, the reasonably-handy supply of bauxite isn't unlimited, either.
I'm reminded of schemes put forth in the 1960s to extract all our needful metals from ocean waters, where they exist in dissolved abundance -- neglecting to notice that it takes an awful lot of ocean to produce one pound of metal!
The price of stuff made of nothing but scrap iron (rebar, fence fabric, farm panels, etc.) has nearly doubled in the past couple years. I take this to be partly due to direct increases in manufacturing costs, and the rest due to *massive* increases in distribution costs, since most such stuff is ferried to retailers by truck.
Re:there's old analog tech that does it better...
on
Remote Control for Humans?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
But you could choose to defy the gun or the whip (albeit with potentially dire consequences; nonetheless, the choice still exists). You might not be physically *able* to defy this gizmo.
If such a device were available in a high-powered, long-range model (defined as a few hundred metres) then crowd control might be possible whether the crowd consented to be controlled or not -- just make them all wobble off in the desired direction.
Warfare becomes a matter of "He with the strongest broadcast, and/or the best tinfoil hats, wins".
Bank being robbed? No problem, just turn on the brain buzzer and make everyone in the building fall helpless to the floor. Then when the tinfoil-hat-equipped cops arrive, they can sort out the perps from the customers. Of course, smart crooks soon arm themselves not with guns, but rather with tinfoil hats.
Meanwhile, some folk hit by these brain-buzzers are permanently damaged, and spend the rest of their days careening in circles.
Farfetched, yeah, but such are the logical extensions, given sufficient broadcast power.
Best of all, chainmail headgear could come back in fashion!
I use a DOS boot disk every single time I prep a new hard disk or new system (which in my role as hardware guru for the local user group, is often). I run the partitioner from DOS and do the initial setup in DOS. Thus I not only have more direct control, I also discover sooner when something isn't working. And the whole process is a matter of a few minutes, with no large OS to install and no drivers to locate and/or fight with.
With a seriously screwed-up machine, it's often much faster to fix Windows from a DOS boot disk than it would be to reinstall Windows, hunt down obscure or nameless drivers, and do battle with OEM "tech support".
So, while average users nowadays have little need for DOS, we folk who get our hands dirty certainly still use it, and are glad to have it.
So now I'm wondering about supplemental DC wiring in a house, where it could power lighting and former wall-warts... would it be possible to put an adjustable rectifier at each DC outlet, so you could set it for the device in question? or is it possible to do autosensing? (I've been told that some laptop bricks do that, and only supply the required voltage for that model of laptop.)
I have a bunch of fluorescents; I hate them (they make everything fuzzy-edged, and they are painfully bright to my eyes) but with SoCal's outrageous electric rates, well, regular lights cost $30/mo. to run, and fluorescent about $8. I've had some since 1998, long enough that some have failed.
When they're new, they are relatively cool to the touch (compared to incandescent). However, as they age, they run hotter and hotter (they also get slightly dimmer with age, and tend to slide toward a less-annoying spectrum, with somewhat less blue skew). When they're close to failing, they get VERY hot.
I have some LED nightlights; their light is blue-white and not very good quality (fuzzy) compared to the ones that use an Xmas-tree type bulb. They only use 1/2W (vs 4W for the Xmas lights) but only produce maybe 10% as much *usable* light.
I totally agree with you. The yellow and pink street lighting of the present is ugly, and not as effective as the old traditional white lights.
Pink lights were first used in Great Falls MT ("The Electric City" because unlike most places where there were only corner lights, GF had three per block) in the late 1960s, and complaints from residents were rampant. But they were "better" so they stayed.
I still hate them. And relative to the visual usefulness of the light they produce, these newfangled lights simply don't work as well as the old white lights, AND they produce more light pollution for the same amount of *useful* light.
See above where I talk about how yellow sodium lights make my light green truck completely invisible at night.
In SoCal, most new street lighting is of a pinkish shade (I don't know what type it is; I do know it appears more yellowish to people with average to poor colour vision. I have that freaky extra-keen colour vision, and I tell you, it is more pink than yellow.) Not only is it ugly, the light pollution produced by these lights is several times as bad as that from ordinary traditional white streetlights.
Furthermore, even to folk like myself with very good night vision (I'm often accused of being a vampire:) the useful quality of this pink light isn't as good as traditional street lighting; the pink lights put a fuzzy edge on everything. This in fact was a common residential complaint when they first came into use in Great Falls MT, back in the late 1960s.
The sodium street lights in Long Beach CA are brilliant yellow.
My truck is a pale jade-green (officially known as "Ford Puke Green, 1978 version").
My truck is *invisible* under Long Beach's sodium lights. From the driver's seat, it looks like the hood isn't there, you just see this blank area in front of the truck. And I once lost it in an empty parking lot, and almost walked into it before I found it.
Mind you, I have freakishly good colour vision, and can distinguish shades far more acutely than most folk. So it ain't just me.:)
And yes, if you walk into a Ford dealer and ask for "puke green" paint, they know which colour you mean:)
Please inform the bugs in my neighbourhood, which are attracted in swarms to the plain white fluoresecent bulb that lights my porch. Several toads and preying mantises make a permanent home on my porch, ecstatic over the eternal bounty.
"Any guess on how long it will take Rattus norvegicus to surpass us?"
I dunno... we've been killing 'em off for several thousand years now, and while the end of the war is nowhere in sight, neither have rats gained much from the contest.
The very best bait for rodents is dry dog food (cat food is also good but they prefer dog food). They will go to any lengths to get to it, probably because of its conveniently-dense proteins and fats. As a side effect, the vitamin K content in dog food is high enough to "immunize" rodents against blood-thinning type poisons. If such poisons aren't working, access to dog food may be the culprit.
Chickens and pigs prey on rodents when they can, tho I'm not sure a pig in your basement is a great improvement over rats in your basement.:)
What about small "disposable" HDs, in the same class of device that we now consider thumb drives and other removable gadgets? if they can be made cheaply enough, they'd become practical.
Frex, movie rentals could use these small (HD-DVD sized capacities) HDs instead of write-once media. Instead of having a big physical inventory of DVDs, you'd have printed covers on the shelf and a single digital copy on a large HD, and you'd copy it to the "disposable HD" on an on-demand basis. When the DHD comes back to the store, just rewrite it for the next customer, on the fly at checkout time. Rent multiple movies with just one physical unit for the customer to keep track of. (Also useful for libraries.)
With new types of large-capacity flash memory (ie. very shock-resistant compared to conventional HDs) on the horizon, this might become practical. And with what amounts to a cheap external HD bay (or glorified memory card reader) that can plug into a USB port on a PC or the standard input jack on a set-top player, compatibility with existing devices wouldn't be an issue.
[I vaguely recall such uses were "planned" for Jazz drives and similar rewritable optical media, way back when, but they never got out of a prohibitive price range, so the idea never went anywhere.]
Anyway, such thoughts were generated by your post; they are probably already technogically obsolete.:)
Sad to say, in today's utilities market, the only cure for that attitude is an explosion, a bunch of your street's residents killed, and a mondo wrongful-death suit.
"I think the combustion of the gaseous/aerosolized diesel also leads to finer soot production than say the combustion of wood logs in a fireplace."
Seems reasonable, and in line with what I've observed. Diesel soot seems very fine-grained, much akin to cig smoke residue (as observed inside computers!)
Coal smoke (presumably consisting largely of coal soot) is "heavy" enough that when the temperature is below -40 degrees, it struggles up the chimney, slides down the side of the building, and lays there in a pile; you can actually shovel up the coal smoke and carry it away in a bucket! (Speaking from firsthand experience -- when I lived in MT, I used coal in the woodstove because at -40, wood doesn't cut it.)
Ah, okay. Um.. what's different about soot from diesel combustion, as opposed to combustion of other commonly-burnt large-molecule fuels (frex, wood)??
Cancer secondary to absestos might be simply a side effect from chronic micro-injury and irritation, with the severity/alacrity of response dependant on genetic susceptibility to cancer. Frex, I've personally seen bruising to mammary tissue in lactating animals very quickly turn into first mastitis and then localized adenocarcinoma, and I know the same chain of events has been reported at least twice in humans (tho AFAIK hasn't been seriously looked at as an initiating factor in genetically-susceptible humans).
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Some years ago I heard a BOOM from an unknown source, and when next I went down the road, there lay the remains of my neighbour's [two miles away] garage and windbreak.
Seems his travel trailer's 5 gallon propane tank had gone up (probably the result of mutual leaks between the propane lines and an ammonia fridge). All that was left of the trailer was the frame. The two-car garage to one side was totally flattened (thus saving the house) as was the row of mature pines to the other side.
And that was just a little bitty propane tank, probably more empty than not.
At a reasonable guess, 90% of the gasoline used in California each day is consumed by folks who must commute more than 100 miles** to work EVERY DAY. Presently, the average vehicle needs the gas tank refilled about twice a week.
... either we come up with some much-cheaper alternative in a hurry, or we're going to have a massive new population of the unemployed here, who can no longer *afford* to go to work.
However, if all you get from a tank of fuel is about 100 miles, that means refills once or even twice a day. Lines at the fuel station are long enough as it is -- no one is going to willingly spend an extra half-hour every day just to fuel up, unless it is seriously cost effective.
** Don't tell us to "live closer to work" -- in CA, such housing either doesn't exist, is such a slum you wouldn't dare live there, or is so expensive you can't afford to live there. The last "affordable" [sub-$300k] housing in SoCal is now 65 miles (about two hours each way during rush hour) from downtown L.A., in an area with almost no jobs above $8/hr. (and not many of those), and with very limited commuter train access.
But with an average daily commute now costing around $600/month (whether you drive or take the train)
A further downside is that those who most need the commute cost break are those least able to afford a new vehicle that uses some cheaper fuel.
Not to mention the monohydrazine that powered the spaceship "Salvage 1". ;)
Not only does reducing bauxite to aluminum take a lot of energy (as many have pointed out, to the point of being totally impractical unless you have cheap electricity available), someone must first mine the bauxite and transport it to the production plant (as no one has yet seemed to notice). And while hardly rare, the reasonably-handy supply of bauxite isn't unlimited, either.
I'm reminded of schemes put forth in the 1960s to extract all our needful metals from ocean waters, where they exist in dissolved abundance -- neglecting to notice that it takes an awful lot of ocean to produce one pound of metal!
The price of stuff made of nothing but scrap iron (rebar, fence fabric, farm panels, etc.) has nearly doubled in the past couple years. I take this to be partly due to direct increases in manufacturing costs, and the rest due to *massive* increases in distribution costs, since most such stuff is ferried to retailers by truck.
Whaddya mean, "anymore"?? I read that mumbledy-decades ago. Both books, in fact.
Zenna Henderson page: http://www.adherents.com/lit/bk_Zenna.html
But you could choose to defy the gun or the whip (albeit with potentially dire consequences; nonetheless, the choice still exists). You might not be physically *able* to defy this gizmo.
If such a device were available in a high-powered, long-range model (defined as a few hundred metres) then crowd control might be possible whether the crowd consented to be controlled or not -- just make them all wobble off in the desired direction.
Warfare becomes a matter of "He with the strongest broadcast, and/or the best tinfoil hats, wins".
Bank being robbed? No problem, just turn on the brain buzzer and make everyone in the building fall helpless to the floor. Then when the tinfoil-hat-equipped cops arrive, they can sort out the perps from the customers. Of course, smart crooks soon arm themselves not with guns, but rather with tinfoil hats.
Meanwhile, some folk hit by these brain-buzzers are permanently damaged, and spend the rest of their days careening in circles.
Farfetched, yeah, but such are the logical extensions, given sufficient broadcast power.
Best of all, chainmail headgear could come back in fashion!
Or use it as a way to store and/or exchange keys, without any two users of said keys ever needing to be in direct contact.
Is there anyone you *would* buy used toothpicks from? Cuz if so, do I have a deal for you! ;)
I use a DOS boot disk every single time I prep a new hard disk or new system (which in my role as hardware guru for the local user group, is often). I run the partitioner from DOS and do the initial setup in DOS. Thus I not only have more direct control, I also discover sooner when something isn't working. And the whole process is a matter of a few minutes, with no large OS to install and no drivers to locate and/or fight with.
With a seriously screwed-up machine, it's often much faster to fix Windows from a DOS boot disk than it would be to reinstall Windows, hunt down obscure or nameless drivers, and do battle with OEM "tech support".
So, while average users nowadays have little need for DOS, we folk who get our hands dirty certainly still use it, and are glad to have it.
It's time to change your bulb.
So now I'm wondering about supplemental DC wiring in a house, where it could power lighting and former wall-warts... would it be possible to put an adjustable rectifier at each DC outlet, so you could set it for the device in question? or is it possible to do autosensing? (I've been told that some laptop bricks do that, and only supply the required voltage for that model of laptop.)
I have a bunch of fluorescents; I hate them (they make everything fuzzy-edged, and they are painfully bright to my eyes) but with SoCal's outrageous electric rates, well, regular lights cost $30/mo. to run, and fluorescent about $8. I've had some since 1998, long enough that some have failed.
When they're new, they are relatively cool to the touch (compared to incandescent). However, as they age, they run hotter and hotter (they also get slightly dimmer with age, and tend to slide toward a less-annoying spectrum, with somewhat less blue skew). When they're close to failing, they get VERY hot.
I have some LED nightlights; their light is blue-white and not very good quality (fuzzy) compared to the ones that use an Xmas-tree type bulb. They only use 1/2W (vs 4W for the Xmas lights) but only produce maybe 10% as much *usable* light.
I totally agree with you. The yellow and pink street lighting of the present is ugly, and not as effective as the old traditional white lights.
Pink lights were first used in Great Falls MT ("The Electric City" because unlike most places where there were only corner lights, GF had three per block) in the late 1960s, and complaints from residents were rampant. But they were "better" so they stayed.
I still hate them. And relative to the visual usefulness of the light they produce, these newfangled lights simply don't work as well as the old white lights, AND they produce more light pollution for the same amount of *useful* light.
See above where I talk about how yellow sodium lights make my light green truck completely invisible at night.
:) the useful quality of this pink light isn't as good as traditional street lighting; the pink lights put a fuzzy edge on everything. This in fact was a common residential complaint when they first came into use in Great Falls MT, back in the late 1960s.
In SoCal, most new street lighting is of a pinkish shade (I don't know what type it is; I do know it appears more yellowish to people with average to poor colour vision. I have that freaky extra-keen colour vision, and I tell you, it is more pink than yellow.) Not only is it ugly, the light pollution produced by these lights is several times as bad as that from ordinary traditional white streetlights.
Furthermore, even to folk like myself with very good night vision (I'm often accused of being a vampire
The sodium street lights in Long Beach CA are brilliant yellow.
:)
:)
My truck is a pale jade-green (officially known as "Ford Puke Green, 1978 version").
My truck is *invisible* under Long Beach's sodium lights. From the driver's seat, it looks like the hood isn't there, you just see this blank area in front of the truck. And I once lost it in an empty parking lot, and almost walked into it before I found it.
Mind you, I have freakishly good colour vision, and can distinguish shades far more acutely than most folk. So it ain't just me.
And yes, if you walk into a Ford dealer and ask for "puke green" paint, they know which colour you mean
Please inform the bugs in my neighbourhood, which are attracted in swarms to the plain white fluoresecent bulb that lights my porch. Several toads and preying mantises make a permanent home on my porch, ecstatic over the eternal bounty.
"Any guess on how long it will take Rattus norvegicus to surpass us?"
I dunno... we've been killing 'em off for several thousand years now, and while the end of the war is nowhere in sight, neither have rats gained much from the contest.
The very best bait for rodents is dry dog food (cat food is also good but they prefer dog food). They will go to any lengths to get to it, probably because of its conveniently-dense proteins and fats. As a side effect, the vitamin K content in dog food is high enough to "immunize" rodents against blood-thinning type poisons. If such poisons aren't working, access to dog food may be the culprit.
:)
Chickens and pigs prey on rodents when they can, tho I'm not sure a pig in your basement is a great improvement over rats in your basement.
What about small "disposable" HDs, in the same class of device that we now consider thumb drives and other removable gadgets? if they can be made cheaply enough, they'd become practical.
:)
Frex, movie rentals could use these small (HD-DVD sized capacities) HDs instead of write-once media. Instead of having a big physical inventory of DVDs, you'd have printed covers on the shelf and a single digital copy on a large HD, and you'd copy it to the "disposable HD" on an on-demand basis. When the DHD comes back to the store, just rewrite it for the next customer, on the fly at checkout time. Rent multiple movies with just one physical unit for the customer to keep track of. (Also useful for libraries.)
With new types of large-capacity flash memory (ie. very shock-resistant compared to conventional HDs) on the horizon, this might become practical. And with what amounts to a cheap external HD bay (or glorified memory card reader) that can plug into a USB port on a PC or the standard input jack on a set-top player, compatibility with existing devices wouldn't be an issue.
[I vaguely recall such uses were "planned" for Jazz drives and similar rewritable optical media, way back when, but they never got out of a prohibitive price range, so the idea never went anywhere.]
Anyway, such thoughts were generated by your post; they are probably already technogically obsolete.
Sad to say, in today's utilities market, the only cure for that attitude is an explosion, a bunch of your street's residents killed, and a mondo wrongful-death suit.
Crap, we're already back to lawsuits!!
Sadly, I think you've nailed it square-on. :(
"I think the combustion of the gaseous/aerosolized diesel also leads to finer soot production than say the combustion of wood logs in a fireplace."
Seems reasonable, and in line with what I've observed. Diesel soot seems very fine-grained, much akin to cig smoke residue (as observed inside computers!)
Coal smoke (presumably consisting largely of coal soot) is "heavy" enough that when the temperature is below -40 degrees, it struggles up the chimney, slides down the side of the building, and lays there in a pile; you can actually shovel up the coal smoke and carry it away in a bucket! (Speaking from firsthand experience -- when I lived in MT, I used coal in the woodstove because at -40, wood doesn't cut it.)
Ah, okay. Um.. what's different about soot from diesel combustion, as opposed to combustion of other commonly-burnt large-molecule fuels (frex, wood)??
Cancer secondary to absestos might be simply a side effect from chronic micro-injury and irritation, with the severity/alacrity of response dependant on genetic susceptibility to cancer. Frex, I've personally seen bruising to mammary tissue in lactating animals very quickly turn into first mastitis and then localized adenocarcinoma, and I know the same chain of events has been reported at least twice in humans (tho AFAIK hasn't been seriously looked at as an initiating factor in genetically-susceptible humans).