You don't need high speed internet to get weather forecasts or to get market data.
In this era of high-speed trading, a good, fast, internet connection can make the difference between selling fleece and being fleeced.
If a commodity firm is interested enough in your market to try to game it you MIGHT have a chance with a broadband ISP fed by fiber. But dialup speeds, satellite delays, and even cellphone modem links are right out.
>> The Community Connect program run by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) funds broadband deployment in rural communities,
And you wonder why our government is neck-dept in debt.
The phone companies have been charging me - and everybody else in the country - a rake-off to pay for deploying high speed internet in rural areas. (It used to be just for phone service but got bumped to cover high-speed internet long ago. I've been paying in for decades, and haven't seen the service yet.)
Is this that money? If not, where did THAT money go?
My retirement house, on the outskirts of a rural village in Nevada, currently has a choice of dialup (32ish KILObits on a good day), cellphone (we're on the LAST TOWER...) or satellite. Even the local WISP - at $80ish/month for their low end product last I looked - doesn't point antennas our way any more, as of last summer. I just did a web search and can't find them any more, so maybe they went belly-up. All I see now is AT&T & Verizon cellphone-based service ($45-$390/month), one cable company (that only covers half the town - and not me), and Dish and HughesNet satellite (with their horrid latency and caps).)
With incoherent radiation the individual photons are random in phase and minor frequency offsets. The fields add up only by a random walk - nearly cancelling out.
With coherent radiation all the photons are in phase. Billions in lockstep. The fields of many photons add up just fine, and the effects are not limited by the energy of a single photon. For starters, a bunch of coherent infrared photons will ionize molecules quite easily.
Photons from microwaves can't ionize matter.... it it is silly to worry about it.
There are other ways to foul DNA than ionization. For starters, it is a long molecule with charged regions. One way that you can detect electrocution is that the DNA in the cells has uncoiled and lined up in parallel along where the electric field was oriented. Since the folding and unfolding of DNA is part of the regulation of gene expression that could have non trivial effects. (On the other hand, that's an effect observed when the exposure to electrical activity is extreme, so any effect might be lost due to the death of the affected cells.)
BUT....
A very substantial effect of electrical (and changing magnetic) fields on cells HAS been detected. It is being used therapeutically - on brain cancer - with great success.
You may have noticed that the electrical activity in living cells is almost entirely confined to electrical potentials across membranes and fine-grained patterns of charge on molecules that affect their interactions at close range. There is very little involvement with, or sensitivity to, large-scale fields.
On the other hand, you may ALSO have noticed, in pictures or drawings of cell reproduction, that the mechanism for separating the DNA into two nuclei looks very much like field lines, or the patterns iron filings take up in the presence of a strong magnetic field.
This is apparently because the cells use gross electric fields as part of the mechanism for gene segregation. So any other use of large-scale electrical fields has a strong selection pressure against it - it must both avoid fouling cell reproduction and provide an extreme advantage to offset any problems it does cause. Very few mechanisms have made this cut. Similarly, any other sensitivity to large scale electrical fields must be small, to avoid being fouled in turn by the fields that occur during cell division.
So cells are very insensitive to large-scale electrical fields through them, EXCEPT during cell division. But it turns out that fields - especially those from changing magnetic fields, DO interfere with cell division:
- Sometimes they prevent gene segregation. After a while the cell passes the phase where it would divide, but without dividing - resulting in a diploid cell, which then commits suicide via the apoptosis mechanism.
- Sometimes they result in incorrect segregation, resulting in two progeny cells with the wrong compliment of chromosomes. Then both either die through missing genes or again commit suicide.
Brain nerve cells, along with most of the cells supporting them, are very long lived and rarely reproduce - to the point that for decades it was though that they didn't reproduce at all once the brain was mature. (In fact there is some new nerve growth, which may be involved in learning and mental plasticity. But it is very slow and mostly newly differentiated cells from stem cell lines rather than reproduction of existing nerves.) So the cells of the brain are almost never in the stage where electrical and changing magnetic fields would be an issue.
Cancer cells, on the other hand, reproduce a lot, and spend much of their time in the vulnerable state. So electrical fields that would cause them to die are particularly useful in treating brain cancer, selectively killing the cancer cells while almost never affecting the normal cells with which they are comingled. Electromagnetic coil devices to produce them have recently shown such excellent results in treating inoperable and rapidly fatal brain cancers that the FDA aborted the tests and fast-tracked an approval.
Yes, the individual photons of radio signals are too low energy to ionize most molecules. But they are coherent and their fields add up to enough to have major electromechanical effects. (They COULD also add to produce ionization, especially on structures appropriately sized or massed-and-sprung to resonate, but at the levels involved in a cellphone this
you can make generators which do not have permanent magnets.
The reason rare earth permanent magnets are popular in wind generators, especially small ones, is that electromagnets continuously burn power to make the field, and this comes out of the power you generate.
Further: The slower the machine turns, the less energy you get from it (by a CUBE function!) and the more field you need (by a linear function in strength and a SQUARE function in consumed energy) to get it to generate a given output voltage. Small machines generally have to generate a higher voltage than an associated battery pack to achieve "cut in" - or use a voltage converter (which is more to fail, has losses, and has losses that are a higher percentage when the input voltage is lower). So when wind is slow, and you're already hard up for power, electromagnets are at their worst. This raises the cut in wind speed and greatly reduces the utility of small machines.
With permanent magnets you pay the magnetizing power once, for nanoseconds, as you manufacture them. No ongoing power cost, so you can use every bit of your generated power for your load.
Rare earth magnets are preferred to other types because they're stronger - strong enough to easily saturate flux-guide silicon-steel winding cores, strong enough to keep the machine small, which means the coils are small and have less resistive losses than a larger arrangement. Again, more power at low speed - which translates to a smaller, lighter, less expensive machine.
A big industrial machine is big enough to have a gearbox and spin fast enough that it can get away with using electromagnets. Nevertheless, permanent magnets, or a mix, also gives energy efficiency advantages to the big mills.
The REAL measure of efficiency for a wind machine, though, is power generated / cost of equipment, maintenance, and site. When your fuel is free the economics doesn't work the way most people are used to thinking.
Why would someone apologize for something they didn't do? That makes no sense.
Sure it does.
(He says) he's apologizing for causing trouble for (named and unnamed) others by coming out of the closet without adequate proof - and guts - to weather the attacks and claims for more proof that would result.
Regardless of whether his claims are true, that's understandable and legit.
and by the time it gets here (assuming it isn't sold out) the fallout cloud has come, dumped, and gone, and the radioiodine is concentrated in your thyroid
I'm usually in either Silicon Valley or western Nevada.
After Fukishima, but before the fallout cloud got here, I tried to get some iodine supplement pills, to load up on non-radioactive iodine before the cloud arrived.
Couldn't do it.
There were no iodine supplements in the drug stores, or the health-food stores.
Also no tincture of iodine, iodine-based water purification tablets at the camping stores (where it used to be available as a water purifier - and has since been replace by other chemicals, ultrafilters, and backpack-sized pressure-cookers.)
(Even iodized salt was hard to find - and would have been poisonous at the necessary levels absent major iodine extraction.)
A compounding pharmacy offered to make up some - for an exorbatant fee - but they didn't have potassium iodide or other iodine compounds in stock. They would have had to back-order it, and the pills would have taken a month (while the fallout cloud would arrive in a couple days.
WTF?
Turns out that it's a casualty of the Drug War. Iodine is used in some street-drug manufacturing process. So (like pseudoephedrine) the government has imposed massive red tape on sales to the general population. These make it unprofitable, so the major outlets have all dropped it and moved on to other things.
Many months later I heard someone being interviewed on a conservative talk radio show, suggesting that the government should stock iodine supplements around the country and make them available on a moment's notice for protection from radiological attacks and other events - and for people to stock them themselves. He and the host were lamenting that the stupid bureaucrats wouldn't take such an obvious preventative measure. If I hadn't been on my way to work at the time I'd have called in and told them "It's the Drug War, stupid!"
I see the opposite. Maybe people tend to become more moderate, with less "fire in the belly" as they get older.
In my case it's not a loss of the enthusiasm of youth. While I do have more experience (and can thus see and avoid higher-order effects that are larger than first-order effects - and that's the main difference between a young liberal and an older conservative), there are other considerations.
The body is wearing out. (That's what happens from running the software on a primate for the hardware.) The government healthcare bureaucracy has drastically impeded the research necessary for prolonging life and restoring youthful characteristics and will most certainly spike any such treatment, at least until most of us boomers are safely killed off. Cryonics is a really long-shot bet. The government has also ripped off most of my income and blocked me from earning anywhere near my potential (while the Republicans talked shrinking it and instead grew it until the boomers were passing retirement age so income tax cuts would be moot.
When you're faced with limited remaining life in a fragile body on miniscule after-ripoffs savings, with a healthcare system that looks to be dedicated to killing you while retaining plausible deniability, idealism and self-reliance start to take a back seat to staying alive, fed, clothed, and housed.
That's a petrol converter, not a diesel one. Diesels nearly always have excess oxygen in the exhaust, meaning the first step in a three-way converter doesn't work.
Unless it's compensated for by controlled exhaust gas recirculation. That lets you reduce oxygen in proportion, providing just enough new oxygen to match the fuel you intend to burn. You keep the same compression ratio. It's ALMOST like adjusting the size of the cylinder on the fly. The heat also helps ignition. (The mix does burn a little slower.)
Not saying that's what they DO do. Just that it's available (and I know it is used in some diesel engines as part of the package, though not necessarily to walk the fuel/air tightrope). (I DID work just with gasoline engines and have no personal experience with pollution control on diesels.)
They also get poisoned by elements that are in diesel fuel, but removed from petrol.
The cars only have to pass a laboratory test. If that test bears no resemblance to the real world (which the EU one doesn't) then thats the fault of the people who devised it.
That would be the auto industry itself.
Not sure how it is in the EU. But here in the US it was NOT the auto industry. The testing regime was completely defined by a government agency.
At the time I was working on engineering emissions testing programs as a consultant, one of the auto company engineers claimed it had been designed like this:
- The EPA put recording instruments on a car (notably the bike-wheel odometer/tachometer).
- Then they parked behind cars in a "typical" city (Denver Colorado, if I recall correctly) and waited for the owner to come out and drive somewhere.
- The timed how long (if at all) the target warmed the engine before pulling out.
- Then they followed the target to its destination, doing their best to drive their instrumented car the same way as the target.
- From among the recorded trips they picked one that looked representative and contained about an average mix of city and highway driving. That became the test cycle the manufacturers must use.
Emissions test measurements (the fancy ones the engineers have to run at the companies, not the surveillance ones applied to car owners) measure enough about engine exhaust gasses and vehicle forces and motions that the mileage can be computed from the carbon balance, without extra gadgetry. So the government mandated it be computed and printed on the price stickers. It thus became glaringly obvious that (of course):
- (Of course) The chosen test cycle was not what all people drove all the time.
- (Not of course) The chosen test cycle happened to be somewhat more fuel efficient that the typical driver's average use of his vehicle. Thus was born "Your Mileage May Vary (and will probably be lower)"
The main problem with emissions is if you want good fuel economy and hence lower CO2 per km then you need a high burn temp. The trouble with that is a high burn temp gives high NOx. Take your pick.
But that's the NOx coming out of the exhaust port. What matters is the NOx coming out of the exhaust PIPE. That's what catalytic converters are about.
A triple-acting catalytic converter pulls the oxygen off NOx, leaving N2, and uses it to burn CO into CO2 and UHC into CO2 and H2O.
Keep the air/fuel ratio carefully adjusted and it it balances out. Too much fuel, you have UHC and CO left over, too little and you have NOx left over. That's the job of the engine control computer, its sensors (especially the exhaust oxygen sensor), and sometimes an exhaust air injection system.
The optimal mix for big-three pollutant minimization is not the best for fuel efficiency. But it's pretty close. The lost power shows up as heat in the catalytic converter - which is part of what drives the reactions - mainly by kicking the reaction over the energy hump and the products off the catalyst so it can get on with more work. (That's also why the vehicles are allowed to warm up for a limited time before the regulations get tight.)
The issue with "cheating" is whether the engine control has been hacked to recognize the standard testing regime and work differently while being tested than it does most of the time on the road.
I'm not sure how it works in the EU. But here in the US (at least when I was working on auto emission testing) the laws don't put any requirements on what the vehicles emit on the road. They just require they meet a set of limits on a set of standardized tests.
You still need energy to drive the compressor. Maybe that's what he means?
As described it's a heat engine. It gets the energy from extracting heat from ocean water and dumping it somewhere else at a different temperature. This provides energy, which "drives the compressor" or the equivalent.
It's like the ammonia-cycle refrigerator as used in travel trailers, which uses heat from a flame (or an electric heater) to boil ammonia out of water at high pressure, cools it with a radiator, and uses this energy to liquify the purified ammonia, which is then allowed to pass through a restriction to a lower pressure and be exposed to hydrogen gas, at which point it boils in a heat exchanger, sucking the heat out of first the freezer, then the refrigerator, compartments, before being allowed to dissolve in the cooled water (which is what lowers the pressure) and be returned to the boiler. The water/boiler/heat-exchanger is a heat engine, getting the power to pump the ammonia through a liquification/boil cycle from heat accepted at one temperature and dumped at another.
In this case, it's not ammonia being boiled out of water by a fire. It's carbon dioxide being boiled, at high pressure, by heat from the ocean.
Presumably the energy source is still fossil fuels because they likely want to heat the place on days and nights when the wind isn't blowing (not much solar at 60N in December).
The energy source is the difference between the temperature of the seawater (the heat source) and that of some other heat sink (probably the Alaskan air). Heat is collected from the ocean via a titanium heat exchanger, transferred to a glycol-water mix (i.e. antifreeze-laden water), and moved to a refrigerator operating as a heat engine - which then drives a heat pump to heat air warmer than either the ocean or the heat-sink air (or whatever).
The "news" is that they modified the heat engine to use liquid/gas carbon dioxide as a replacement for its original working fluid - R-134a (the pricey modern refrigerant that replaced the R-12 "freon" of ozone-hole fame).
They've got BlueTooth and BlueTooth Low Energy (BLE) confused. That's not too surprising, since they're defined by the same organization, named as of the latter is a part of a latter version of the former rather than a separate thing, described in the same, 3,000+ page, poorly-written, standards document, modern chips do both (with separate "radios" internally), and these guys are NOT working with that protocol.
BlueTooth and BLE are very different protocols near the metal and on the air. And though they share some stuff farther up the stack they're different even there.
BLE is the BlueTooth SIG's answer to other protocols (notably ZigBee) that were gaining market share in IoT things like smartmeters.
Who redefines words - and promulgates the revised meanings through media and educational institutions - so Constitutional provisions and the debates that went into their construction seem to say something different than - and often the opposite of - what they actually said? The left.
Who came up with the concept of "code words" and used it to redefine the meaning of ordinary words spoken by anyone arguing a position they disagree with, so they can edit their arguments even as they're being uttered, leaving their opponents with a language crippled by "holes" where necessary and convincing words used to be? The left.
Don't you think it's past time to finish the job, get off the 300 year dino juice addiction, and invest in cleaner power - solar, wind, wave, nuclear, whatever - so we can have our cake and eat it too, without getting poisoned in the process?
We "get off the dino juice" when doing something else has a better price/performance ratio.
Screwing around with the market to try to make that happen artificially just results in people finding ways around your screwing around.
Meanwhile: Ground-based solar is starting to cross-over versus grid power for stationary loads in sunny (and especially rural) areas - even without government subsidies and market fouling. Wind is to, for grid loads (and small wind has been cheaper than grid for some sites since before electrification.) Several approaches to fusion have the possibility that one might become game changer in the next couple decades. Space-based solar may also be becoming practical, thanks to technological advancement cutting the cost to orbit.
I could go on.
I fully expect the Invisible Hand to guide us to non-fossil-fuel energy sources well before the exploitable fossil fuels run out (in a few centuries at the current rate) or distort the environment dangerously. Assuming, of course, that government intervention, ripping off the public in the name of environmentalism, doesn't crash the economies and technological development needed to make it happen.
After that economic disaster scenario my second-tier concern is more a crash into another ice age in about 150 to 400 years than about "global warming".
I recall one of the Hackers / Life Extension j/ "Is uploading possible?" people reporting on someone making that argument back somewhere between 1988 and 1992.
(Except for the bit about denizens doing their own sims and all bets being off.)
The argument continued with the claim that, if there is one original and many sims the probability is high that any particular instance of you is a sim rather than an original.
(My take: What's the difference? If the (simulated or otherwise) particles interact in a way that supports life, it's life.)
100C: Water boils (at sea level mean pressure) 0C: Water freezes.
Nice if you're doing thermodynamics, and 0C is nice if you're worried about that bridge freezing up as you're driving (but 32F isn't THAT hard to remeber).
100F: Internal body temperature of wakeful adult 0F: Melting point of salted ice.
As ambient temperatures go from somewhat below 100F to 100F exertion in the open rapidly becomes dangerous. As it approaches and crosses it, the body becomes dependent on evaporation for cooling and staying hydrated becomes life-critical.
As ambient temperatures drop below zero degrees, salt stops melting ice on highways. Driving becomes extremely trecherous as falling snow is pressure-melted into patches of glossy ice that can't be removed effectively.
Both are occasional, but life-threatening, events. It's nice that the F scale has round numbers to make them easy to remember and likely to be noticed when they occur.
Whenever I start to feel any sympathy for government overreach to "protect" us, I re-read a scene in E. E. "Doc" Smith's _The Grey Lensman_. The one where the institutionally self-directed and unsupervised nark with the mind-reading spy technology wipes out the nest of dope dealers by calling in the beam-weapon equivalent of a total-annihilation nuclear strike on the city where they're based.
Daren't let even one of them escape, after all. They're corrupting our population's moral fibre.
In fact, these people have lobbied hard to make any such 3rd party, after market transfers "illegal,", by forbidding them in an absurd license agreement.
And there's nothing new about that. They have done it with every technological improvement in publishing media ever.
For instance: Look aat the labels on very early 45 records. You'll see a license warning telling you you don't own this record, you're only licensing the right to play it under certain circumstances.
It took the government and the "first sale doctrine" to break that assertion. But such things apply only to the media for which they were written. So with every new technology the publishers do the same old tricks until the government is prodded into making the analogous edict (if it hasn't grown too corrupt to do so).
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need high speed internet to get weather forecasts or to get market data.
In this era of high-speed trading, a good, fast, internet connection can make the difference between selling fleece and being fleeced.
If a commodity firm is interested enough in your market to try to game it you MIGHT have a chance with a broadband ISP fed by fiber. But dialup speeds, satellite delays, and even cellphone modem links are right out.
>> The Community Connect program run by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) funds broadband deployment in rural communities,
And you wonder why our government is neck-dept in debt.
The phone companies have been charging me - and everybody else in the country - a rake-off to pay for deploying high speed internet in rural areas. (It used to be just for phone service but got bumped to cover high-speed internet long ago. I've been paying in for decades, and haven't seen the service yet.)
Is this that money? If not, where did THAT money go?
My retirement house, on the outskirts of a rural village in Nevada, currently has a choice of dialup (32ish KILObits on a good day), cellphone (we're on the LAST TOWER...) or satellite. Even the local WISP - at $80ish/month for their low end product last I looked - doesn't point antennas our way any more, as of last summer. I just did a web search and can't find them any more, so maybe they went belly-up. All I see now is AT&T & Verizon cellphone-based service ($45-$390/month), one cable company (that only covers half the town - and not me), and Dish and HughesNet satellite (with their horrid latency and caps).)
Coherence has a lot to do with it.
With incoherent radiation the individual photons are random in phase and minor frequency offsets. The fields add up only by a random walk - nearly cancelling out.
With coherent radiation all the photons are in phase. Billions in lockstep. The fields of many photons add up just fine, and the effects are not limited by the energy of a single photon. For starters, a bunch of coherent infrared photons will ionize molecules quite easily.
We bathe ourselves in kilowatts of infrared radiation, and apart from heating, we don't worry about our chemistry or cells being changed, ...
That's INCOHERENT infrared radiation - the same incoherent stuff that has been bathing lifeforms since there were single cells exposed to sunlight.
Try it with a kilowatt infrared laser.
Photons from microwaves can't ionize matter. ... it it is silly to worry about it.
There are other ways to foul DNA than ionization. For starters, it is a long molecule with charged regions. One way that you can detect electrocution is that the DNA in the cells has uncoiled and lined up in parallel along where the electric field was oriented. Since the folding and unfolding of DNA is part of the regulation of gene expression that could have non trivial effects. (On the other hand, that's an effect observed when the exposure to electrical activity is extreme, so any effect might be lost due to the death of the affected cells.)
BUT....
A very substantial effect of electrical (and changing magnetic) fields on cells HAS been detected. It is being used therapeutically - on brain cancer - with great success.
You may have noticed that the electrical activity in living cells is almost entirely confined to electrical potentials across membranes and fine-grained patterns of charge on molecules that affect their interactions at close range. There is very little involvement with, or sensitivity to, large-scale fields.
On the other hand, you may ALSO have noticed, in pictures or drawings of cell reproduction, that the mechanism for separating the DNA into two nuclei looks very much like field lines, or the patterns iron filings take up in the presence of a strong magnetic field.
This is apparently because the cells use gross electric fields as part of the mechanism for gene segregation. So any other use of large-scale electrical fields has a strong selection pressure against it - it must both avoid fouling cell reproduction and provide an extreme advantage to offset any problems it does cause. Very few mechanisms have made this cut. Similarly, any other sensitivity to large scale electrical fields must be small, to avoid being fouled in turn by the fields that occur during cell division.
So cells are very insensitive to large-scale electrical fields through them, EXCEPT during cell division. But it turns out that fields - especially those from changing magnetic fields, DO interfere with cell division:
- Sometimes they prevent gene segregation. After a while the cell passes the phase where it would divide, but without dividing - resulting in a diploid cell, which then commits suicide via the apoptosis mechanism.
- Sometimes they result in incorrect segregation, resulting in two progeny cells with the wrong compliment of chromosomes. Then both either die through missing genes or again commit suicide.
Brain nerve cells, along with most of the cells supporting them, are very long lived and rarely reproduce - to the point that for decades it was though that they didn't reproduce at all once the brain was mature. (In fact there is some new nerve growth, which may be involved in learning and mental plasticity. But it is very slow and mostly newly differentiated cells from stem cell lines rather than reproduction of existing nerves.) So the cells of the brain are almost never in the stage where electrical and changing magnetic fields would be an issue.
Cancer cells, on the other hand, reproduce a lot, and spend much of their time in the vulnerable state. So electrical fields that would cause them to die are particularly useful in treating brain cancer, selectively killing the cancer cells while almost never affecting the normal cells with which they are comingled. Electromagnetic coil devices to produce them have recently shown such excellent results in treating inoperable and rapidly fatal brain cancers that the FDA aborted the tests and fast-tracked an approval.
Yes, the individual photons of radio signals are too low energy to ionize most molecules. But they are coherent and their fields add up to enough to have major electromechanical effects. (They COULD also add to produce ionization, especially on structures appropriately sized or massed-and-sprung to resonate, but at the levels involved in a cellphone this
you can make generators which do not have permanent magnets.
The reason rare earth permanent magnets are popular in wind generators, especially small ones, is that electromagnets continuously burn power to make the field, and this comes out of the power you generate.
Further: The slower the machine turns, the less energy you get from it (by a CUBE function!) and the more field you need (by a linear function in strength and a SQUARE function in consumed energy) to get it to generate a given output voltage. Small machines generally have to generate a higher voltage than an associated battery pack to achieve "cut in" - or use a voltage converter (which is more to fail, has losses, and has losses that are a higher percentage when the input voltage is lower). So when wind is slow, and you're already hard up for power, electromagnets are at their worst. This raises the cut in wind speed and greatly reduces the utility of small machines.
With permanent magnets you pay the magnetizing power once, for nanoseconds, as you manufacture them. No ongoing power cost, so you can use every bit of your generated power for your load.
Rare earth magnets are preferred to other types because they're stronger - strong enough to easily saturate flux-guide silicon-steel winding cores, strong enough to keep the machine small, which means the coils are small and have less resistive losses than a larger arrangement. Again, more power at low speed - which translates to a smaller, lighter, less expensive machine.
A big industrial machine is big enough to have a gearbox and spin fast enough that it can get away with using electromagnets. Nevertheless, permanent magnets, or a mix, also gives energy efficiency advantages to the big mills.
The REAL measure of efficiency for a wind machine, though, is power generated / cost of equipment, maintenance, and site. When your fuel is free the economics doesn't work the way most people are used to thinking.
Why would someone apologize for something they didn't do? That makes no sense.
Sure it does.
(He says) he's apologizing for causing trouble for (named and unnamed) others by coming out of the closet without adequate proof - and guts - to weather the attacks and claims for more proof that would result.
Regardless of whether his claims are true, that's understandable and legit.
This is now
That was then. I DID check the local Walgreens - more than one of them.
Perhaps, after Fukishima, the drug warriors came to their senses. Or perhaps it's just, as another poster said, "A California Thing".
Regardless, I'll give 'em another try now, and stock up if they're available. And if not, I'll try a Nevada store next time I'm out that way.
and by the time it gets here (assuming it isn't sold out) the fallout cloud has come, dumped, and gone, and the radioiodine is concentrated in your thyroid
I'm usually in either Silicon Valley or western Nevada.
After Fukishima, but before the fallout cloud got here, I tried to get some iodine supplement pills, to load up on non-radioactive iodine before the cloud arrived.
Couldn't do it.
There were no iodine supplements in the drug stores, or the health-food stores.
Also no tincture of iodine, iodine-based water purification tablets at the camping stores (where it used to be available as a water purifier - and has since been replace by other chemicals, ultrafilters, and backpack-sized pressure-cookers.)
(Even iodized salt was hard to find - and would have been poisonous at the necessary levels absent major iodine extraction.)
A compounding pharmacy offered to make up some - for an exorbatant fee - but they didn't have potassium iodide or other iodine compounds in stock. They would have had to back-order it, and the pills would have taken a month (while the fallout cloud would arrive in a couple days.
WTF?
Turns out that it's a casualty of the Drug War. Iodine is used in some street-drug manufacturing process. So (like pseudoephedrine) the government has imposed massive red tape on sales to the general population. These make it unprofitable, so the major outlets have all dropped it and moved on to other things.
Many months later I heard someone being interviewed on a conservative talk radio show, suggesting that the government should stock iodine supplements around the country and make them available on a moment's notice for protection from radiological attacks and other events - and for people to stock them themselves. He and the host were lamenting that the stupid bureaucrats wouldn't take such an obvious preventative measure. If I hadn't been on my way to work at the time I'd have called in and told them "It's the Drug War, stupid!"
I see the opposite. Maybe people tend to become more moderate, with less "fire in the belly" as they get older.
In my case it's not a loss of the enthusiasm of youth. While I do have more experience (and can thus see and avoid higher-order effects that are larger than first-order effects - and that's the main difference between a young liberal and an older conservative), there are other considerations.
The body is wearing out. (That's what happens from running the software on a primate for the hardware.) The government healthcare bureaucracy has drastically impeded the research necessary for prolonging life and restoring youthful characteristics and will most certainly spike any such treatment, at least until most of us boomers are safely killed off. Cryonics is a really long-shot bet. The government has also ripped off most of my income and blocked me from earning anywhere near my potential (while the Republicans talked shrinking it and instead grew it until the boomers were passing retirement age so income tax cuts would be moot.
When you're faced with limited remaining life in a fragile body on miniscule after-ripoffs savings, with a healthcare system that looks to be dedicated to killing you while retaining plausible deniability, idealism and self-reliance start to take a back seat to staying alive, fed, clothed, and housed.
That's a petrol converter, not a diesel one. Diesels nearly always have excess oxygen in the exhaust, meaning the first step in a three-way converter doesn't work.
Unless it's compensated for by controlled exhaust gas recirculation. That lets you reduce oxygen in proportion, providing just enough new oxygen to match the fuel you intend to burn. You keep the same compression ratio. It's ALMOST like adjusting the size of the cylinder on the fly. The heat also helps ignition. (The mix does burn a little slower.)
Not saying that's what they DO do. Just that it's available (and I know it is used in some diesel engines as part of the package, though not necessarily to walk the fuel/air tightrope). (I DID work just with gasoline engines and have no personal experience with pollution control on diesels.)
They also get poisoned by elements that are in diesel fuel, but removed from petrol.
That's an issue, all right.
[description of diesel cat approach]
Thanks.
This is about diesel. Call us back when they have a throttle.
Diesels have catalytic converters, too, and other ways to adjust the mixture as viewed by the cat - notably exhaust gas recirculation.
Not sure how it is in the EU. But here in the US it was NOT the auto industry. The testing regime was completely defined by a government agency.
At the time I was working on engineering emissions testing programs as a consultant, one of the auto company engineers claimed it had been designed like this:
- The EPA put recording instruments on a car (notably the bike-wheel odometer/tachometer).
- Then they parked behind cars in a "typical" city (Denver Colorado, if I recall correctly) and waited for the owner to come out and drive somewhere.
- The timed how long (if at all) the target warmed the engine before pulling out.
- Then they followed the target to its destination, doing their best to drive their instrumented car the same way as the target.
- From among the recorded trips they picked one that looked representative and contained about an average mix of city and highway driving. That became the test cycle the manufacturers must use.
Emissions test measurements (the fancy ones the engineers have to run at the companies, not the surveillance ones applied to car owners) measure enough about engine exhaust gasses and vehicle forces and motions that the mileage can be computed from the carbon balance, without extra gadgetry. So the government mandated it be computed and printed on the price stickers. It thus became glaringly obvious that (of course):
- (Of course) The chosen test cycle was not what all people drove all the time.
- (Not of course) The chosen test cycle happened to be somewhat more fuel efficient that the typical driver's average use of his vehicle.
Thus was born "Your Mileage May Vary (and will probably be lower)"
The main problem with emissions is if you want good fuel economy and hence lower CO2 per km then you need a high burn temp. The trouble with that is a high burn temp gives high NOx. Take your pick.
But that's the NOx coming out of the exhaust port. What matters is the NOx coming out of the exhaust PIPE. That's what catalytic converters are about.
A triple-acting catalytic converter pulls the oxygen off NOx, leaving N2, and uses it to burn CO into CO2 and UHC into CO2 and H2O.
Keep the air/fuel ratio carefully adjusted and it it balances out. Too much fuel, you have UHC and CO left over, too little and you have NOx left over. That's the job of the engine control computer, its sensors (especially the exhaust oxygen sensor), and sometimes an exhaust air injection system.
The optimal mix for big-three pollutant minimization is not the best for fuel efficiency. But it's pretty close. The lost power shows up as heat in the catalytic converter - which is part of what drives the reactions - mainly by kicking the reaction over the energy hump and the products off the catalyst so it can get on with more work. (That's also why the vehicles are allowed to warm up for a limited time before the regulations get tight.)
The issue with "cheating" is whether the engine control has been hacked to recognize the standard testing regime and work differently while being tested than it does most of the time on the road.
I'm not sure how it works in the EU. But here in the US (at least when I was working on auto emission testing) the laws don't put any requirements on what the vehicles emit on the road. They just require they meet a set of limits on a set of standardized tests.
You still need energy to drive the compressor. Maybe that's what he means?
As described it's a heat engine. It gets the energy from extracting heat from ocean water and dumping it somewhere else at a different temperature. This provides energy, which "drives the compressor" or the equivalent.
It's like the ammonia-cycle refrigerator as used in travel trailers, which uses heat from a flame (or an electric heater) to boil ammonia out of water at high pressure, cools it with a radiator, and uses this energy to liquify the purified ammonia, which is then allowed to pass through a restriction to a lower pressure and be exposed to hydrogen gas, at which point it boils in a heat exchanger, sucking the heat out of first the freezer, then the refrigerator, compartments, before being allowed to dissolve in the cooled water (which is what lowers the pressure) and be returned to the boiler. The water/boiler/heat-exchanger is a heat engine, getting the power to pump the ammonia through a liquification/boil cycle from heat accepted at one temperature and dumped at another.
In this case, it's not ammonia being boiled out of water by a fire. It's carbon dioxide being boiled, at high pressure, by heat from the ocean.
Presumably the energy source is still fossil fuels because they likely want to heat the place on days and nights when the wind isn't blowing (not much solar at 60N in December).
The energy source is the difference between the temperature of the seawater (the heat source) and that of some other heat sink (probably the Alaskan air). Heat is collected from the ocean via a titanium heat exchanger, transferred to a glycol-water mix (i.e. antifreeze-laden water), and moved to a refrigerator operating as a heat engine - which then drives a heat pump to heat air warmer than either the ocean or the heat-sink air (or whatever).
The "news" is that they modified the heat engine to use liquid/gas carbon dioxide as a replacement for its original working fluid - R-134a (the pricey modern refrigerant that replaced the R-12 "freon" of ozone-hole fame).
They've got BlueTooth and BlueTooth Low Energy (BLE) confused. That's not too surprising, since they're defined by the same organization, named as of the latter is a part of a latter version of the former rather than a separate thing, described in the same, 3,000+ page, poorly-written, standards document, modern chips do both (with separate "radios" internally), and these guys are NOT working with that protocol.
BlueTooth and BLE are very different protocols near the metal and on the air. And though they share some stuff farther up the stack they're different even there.
BLE is the BlueTooth SIG's answer to other protocols (notably ZigBee) that were gaining market share in IoT things like smartmeters.
Also:
Who redefines words - and promulgates the revised meanings through media and educational institutions - so Constitutional provisions and the debates that went into their construction seem to say something different than - and often the opposite of - what they actually said? The left.
Who came up with the concept of "code words" and used it to redefine the meaning of ordinary words spoken by anyone arguing a position they disagree with, so they can edit their arguments even as they're being uttered, leaving their opponents with a language crippled by "holes" where necessary and convincing words used to be? The left.
Newspeak is doubleplus alive and well.
Don't you think it's past time to finish the job, get off the 300 year dino juice addiction, and invest in cleaner power - solar, wind, wave, nuclear, whatever - so we can have our cake and eat it too, without getting poisoned in the process?
We "get off the dino juice" when doing something else has a better price/performance ratio.
Screwing around with the market to try to make that happen artificially just results in people finding ways around your screwing around.
Meanwhile: Ground-based solar is starting to cross-over versus grid power for stationary loads in sunny (and especially rural) areas - even without government subsidies and market fouling. Wind is to, for grid loads (and small wind has been cheaper than grid for some sites since before electrification.) Several approaches to fusion have the possibility that one might become game changer in the next couple decades. Space-based solar may also be becoming practical, thanks to technological advancement cutting the cost to orbit.
I could go on.
I fully expect the Invisible Hand to guide us to non-fossil-fuel energy sources well before the exploitable fossil fuels run out (in a few centuries at the current rate) or distort the environment dangerously. Assuming, of course, that government intervention, ripping off the public in the name of environmentalism, doesn't crash the economies and technological development needed to make it happen.
After that economic disaster scenario my second-tier concern is more a crash into another ice age in about 150 to 400 years than about "global warming".
I recall one of the Hackers / Life Extension j/ "Is uploading possible?" people reporting on someone making that argument back somewhere between 1988 and 1992.
(Except for the bit about denizens doing their own sims and all bets being off.)
The argument continued with the claim that, if there is one original and many sims the probability is high that any particular instance of you is a sim rather than an original.
(My take: What's the difference? If the (simulated or otherwise) particles interact in a way that supports life, it's life.)
100C: Water boils (at sea level mean pressure)
0C: Water freezes.
Nice if you're doing thermodynamics, and 0C is nice if you're worried about that bridge freezing up as you're driving (but 32F isn't THAT hard to remeber).
100F: Internal body temperature of wakeful adult
0F: Melting point of salted ice.
As ambient temperatures go from somewhat below 100F to 100F exertion in the open rapidly becomes dangerous. As it approaches and crosses it, the body becomes dependent on evaporation for cooling and staying hydrated becomes life-critical.
As ambient temperatures drop below zero degrees, salt stops melting ice on highways. Driving becomes extremely trecherous as falling snow is pressure-melted into patches of glossy ice that can't be removed effectively.
Both are occasional, but life-threatening, events. It's nice that the F scale has round numbers to make them easy to remember and likely to be noticed when they occur.
Posts like that make me wonder: Is this just a prank? Or is it a steganographied command-and-control channel for some malware?
Note to self*: Re-watch Hot Fuzz.
Whenever I start to feel any sympathy for government overreach to "protect" us, I re-read a scene in E. E. "Doc" Smith's _The Grey Lensman_. The one where the institutionally self-directed and unsupervised nark with the mind-reading spy technology wipes out the nest of dope dealers by calling in the beam-weapon equivalent of a total-annihilation nuclear strike on the city where they're based.
Daren't let even one of them escape, after all. They're corrupting our population's moral fibre.
The reader is expected to cheer.
In fact, these people have lobbied hard to make any such 3rd party, after market transfers "illegal,", by forbidding them in an absurd license agreement.
And there's nothing new about that. They have done it with every technological improvement in publishing media ever.
For instance: Look aat the labels on very early 45 records. You'll see a license warning telling you you don't own this record, you're only licensing the right to play it under certain circumstances.
It took the government and the "first sale doctrine" to break that assertion. But such things apply only to the media for which they were written. So with every new technology the publishers do the same old tricks until the government is prodded into making the analogous edict (if it hasn't grown too corrupt to do so).