special trash can to eat away grease (McDonalds would love that.)
Until they started to eat the cooking oil, not to mention 90% of the "food" before it could be served.
Or even a microbe spray to degrease stuff; cool, huh? No more wiping down.
The fat can be converted to something else, but it won't disappear. You'd probbaly get a waste product even more disgusting to clean up.
Wouldn't that solution just make lots more radiation contaminated water and parephenalia?
The idea was that microbes consume the dissolved uranium (and other nasty elements) and excrete them as insoluble compounds. So the water is clean and you have a pile of solid waste much much smaller than the original volume. You could recycle that or dispose of it (at least more safely than the original method of pouring it into a hole in the ground and forgetting it).
average Joe knows only three things about nuclear energy:
1. It makes bombs go boom
2. It's baaaaad and kills everyone
Is Joe wrong in thinking that? Why does Iran want nuclear power when it has oceans of oil? Not to mention Pakistan, India, N Korea, Israel, South Africa -- they want[ed] nuclear technology because it can go boom.
It's just like in the movies [link to the China Syndrome]
What does Joe think about Chernobyl?
Actually, I'm not against nuclear power on principle, but it is a huge risk, not so much for waste, but that it easily segues into nuclear weapons.
The idea is that there may be an advantage in that these bicycles aren't practical for factory production. The design works best when made by hand; if many should be built, this would require a large number of hands working on many bicycles all at once.
A "steel bike" factory would be of a similar technical standard. I saw some tiny bike factories in Taiwan. Juayt a shed wher they were welding steel tubes together then painting and assembling the bikes. But in both cases they have to have the capital to buy all the components (which is most of them) that you can't make out of bamboo or make at all in a village.
forgive my ignorance, but doesn't bamboo have a tiny bit more give to it than metal, thus allowing it to withstand shock a little better? I seem to remember something about bamboo structures withstanding earthquakes remarkably well.
Steel (and othe metal) bikes have a carefully designed amount of springiness for a comfrtable ride. You could make steel as springy as you liked; but then it'd be too wobbly to ride. If you flex a piece of bamboo often enough, it starts to get soggy, then falls apart. Steel framed buildings survive earthquakes too; it's just the brittle bricks and concrete attached to the frames that fall off that make the problem.
OK, lets try and sell it to you. Wood has one advantage most metals don't - the ability to flex under pressure without snapping. A bicycle which exploits some of the natural give and take of woods may have some advantages.
Bamboo, and most woods, will tear apart after a few thousand flexes (maybe a few dozen). The bike flexes every time you go over a bump. So a few months at best. Good steel will flex not indefinitely, but for your lifetime.
Second, if wood shatters, the bits are less likely to hurt so much as metal bits
No, wood splinters. And bamboo much more so. It makes very sharp and deadly ones, in fact.
Take a piece of bamboo, clamp one end, and twist it. After a few minutes you will notice it splitting lengthwise. It's very tough, and takes a while to break completely, but it's already useless and dangerous as a bike frame.
None of these are the real point at hand. I think the real potential is in third world countries, where many people don't own any sort of bicycle
No, because a bamboo bike would be more expensive and less durable than a steel one.
The ability to have a cheap bicycle, made from sustainable materials is an incredible thing for these people
Except that it's impossible. Can they make a bamboo hub or chain? What about the lugs? Wheels? Gear wheel? Ball bearings?
I'm sure in Laos you can buy cheap Chinese-made bikes. (Flying Pigeon, eg). They ARE ALREADY "sustainable". All they need are new tires every ear or so, and put some oil on the chain when it rains, regrease the bearings once a year or two, repaint every 10 years. You find little roadside shops where guys fix bikes (patch flats, fix most other problems with a hammer and a wrench) for pennies in the third world. (I've biked in Indonesia, Thailand and China.) With minimum maintenance they last for decades. Bamboo bikes are a novelty item for rich Westerners, completely useless to the third world.
the very fact that it is inefficient to produce (according to our industrialized standards) may actually be a boon for third world production
No, it's just a road to more poverty. The 3rd world doesn't need less efficient production, but more. Less efficient production means either lower wages (i.e. lower than in the existing factories, which are on the poverty line already) or higher prices (which means that they must put massive import duties on imported bikes, or sell none at all). It also means no export market, except for a few sold as toys to rich foreigners, a market that will evaporate quickly after a few get serious injuries from the frames failing and spearing their intestines with bamboo splinters.
It would be great if I could ride around on a $15 bicycle.
Since that's about what a bike chain costs, or a seat, and much less than a wheel, I doubt it. Unless you wan to go back to the 19th C Penny-farthings with pedals directly on the hub of the 6ft diam front wheel, which could be made of wood.
For a country such as China that has such a large percentage of the population using bikes then switching to bamboo makes economic and environmental sense
No, it's completely insane. Bamboo bikes are a toy, and require careful handcrafting to work at all, let alone be safe. They are also bound to be more expensive than steel-framed bikes, and a safety and quality-control nightmare. Environmentally, China is a disaster in the making as automobile manufacture ramps up. Already in major Chinese cities bikes are being banned from major roads to make way for the almighty polluting car. Of course, massive smog and traffic jams are the result. Not to mention massive oil demands and global warming.
Here in the States it would be more effective to have people switch from their SUVs to a bike, even aluminum ones.
Agree with you there.
Re:More Sustainable than Aluminum ??
on
Bamboo Bike A Reality
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Much better to work on making bamboo beer cans than bicycles, consdidering the amount of Al consumed by the average Joe in every sixpack. Or go back to refillable glass bottles.
On a tangent, in Thailand you can buy snacks of steamed rice with various goodies, cooked inside a section of bamboo. Buy them outside Hualampung Station before going on long train trips.
If they really wanted to get off the island they should have just shot Gilligan with a bamboo gun.
There was an episode where they made a bamboo speargun to reenact a murder (back in Hawaii that several of the castaways were suspects in). Gilligan played the victim, and narrowly escaped being harpooned by the speargun...
In HK we use bamboo scaffolding becasue it's much,ighter than steel pipe. So it can be aeasily supported by attachments to the building. However, it soen't last long, (though it doesn;t need to).
Anyway, as for the "environmentally sound" comment made in the orignal post, it's complete bull. I have a steel bike that's 22 years old. It's fine. I think the 5 kgs of steel that make up its tubing is not a grat burden on the earth, and steel is recyclable and non-poisonous. A bamboo bike would be lucky to last a single year before it became dangerous. There are all kinds of bugs, moulds and fungus that attack bamboo and the failure of a single tube in a bike frame could be lethal if it happened at speed or in traffic, not to mention the very sharp splinters that bamboo makes. As for cost, it's the frame fittings (like bottom bracket), and gears that make up the main cost of a normal bike. I'm sure that this bike will cost much more than a similarly specced steel one, and be in the landfill along with its parts long before it too.
It's the only archive format out there that is sensitive to Mac OS resource forks. For certain types of Mac files (read: most), putting your data into a zip archive will render them useless.
Unless you use ZipIt. I use it mainly to exchange files with PCs, but it works fine as a Mac archiver. The interface is cloned from Stuffit.
It's not difficult to store both forks of a Mac file into one file, say using Macbinary, and then compress it with the archiver of your choice. I don't know if that's how ZipIt works.
That was in the FA too. But though being a janitor is a lowly position, actually it will be one of the last jobs automated. It requires being able to assess and repair problems with electrical, plumbing, mechaical, architectural systems. It's not at all a routine job that can be scripted easily, like flipping burgers.
I don't know how difficult it is to build a model that actually flies. If the physics are really realistic
Aside from many based on real aircraft (including dirigibles, space shuttles, etc) ther are some wacky ones at X-plane.org. Such as a TARDIS the teleports, and a Steinway Model D Concert Grand Piano that "glides" (down, very quickly).
No there isn't. This is a classic urban legend "I heard from a guy whose cousin..." etc. You ask the guy's cousin, he actually heard it from a barber. You will never find any actual witness or evidence. There's a million stories like this. See Urban Legends Reference Pages for a few others.
The British Library has scans of two editions, with pages at 1450x2048 pixels, 851kb jpegs; almost sharp enough to forge a copy (they're worth about $20m).
The GB and the printing press also aided civilization tremendously by helping spread knowledge throughout the globe in a quick and timely manner.
Yes -- what's special is that it's one of the first printed books in Europe. The cultural impact on the free dissemination of information was much greater than that of the Internet. (Yes, books were still expensive, but much more numerous and affordable than hand scribed ones.)
the photographs provided by the HRC are not detailed enough to make out the text clearly.
Following a hint in the story, I found the British Library's edition, which is much nicer. (Though on UTexas they say you can get high res images on application; I suspect that means buying a CDROM.)
Simply ignoring the facts as though they hadn't come up is NOT debate
Who said we were in a "debate"?
You ignored and restated my arguments to make a better straw man, and gratuitously insulted me in the process. Good debating technique, but I don't want to play.
Huh... I watched a furry white creature attacking penguins on Discovery Channel - I thought it'd be a Polar Bear, am I wrong?
Only in Disney cartoons do polar bears (Arctic) meet penguins (Antarctic). (There are penguin colonies in southern Australia and Africa, but no bears there either.)
Until they became extinct in about 1850, there were Great Auks in the North Atlantic. They might have had problems with bears.
I live in a semi-industrial part of town and I already fear for my life in my car (lots of big trucks, narrow urban streets).
I've found that old urban areas usually let you work out some intersting bike routes, as long as you're not is a screaming hurry. There are usually side streets with obstacles that keep motor vehicles away that are perfect for cycling (maybe you have to walk up a flight of steps to a connecting alley, for instance). Going the wrong way on one-way streets is quite safe on a bike (just look out for cops). If the pedestrian traffic is thin, ride on the sidewalks. Take some time on a weekend and reconnoitre. Just becasue the route you use in your car isn't pleasant doesn't mean there isn't a way. And if you must share with heavy traffic for a while, be aggressive. Don't let them force you off the road -- if there isn't room for passing, just stay in the middle of the lane and don't let them squeeze you -- (unless you're in an area with a high incidence of armed road rage/driveby shootings). But in an industrial zone, drivers are usually more professional -- they'll push you if they can, but won't risk their licenses by killing you.
The problem, if there is one, is not false passports, but real ones issued under false pretenses. Or real ones issued to people with clean records who have evil plans. Or real ones issued by corrupt civil servants to anyone who pays enough, or is sympathetic to their aims.
And at the risk of repeating myself, there were no problems(AFAIR) with US passports, so these measures won't help anything except justify reducing the headcount of human security checkers who might use their brains to assess risk.
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Until they started to eat the cooking oil, not to mention 90% of the "food" before it could be served. Or even a microbe spray to degrease stuff; cool, huh? No more wiping down.
The fat can be converted to something else, but it won't disappear. You'd probbaly get a waste product even more disgusting to clean up.
The idea was that microbes consume the dissolved uranium (and other nasty elements) and excrete them as insoluble compounds. So the water is clean and you have a pile of solid waste much much smaller than the original volume. You could recycle that or dispose of it (at least more safely than the original method of pouring it into a hole in the ground and forgetting it).
1. It makes bombs go boom
2. It's baaaaad and kills everyone
Is Joe wrong in thinking that? Why does Iran want nuclear power when it has oceans of oil? Not to mention Pakistan, India, N Korea, Israel, South Africa -- they want[ed] nuclear technology because it can go boom.
It's just like in the movies [link to the China Syndrome]
What does Joe think about Chernobyl?
Actually, I'm not against nuclear power on principle, but it is a huge risk, not so much for waste, but that it easily segues into nuclear weapons.
Both the Apple Menu and the Windows Startup are folders in which you can put aliases/shortcuts, executables, files, whatever.
When the Apple menu is designed to start all of the applications installed on a Mac instead of having to dig them out using Finder
The Win Startup doesn't have to contain every application, though conventional installs will put a shortcut there.
A "steel bike" factory would be of a similar technical standard. I saw some tiny bike factories in Taiwan. Juayt a shed wher they were welding steel tubes together then painting and assembling the bikes. But in both cases they have to have the capital to buy all the components (which is most of them) that you can't make out of bamboo or make at all in a village. forgive my ignorance, but doesn't bamboo have a tiny bit more give to it than metal, thus allowing it to withstand shock a little better? I seem to remember something about bamboo structures withstanding earthquakes remarkably well.
Steel (and othe metal) bikes have a carefully designed amount of springiness for a comfrtable ride. You could make steel as springy as you liked; but then it'd be too wobbly to ride. If you flex a piece of bamboo often enough, it starts to get soggy, then falls apart. Steel framed buildings survive earthquakes too; it's just the brittle bricks and concrete attached to the frames that fall off that make the problem.
For temporary scaffolding. Won't last longer than a few months at best.
Bamboo, and most woods, will tear apart after a few thousand flexes (maybe a few dozen). The bike flexes every time you go over a bump. So a few months at best. Good steel will flex not indefinitely, but for your lifetime.
Second, if wood shatters, the bits are less likely to hurt so much as metal bits
No, wood splinters. And bamboo much more so. It makes very sharp and deadly ones, in fact.
Take a piece of bamboo, clamp one end, and twist it. After a few minutes you will notice it splitting lengthwise. It's very tough, and takes a while to break completely, but it's already useless and dangerous as a bike frame.
No, because a bamboo bike would be more expensive and less durable than a steel one.
The ability to have a cheap bicycle, made from sustainable materials is an incredible thing for these people
Except that it's impossible. Can they make a bamboo hub or chain? What about the lugs? Wheels? Gear wheel? Ball bearings?
I'm sure in Laos you can buy cheap Chinese-made bikes. (Flying Pigeon, eg). They ARE ALREADY "sustainable". All they need are new tires every ear or so, and put some oil on the chain when it rains, regrease the bearings once a year or two, repaint every 10 years. You find little roadside shops where guys fix bikes (patch flats, fix most other problems with a hammer and a wrench) for pennies in the third world. (I've biked in Indonesia, Thailand and China.) With minimum maintenance they last for decades. Bamboo bikes are a novelty item for rich Westerners, completely useless to the third world.
No, it's just a road to more poverty. The 3rd world doesn't need less efficient production, but more. Less efficient production means either lower wages (i.e. lower than in the existing factories, which are on the poverty line already) or higher prices (which means that they must put massive import duties on imported bikes, or sell none at all). It also means no export market, except for a few sold as toys to rich foreigners, a market that will evaporate quickly after a few get serious injuries from the frames failing and spearing their intestines with bamboo splinters.
Since that's about what a bike chain costs, or a seat, and much less than a wheel, I doubt it. Unless you wan to go back to the 19th C Penny-farthings with pedals directly on the hub of the 6ft diam front wheel, which could be made of wood.
No, it's completely insane. Bamboo bikes are a toy, and require careful handcrafting to work at all, let alone be safe. They are also bound to be more expensive than steel-framed bikes, and a safety and quality-control nightmare. Environmentally, China is a disaster in the making as automobile manufacture ramps up. Already in major Chinese cities bikes are being banned from major roads to make way for the almighty polluting car. Of course, massive smog and traffic jams are the result. Not to mention massive oil demands and global warming.
Here in the States it would be more effective to have people switch from their SUVs to a bike, even aluminum ones.
Agree with you there.
On a tangent, in Thailand you can buy snacks of steamed rice with various goodies, cooked inside a section of bamboo. Buy them outside Hualampung Station before going on long train trips.
There was an episode where they made a bamboo speargun to reenact a murder (back in Hawaii that several of the castaways were suspects in). Gilligan played the victim, and narrowly escaped being harpooned by the speargun...
Anyway, as for the "environmentally sound" comment made in the orignal post, it's complete bull. I have a steel bike that's 22 years old. It's fine. I think the 5 kgs of steel that make up its tubing is not a grat burden on the earth, and steel is recyclable and non-poisonous. A bamboo bike would be lucky to last a single year before it became dangerous. There are all kinds of bugs, moulds and fungus that attack bamboo and the failure of a single tube in a bike frame could be lethal if it happened at speed or in traffic, not to mention the very sharp splinters that bamboo makes. As for cost, it's the frame fittings (like bottom bracket), and gears that make up the main cost of a normal bike. I'm sure that this bike will cost much more than a similarly specced steel one, and be in the landfill along with its parts long before it too.
Unless you use ZipIt. I use it mainly to exchange files with PCs, but it works fine as a Mac archiver. The interface is cloned from Stuffit.
It's not difficult to store both forks of a Mac file into one file, say using Macbinary, and then compress it with the archiver of your choice. I don't know if that's how ZipIt works.
That was in the FA too. But though being a janitor is a lowly position, actually it will be one of the last jobs automated. It requires being able to assess and repair problems with electrical, plumbing, mechaical, architectural systems. It's not at all a routine job that can be scripted easily, like flipping burgers.
Aside from many based on real aircraft (including dirigibles, space shuttles, etc) ther are some wacky ones at X-plane.org. Such as a TARDIS the teleports, and a Steinway Model D Concert Grand Piano that "glides" (down, very quickly).
No there isn't. This is a classic urban legend "I heard from a guy whose cousin..." etc. You ask the guy's cousin, he actually heard it from a barber. You will never find any actual witness or evidence. There's a million stories like this. See Urban Legends Reference Pages for a few others.
Inquiries regarding the availability of higher-resolution digital images for research or publication should be directed to the Center's staff. I think they'll probably offer a CDROM for purchase. The images on the site are 600x875 pixels, 187k jpegs.
The British Library has scans of two editions, with pages at 1450x2048 pixels, 851kb jpegs; almost sharp enough to forge a copy (they're worth about $20m).
Yes -- what's special is that it's one of the first printed books in Europe. The cultural impact on the free dissemination of information was much greater than that of the Internet. (Yes, books were still expensive, but much more numerous and affordable than hand scribed ones.)
the photographs provided by the HRC are not detailed enough to make out the text clearly.
Following a hint in the story, I found the British Library's edition, which is much nicer. (Though on UTexas they say you can get high res images on application; I suspect that means buying a CDROM.)
Who said we were in a "debate"?
You ignored and restated my arguments to make a better straw man, and gratuitously insulted me in the process. Good debating technique, but I don't want to play.
Funny how people think that saying that allows them to insult you with impunity.
renders the entire exercise of debate futile.
With that attitude, it certainly is.
Only in Disney cartoons do polar bears (Arctic) meet penguins (Antarctic). (There are penguin colonies in southern Australia and Africa, but no bears there either.)
Until they became extinct in about 1850, there were Great Auks in the North Atlantic. They might have had problems with bears.
I've found that old urban areas usually let you work out some intersting bike routes, as long as you're not is a screaming hurry. There are usually side streets with obstacles that keep motor vehicles away that are perfect for cycling (maybe you have to walk up a flight of steps to a connecting alley, for instance). Going the wrong way on one-way streets is quite safe on a bike (just look out for cops). If the pedestrian traffic is thin, ride on the sidewalks. Take some time on a weekend and reconnoitre. Just becasue the route you use in your car isn't pleasant doesn't mean there isn't a way. And if you must share with heavy traffic for a while, be aggressive. Don't let them force you off the road -- if there isn't room for passing, just stay in the middle of the lane and don't let them squeeze you -- (unless you're in an area with a high incidence of armed road rage/driveby shootings). But in an industrial zone, drivers are usually more professional -- they'll push you if they can, but won't risk their licenses by killing you.
The problem, if there is one, is not false passports, but real ones issued under false pretenses. Or real ones issued to people with clean records who have evil plans. Or real ones issued by corrupt civil servants to anyone who pays enough, or is sympathetic to their aims.
And at the risk of repeating myself, there were no problems(AFAIR) with US passports, so these measures won't help anything except justify reducing the headcount of human security checkers who might use their brains to assess risk.