You are missing a critical point. Ionic air cleaners do not filter air - they release ions that attach themselves to aerosolized dust particles. It does not matter how much air passes through an ionic cleaner because airflow across the corona wire (ion producer) is simply not an important measure for ionic air cleaners. Some have charged collection plates, but most particles collect on walls and floors. Only air filters filter air, and for them the airflow though the filter IS an important measure. You are comparing apples and oranges. The important stat for ionic cleaners is the number of ions they put into the room air, and the important stats for filters is flow rate. Filters don't put ions in the air and ionic cleaners don't filter air - but both clean air.
Ionic air cleaners are basically a version of electrostatic air cleaner that uses room surfaces as the collection plate.
Siamese cats have a gene that causes their hair to grow dark in cool areas of their body (paws, nose, ears, tail) and light in warm areas (body). To personalize your cat just shave your initials in the fur on its side. The cool air will cause the hair to grow dark. This only works with Siamese.
OK, I am what you are calling a HEPA engineer, although there really is no such thing. I have had some backbreaking aerosol physics and ventilation design courses in graduate school and designed and tested clean rooms for years. Here are some facts you should consider...
The ionic cleaner works by producing charged ions and releasing them into the room. The theory is that dust particles attach themselves to these charged ions and are then attracted to surfaces such as walls and floors (and, I guess, computers and electronics). It is the number of ions released to attach themselves to particles that makes the ionic cleaners work, not the amount of air that passees through them. Some ionic cleaners have an oppositely charged plate that helps collect the charged particles, but mainly the particles get collected on walls. The mistake everyone is making is in thinking that ionic cleaners filter air when they do not - they just release ions. You do not need a large airflow to release zillions of ions.
Air filtration systems on the other hand rely directly on the amount of air passing through them and the efficiency of the filter. To determine the efficiency of a filter you must define the particle size. A chickenwire filter is 100% efficient for tennis balls, but lousy for dust. A HEPA filter is by the way, 99.98% efficient for particles >=.03 microns.
Air chages per hour is a particularly bad way to judge the efficiency of a filtering system. Air changes per hour is really a term of art used in the ventilation trades as a yardstick to meet general ventilation standards for different room types. One air change per hour does NOT mean that all the air is changed in the room every hour. Most people think that a filter passing 5000 cubic feet of air per hour will filter all the air in a 5000 ft3 room in one hour. Not so. Because the clean air is constantly mixing with the dirty unfiltered air you are essentially cleaning the same clean air over and over again. Therefore it takes a lot longer to pass all the dirty air through the filter. I could give the equation, but a good rule of thumb is 7 times the volume of the room in acph to filter 99% of the air at least once. In other words a 5000 ft3 room will need a filtering system cleaning 35,000 ft3 of air per hour. That isn't really that hard - only ~500 ft3/minute. BUt who says you need to filter all the air every hour? Put another way, a filter with a Q (flow rate) equivalent to 1 ac/h (5000cfm) will take about 7 hours to filter all the air in the 5000 cf room. Because it is a logarithmic function you get about 85% filtering in 4 hours.
A big difference in ionic cleaners and filters is that ionic filters do best with very small particles while filters do best with larger particles. An ionic cleaner will remove many more particles than will a filter because it is easier to get a higher charge/mass ratio in small particles, but the filter will likely remove much more mass from the air. (Small particles don't weigh much).
The best and cheapest thing for the original poster to do is to buy a floor fan or two and put some cheap trimable filtering material on the upstream side of the blades. Air conditioner foam filters for example. The pressure difference should be enough to hold it in place.
YES! You have it exactly right g4dget. This has been my rallying cry for years - the spin doctoring and PR garbage that companies and their PR minions spew to discredit any argument that interferes with their ability to make money. The old "we need good science" argument (who can say we don't want good science?) which is really a delaying tactic. The "conflicting studies" argument when all the conflicting studies come from tame researchers being funded by the industry in question. The perfect example is the tobacco industry that delayed identification of the cancer/cigarette link for decades while they made billions by buying favorable studies through the Tobacco Institute. That was the classic "we need good science" ploy.
An excellent source to learn how the world really works is a book called "Trust Us, Were Experts". It is really an eye opener that shows how public perception is manipulated by PR spin for the benefit of a few and the detriment of the many.
Mind you I'm not saying that the original poster's arguement that power lines do not cause cancer or that there are conflicting studies is wrong - I don't know. There are legitimate conflicting studies and legitimate areas where more study is needed - this may or may not be one of them.
You have absolutely no evidence or basis for saying that this will happen. This is wild useless unfounded speculation of the type that starts damaging rumors of a "mutated super-SARS". Be responsible for God's sake.
I question your 4% fatality rate. The fatality rate in Toronto is 10%. That is one of the mysteries about SARS - its fatality rate appears to be greater in western environments with state of the art medical systems than in places like Vietnam.
Another issue is that it doesn't seem to be attenuating. Normally infections attentuate and become less serious as they pass from host to host. A tertiary infection is almost always muuch less severe that primary infection. This does not seem to be hapening with SARS.
Finally, how can you possibly say that an illness transmitted as easily as the flu with a 4 to 12% fatality rate di=oesn't seem that deadly. Remember, the cases we have seen so far are in healthy people travelling on business and healthy medical personnel. A 4-12% fatality rate among that population will increase dramaticaly when the young and elderly start to be infected.
What benighted fool came up with "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome"? Severe and acute mean the same thing.
You really shouldn't call people fools and then make foolish statements such as "acute and severe mean the same thing". Severe means just that - a severe ilness. Chronic means it is a long-term illness while acute means it happens quickly. As in Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. An illness described as Severe Chronic Respiratory Syndrome would be very different, but both would be severe.
Luckily we don't have to depend on _you_ for anything.
While much of the public fears of SARS is definitely overplayed
In 1914 the Spanish Flu killed millions of people in the US and Europe. MILLIONS. And it was just "the common flu".
Just because we have not had a major killing pandemic in 80 years doesn't mean we can't have one again. I don't think the public concern over SARS is overblown. These illnesses have to be taken seriously. We may very well be at the tipping point of controlling it or having a major world-wide disaster on our hands. A six to ten percent fatality rate is a major killer for a virus that is so easily transmitted. We are really in not much better shape to counter a worldwide virus outbreak than we were in 1914. As you point out we are really worse off in some ways because of air travel.
Accuse!? This is 2003! You don't even have to accuse anyone of anything - you can just call them material witnesses. Hell, just throw some people in prison and send me the bounty money.
That is the POINT! These methods aren't cheating - they are a different way to look at the problem. I'm sorry to tell you this, but the question is designed to filter out the people who don't have enough creativity to find those alternate ways to do it. Slurry line - sheesh.
I use Opera almost exclusively and read the New York Times online every day. When I read this series of posts I was thinking Popups?... the New York Times has Popups!?
That's the point. Because it retains heat it averages out the temperature fluctuations over the day, keeping the electronics close to the average temperature for the area. The oil will be warmer than the air temp during the night, but cooler than the air temp during the day. For example, in New York the average temperature even in August is only about 80F, although it could be well over 100F during the day (I made those numbers up but you get the point). They may have a problem in that the heat generated by the electronics itself will make its steady state too hot.
However, the interesting part for me is "oil doesn't conduct electricity"! Waaaa? If this is true then am I protected from lightning if I slather on enough sunscreen at the beach?
I don't even know where to start with this. One big tip off is your call for "good science". The good science/bad science argument is almost always a political re-interpretation of the scientific evidence by spin doctors to convince people that the evidence really doesn't show what the evidence shows. After all, who could be against good science and for bad science? Calling for more studies and giving lip service to "good" science in the face of the vast preponderance of inconvenient evidence is a well known and successful method for stalling regulatory and environmental compliance initiatives.
Another technique of the science re-interpretation movement is to counter the evidence with trivial examples that appear to contradict mainstream scientific thinking. Your three points are an example - they appear on the surface to show that there is no global warming problem because there are natural mitigating processes in place. In fact they do no such thing. All your spin flies in the face of the fact that atmospheric CO2 levels are rapidly increasing. So don't try to tell me that all our global warming problems are solved by limestone formation in the ocean, by acid rain in your back yard, or by the biodegredation of who knows what by plankton.
Also, has it occured to you that your cures are worse than the disease? We are in really bad shape if our big hope to avert global warming is acid rain.
Your arguments are classic spin - oppose the large body of evidence with a few trivial and unimportant facts to (and we return to the title of the post) cloud the issue.
Where did you get your environmental degree - the Ronald Reagan School of the Environment? Remember those bad ol' polluting trees, and sunglasses and sunscreen as a solution for increased solar radiation? And don't get me started before I start ranting about those ketchup vegetables.
Yes, water vapor is a greenhouse gas, but it is a self-regulating greenhouse gas. As water vapor increases more clouds form which reflect sunlight away from earth, lowering the amount of water evaported from the oceans, decreasing the amount of water vapor in the air.
Unfortunatly there is nothing self-regulating about CO2 produced by burning of fossil fuels. So don't try to cloud the issue by arguing that the earth pollutes itself so why should we worry about CO2.
Segway people want to ride them on sidewalks so they won't have to ride in the street and risk getting hit by the larger, faster and heavier cars. Instead they would much prefer being the larger, faster, heavier vehicles on the sidewalk. That way it will be someone else hurt when there is a collision. More than 50% of elderly people who break a hip die within a year of the injury. The risk from powered vehicles on sidewalks colliding with pedestrians is just not worth whatever cool value a standup scooter might have.
One good thing though - since the Segways are bought by well-off people with a spare $5,000 to spend on scooter, the lawsuits will at least be worth it.
By this logic anyone convicted of murder in the EU has a license to kill anyone else after he is released from his first prison term? What about speeding tickets?
Fruit juice gets its color from tiny particles that disappear without a trace! Duh, of course it does! Solids dissolve in liquids all the time and change the color.
Chemists put a UV absorbing solid into suspension and then sell it as sunscreen - and its nanotechnology!? I don't think so. Since when is making a wax similar to a plant leaf wax called nanotechnology? Just because someone uses atoms and molecules and small particles to make things doesn't make it nanotechnology in my book - it makes it chemistry.
This isn't a typical anti-lawyer rant - there is some logic behind it...
Lawyers do not think about problems and situatons the way we do. Lawyers are advocates. You and I look at all sides of an issue and reach a conclusion based on all the facts, plus and minus. Lawyers, on the other hand, are not _supposed_ to look at all the facts - only the ones that help their side! Lawyers are not required to be objective and are definately not required to present any arguments that do not support their position.
Take a recent example: a very recent study showed that people taking an expensive blood pressure medicine had a 25% higher incidence of heart falure over those taking a cheaper drug, even though the blood pressure in both groups were lowered to the same level. What was the pharmaceutical company's official press release? "Our drug shown to be just as effctive in lowering blood pressure as other more traditional drugs!" Is this true? Yes. Is it the whole story? No. But the lawyers have learned that as long as what they say is technicaly true, it doesn't matter what they don't say. If questioned, their legal argument would be that they made no claim whatsoever about increased longevity. I'm not picking on pharmaceuticals - all industries do it as well as te governement.
The point of this rant is that we all have to be skeptical about _everything_ we read and hear on any topic that involves money (business) or power (politics). I hate it too, but that is just the way it is. Trust nothing, verify everything, think for yourself!
An excellent treatment of how to lie with spin and statistics is the book "Trust Us - We're Experts" An interesting read and highly recommended.
I agree with this train of thought. It is very easy to fall into the trap of looking back at the past in the light of our knowledge and ability today and finding it wanting.
...We were all lamenting the limitations of our hardware...
Probably in reality you were rejoicing in the capability of your hardware. Yes, from today's point of view paper tape is pathetic, but there had previously been no way to store programs or data permanently, period. That paper tape payroll system you are today laughing at was practically a miracle at the time. Before paper tape or paper punch cards payrolls had to be done by hand, fresh, every week!
Quoting some selective "failures" such as handwriting recognition to illustrate how we have failed in our dreams is poor logic. Doing so incorrectly defines the technology advance of the past four decades as a failure because we haven't managed to finish everything on society's 1970 ToDo list. We have succeeded beyond our dreams in so many areas. It is like moaning that we are failures because we never got around to painting our house in 40 years, while in reality we built twenty new ones.
During the very last days of the electric typewriters, when electronics were being introduced there were some hybrids produced by IBM. They were Selectric-based and had a small LCD panel right above the keyboard. These typers were so expensive few companies bought them, but instead leased them from IBM (so turned them back in eventually). You may be able to find one, but they were finnicky to work on and will be a bear to keep going and modify.
A better bet might be an earlier version called a MagCard or MagTape typewriter. These recorded keystrokes on a magnetic card the same size and shape of a keypunch card (if you don't know what a keypunch card is I can't help you), or a looped magnetic tape that allowed forms to be typed over and over again. Pretty cool for the time. Again it is Selectric-based. No heavy metal 50's look for either of these, but plenty old-looking these days. These were desktop machines, and the cases are bigger than the standard typewriters, so if you judiciously remove some unneeded parts there may be just enough room to fit an entire computer in there! Hmmmm... could be an interesting little useless project.
These two statements are not contradictory. Amazon may not BE doing it with current data, but that does not mean they don't have the technology to do it when the database gets larger. Not doing something and being able to do it are not mutually exclusive.
Slashdot Mirror
Ionic air cleaners are basically a version of electrostatic air cleaner that uses room surfaces as the collection plate.
Siamese cats have a gene that causes their hair to grow dark in cool areas of their body (paws, nose, ears, tail) and light in warm areas (body). To personalize your cat just shave your initials in the fur on its side. The cool air will cause the hair to grow dark. This only works with Siamese.
Go to the hardware store, but some foam air conditioner filter material. Trim it to fit and place it over the air inlets on your PC. $3 including tax.
Oops. I meant a Q of 5000cfh will take 7 hours to filter 99% of the air, not 5000cfm.
The ionic cleaner works by producing charged ions and releasing them into the room. The theory is that dust particles attach themselves to these charged ions and are then attracted to surfaces such as walls and floors (and, I guess, computers and electronics). It is the number of ions released to attach themselves to particles that makes the ionic cleaners work, not the amount of air that passees through them. Some ionic cleaners have an oppositely charged plate that helps collect the charged particles, but mainly the particles get collected on walls. The mistake everyone is making is in thinking that ionic cleaners filter air when they do not - they just release ions. You do not need a large airflow to release zillions of ions.
Air filtration systems on the other hand rely directly on the amount of air passing through them and the efficiency of the filter. To determine the efficiency of a filter you must define the particle size. A chickenwire filter is 100% efficient for tennis balls, but lousy for dust. A HEPA filter is by the way, 99.98% efficient for particles >=.03 microns.
Air chages per hour is a particularly bad way to judge the efficiency of a filtering system. Air changes per hour is really a term of art used in the ventilation trades as a yardstick to meet general ventilation standards for different room types. One air change per hour does NOT mean that all the air is changed in the room every hour. Most people think that a filter passing 5000 cubic feet of air per hour will filter all the air in a 5000 ft3 room in one hour. Not so. Because the clean air is constantly mixing with the dirty unfiltered air you are essentially cleaning the same clean air over and over again. Therefore it takes a lot longer to pass all the dirty air through the filter. I could give the equation, but a good rule of thumb is 7 times the volume of the room in acph to filter 99% of the air at least once. In other words a 5000 ft3 room will need a filtering system cleaning 35,000 ft3 of air per hour. That isn't really that hard - only ~500 ft3/minute. BUt who says you need to filter all the air every hour? Put another way, a filter with a Q (flow rate) equivalent to 1 ac/h (5000cfm) will take about 7 hours to filter all the air in the 5000 cf room. Because it is a logarithmic function you get about 85% filtering in 4 hours.
A big difference in ionic cleaners and filters is that ionic filters do best with very small particles while filters do best with larger particles. An ionic cleaner will remove many more particles than will a filter because it is easier to get a higher charge/mass ratio in small particles, but the filter will likely remove much more mass from the air. (Small particles don't weigh much).
The best and cheapest thing for the original poster to do is to buy a floor fan or two and put some cheap trimable filtering material on the upstream side of the blades. Air conditioner foam filters for example. The pressure difference should be enough to hold it in place.
Expirement? Unfortunately an potentially accurate term for a project to microwave a village.
An excellent source to learn how the world really works is a book called "Trust Us, Were Experts". It is really an eye opener that shows how public perception is manipulated by PR spin for the benefit of a few and the detriment of the many.
Mind you I'm not saying that the original poster's arguement that power lines do not cause cancer or that there are conflicting studies is wrong - I don't know. There are legitimate conflicting studies and legitimate areas where more study is needed - this may or may not be one of them.
You have absolutely no evidence or basis for saying that this will happen. This is wild useless unfounded speculation of the type that starts damaging rumors of a "mutated super-SARS". Be responsible for God's sake.
Another issue is that it doesn't seem to be attenuating. Normally infections attentuate and become less serious as they pass from host to host. A tertiary infection is almost always muuch less severe that primary infection. This does not seem to be hapening with SARS.
Finally, how can you possibly say that an illness transmitted as easily as the flu with a 4 to 12% fatality rate di=oesn't seem that deadly. Remember, the cases we have seen so far are in healthy people travelling on business and healthy medical personnel. A 4-12% fatality rate among that population will increase dramaticaly when the young and elderly start to be infected.
You really shouldn't call people fools and then make foolish statements such as "acute and severe mean the same thing". Severe means just that - a severe ilness. Chronic means it is a long-term illness while acute means it happens quickly. As in Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. An illness described as Severe Chronic Respiratory Syndrome would be very different, but both would be severe.
Luckily we don't have to depend on _you_ for anything.
While much of the public fears of SARS is definitely overplayed
In 1914 the Spanish Flu killed millions of people in the US and Europe. MILLIONS. And it was just "the common flu".
Just because we have not had a major killing pandemic in 80 years doesn't mean we can't have one again. I don't think the public concern over SARS is overblown. These illnesses have to be taken seriously. We may very well be at the tipping point of controlling it or having a major world-wide disaster on our hands. A six to ten percent fatality rate is a major killer for a virus that is so easily transmitted. We are really in not much better shape to counter a worldwide virus outbreak than we were in 1914. As you point out we are really worse off in some ways because of air travel.
Accuse!? This is 2003! You don't even have to accuse anyone of anything - you can just call them material witnesses. Hell, just throw some people in prison and send me the bounty money.
That is the POINT! These methods aren't cheating - they are a different way to look at the problem. I'm sorry to tell you this, but the question is designed to filter out the people who don't have enough creativity to find those alternate ways to do it. Slurry line - sheesh.
I use Opera almost exclusively and read the New York Times online every day. When I read this series of posts I was thinking Popups?... the New York Times has Popups!?
However, the interesting part for me is "oil doesn't conduct electricity"! Waaaa? If this is true then am I protected from lightning if I slather on enough sunscreen at the beach?
Another technique of the science re-interpretation movement is to counter the evidence with trivial examples that appear to contradict mainstream scientific thinking. Your three points are an example - they appear on the surface to show that there is no global warming problem because there are natural mitigating processes in place. In fact they do no such thing. All your spin flies in the face of the fact that atmospheric CO2 levels are rapidly increasing. So don't try to tell me that all our global warming problems are solved by limestone formation in the ocean, by acid rain in your back yard, or by the biodegredation of who knows what by plankton.
Also, has it occured to you that your cures are worse than the disease? We are in really bad shape if our big hope to avert global warming is acid rain. Your arguments are classic spin - oppose the large body of evidence with a few trivial and unimportant facts to (and we return to the title of the post) cloud the issue.
Where did you get your environmental degree - the Ronald Reagan School of the Environment? Remember those bad ol' polluting trees, and sunglasses and sunscreen as a solution for increased solar radiation? And don't get me started before I start ranting about those ketchup vegetables.
Yes, water vapor is a greenhouse gas, but it is a self-regulating greenhouse gas. As water vapor increases more clouds form which reflect sunlight away from earth, lowering the amount of water evaported from the oceans, decreasing the amount of water vapor in the air.
Unfortunatly there is nothing self-regulating about CO2 produced by burning of fossil fuels. So don't try to cloud the issue by arguing that the earth pollutes itself so why should we worry about CO2.
One good thing though - since the Segways are bought by well-off people with a spare $5,000 to spend on scooter, the lawsuits will at least be worth it.
By this logic anyone convicted of murder in the EU has a license to kill anyone else after he is released from his first prison term? What about speeding tickets?
Chemists put a UV absorbing solid into suspension and then sell it as sunscreen - and its nanotechnology!? I don't think so. Since when is making a wax similar to a plant leaf wax called nanotechnology? Just because someone uses atoms and molecules and small particles to make things doesn't make it nanotechnology in my book - it makes it chemistry.
Blame it on the lawyers.
This isn't a typical anti-lawyer rant - there is some logic behind it...
Lawyers do not think about problems and situatons the way we do. Lawyers are advocates. You and I look at all sides of an issue and reach a conclusion based on all the facts, plus and minus. Lawyers, on the other hand, are not _supposed_ to look at all the facts - only the ones that help their side! Lawyers are not required to be objective and are definately not required to present any arguments that do not support their position.
Take a recent example: a very recent study showed that people taking an expensive blood pressure medicine had a 25% higher incidence of heart falure over those taking a cheaper drug, even though the blood pressure in both groups were lowered to the same level. What was the pharmaceutical company's official press release? "Our drug shown to be just as effctive in lowering blood pressure as other more traditional drugs!" Is this true? Yes. Is it the whole story? No. But the lawyers have learned that as long as what they say is technicaly true, it doesn't matter what they don't say. If questioned, their legal argument would be that they made no claim whatsoever about increased longevity. I'm not picking on pharmaceuticals - all industries do it as well as te governement.
The point of this rant is that we all have to be skeptical about _everything_ we read and hear on any topic that involves money (business) or power (politics). I hate it too, but that is just the way it is. Trust nothing, verify everything, think for yourself!
An excellent treatment of how to lie with spin and statistics is the book "Trust Us - We're Experts" An interesting read and highly recommended.
Nano baseball gloves? Come on...get serious. That would be much too inefficient. Little nano tennis rackets would work much better.
Probably in reality you were rejoicing in the capability of your hardware. Yes, from today's point of view paper tape is pathetic, but there had previously been no way to store programs or data permanently, period. That paper tape payroll system you are today laughing at was practically a miracle at the time. Before paper tape or paper punch cards payrolls had to be done by hand, fresh, every week!
Quoting some selective "failures" such as handwriting recognition to illustrate how we have failed in our dreams is poor logic. Doing so incorrectly defines the technology advance of the past four decades as a failure because we haven't managed to finish everything on society's 1970 ToDo list. We have succeeded beyond our dreams in so many areas. It is like moaning that we are failures because we never got around to painting our house in 40 years, while in reality we built twenty new ones.
A better bet might be an earlier version called a MagCard or MagTape typewriter. These recorded keystrokes on a magnetic card the same size and shape of a keypunch card (if you don't know what a keypunch card is I can't help you), or a looped magnetic tape that allowed forms to be typed over and over again. Pretty cool for the time. Again it is Selectric-based. No heavy metal 50's look for either of these, but plenty old-looking these days. These were desktop machines, and the cases are bigger than the standard typewriters, so if you judiciously remove some unneeded parts there may be just enough room to fit an entire computer in there! Hmmmm... could be an interesting little useless project.
These two statements are not contradictory. Amazon may not BE doing it with current data, but that does not mean they don't have the technology to do it when the database gets larger. Not doing something and being able to do it are not mutually exclusive.