But I think the extraction method in the article has some promise in making it more cost effective and offers a new way to use it.
Not to get picky, but the method in the article is a way to take ethanol and convert it into hydrogen to use in a fuel cell. It doesn't matter if your ethanol comes from corn or petrochemicals. In my personal opinion, we won't be using Biomass fuels until crude oil becomes so scare/expensive that we have too. It seems like the big problem with Biomass is that it costs money for your starting materials (someone has to farm them). Crude oil is just sitting in the ground waiting to be pumped out. Of course, once you run out, game over. Good reason to develop alternate technolgies now.
I guess my point is there's lots of ways to power a car (combustion engine, solar, nuclear, fuel cell, etc.) but in terms of all considerations (comfort, safety, performance, etc.), gasoline just works best right now for a variety of reasons. Don't get me wrong, i'd love to see a world with no reliance on fossil fuels, but right now there isn't sufficient driving force to get it to happen.
The reason they're getting subsidies is because converting corn into ethanol cost more than conventional methods (i.e. taking crude oil and running it through a variety of reactors to convert it). If it were more cost efficient that the traditional approach, the government would have no reason to subsidize it. Everyone would do it.
Take the hypothetical case where you have infinite (or even extremely large) surface energy between your liquid and glass. The liquid would ball up and only touch the glass at one point at the base (and sure it would probably bounce around). Would you not agree that this is a possible configuration? It is possible, although unlikely. It's also possible that the water hovers in mid air. It's possible, although not what you would call probable. But thank you for the wonderful lesson in semantics.
Tell me, if i put a small drop of water in a huge glass (with a wide base), will it always form a small film on the bottom of the glass, regardless of the material i choose? Will it never ball up in the center? I mean, gravity is big, bad, and mean, right?
Oh wait, i really don't care. I know the answer. And you probably do too, but that doesn't really matter. You're really boring me, so let's just say, you are the master of the universe and i am obviously completely wrong because i don't care about working with linus or whatever other dreams computer programers have.
Here's the only reason that i commented at all. You started out by saying:
Would the water in a glass stay in the glass - with the least amount of surface possible - if it was in a zero-gravity environment?
Implying to me that you think in a glass water has minimized its surface area. Ok, fine. I say that's not so, and you reply with:
No, water in a glass DOES have the least amount of surface area possible. A liquid will ALWAYS have such.
Well, now it's not just implied. You straight out say something which is obviously false. So i felt that one might benefit from noticing that the surface area is minimized in the form of a sphere and not in any other shape. Apparently you took that as an insult and proceeded to defend your honor, so to speak, by arguing about the whole pen/space issue, which i was never concerned with. I just found it humorous that you would argue quite vigorously that this was true. Perhaps in the second post you meant to say that in a glass water will minimize its potential energy as opposed to surface energy (i.e. surface area).
The point is not that i misunderstood. The problem is that what your wrote was different from what you meant. Which is fine. Language can be quite fickle.
A ballpoint pen is certainly not a closed container. It has to have at least one opening if not more likely two (pop open a bic, it should be fairly obvious). And the ink is not very likely to "flow" around seeing as it is quite viscous and confined within a relatively small capillary. I don't really care about this argument anymore since i was never really commenting on ballpoint pens in space, but more to question how you decided to define this magical surface area that was "minimized" in a glass. That's the only part that i found funny is that you stand by that statement so vigorously. Tell me something, if you were to fill an upside down glass with water (with it's "minimum surface area" as you stated) and lifted the glass, would it still have that minimum surface area, or would it be more? Gosh, i'll have to do the experiment to find out... If your comments were intended to be humorous, i apologize for not getting it. Frankly, you're not very funny and your sarcasm just comes off as stupidity.
Wow, you're quite beligerant and stubborn also. All I was trying to point out was the fact that the reason that water doesn't stay in a glass at zero g, is because without external forces placed upon it, it will minimize its surface area to volume ratio and form into a sphere. And also that a glass is most certainly not a minimization of surface area as you claim. Perhaps you could show me a simple calculation that would show how you decided to define surface area, or is it just arbitrary such that the definition makes whatever you say correct? The reason it adopts the shape of the glass is because gravity has a distinctly larger contribution to the overall energy than the surface energy. So it is able to adopt a configuration which conforms to the glass because the potential energy contribution is much greater that the additional energy required to generate the glass/water interface.
This has been quite an interesting discussion, but in the future, perhaps you could include some other insults besides idiot. Being called an idiot is becoming quite tedious. Perhaps try ignoramus, dimwit, imbecile, or my personal favorite nincompoop. Maybe you should put a thesaurus on your christmas list or just use one of the many online options. Certainly this would have given me incentive to not bother trying to straighten your thinking out.
Your definition of surface area is skewed. If you mean surface area exposed to the air. Fine. In a glass, it has less surface area exposed to the air. Hell, why not seal it up in a piece of glass and make it have not air in there. Wouldn't that be spectacular. There is still surface area.
Let's do some easy math. A sphere with radius 1 cm. That makes the volume and surface area as follows V = [4 pi (1 cm)^3]/3 SA = 4 pi (1 cm)^2 V/SA = (1 cm)/3 = 0.333333 cm
Ok, you with me? Now consider a cube (in free space for now, just to demonstrate my point). Let's say it has the same volume as the sphere. That means that each side of the cube is ([4 pi (1 cm)^3]/3)^(1/3). So, V = [4 pi (1 cm)^3]/3 SA = V^(2/3) V/SA = V^(1/3) = ([4 pi (1 cm)^3]/3)^(1/3) = 1.612 cm
Wow, the cube has a lot more surface area than the sphere for the same volume. In free space with no other forces, the only thermodynamic terms you have will be a bulk energy (energy due to the "enclosed" atom, their interactions with each other. this is per volume) and a surface energy (the interaction of atoms on the surface with the second phase, be it air, glass, metal, wax, or whatever combintation of materials you can imagine.) This surface energy term is why water will completely wet some materials (say a rock) and will ball up on others (say a freshly waxed car).
The only thing that changes when you put something in a glass, is that you add a different surface energy term. Let's say that you take you free standing cube and put it in a cube shaped glass. The bulk energy doesn't change, because the shape is the same. The surface energy does change, because before you had all faces of the cube interacting with air, now 5 are interaction with glass. Why do you get a miniscus? Better yet, why will it sometimes curve upward, sometimes curve downward? This is because the interaction with the material the glass is made of is either favorable (water likes material, somewhat more than it likes itself in the bulk form) and you get it curving upward, or it is unfavorable (water likes itself much more, it would like to ball up it possible, into a sphere if it weren't for gravity) and you get it curving downward.
Gravity just adds another parameter to the problem. So in the absence of gravity, if water doesn't like glass, it will ball up into a sphere and eventually leave the glass surface. What gravity does for us is force the water to stay in contact by the glass. Because, if the water wants to ball up to reduce it's interface and bulk energy, it also has to increase it's potential. Because of that, in the presence of gravity, there will be a midway point typically between completely wetting a surface and balling up into a tight sphere on the surface.
My point about your analysis being completely flawed only refered to the question posed about water in a glass at zero gravity. The other portion of the post (which was basically you just thinking through the correct explanation provided by the previous comment because you could believe it without writing it down or something) that was fine. There is a competion between gravity, surface energy and bulk energy, which determines what happens. I agree.
I am however a bit confused as to why you would call me an idiot, when you can't grasp the fact that a cube (or cylinder, the analysis is the same) has more surface area than a sphere for a given volume. My point is that just because the surface is not exposed to air, doesn't mean that the surface doesn't exist. I wasn't even commenting at all on the first portion of your post, which is why i quoted the part in question to start out with. If you read my previous post (preferably with your head out of your ass) you'll notice i don't mention anything about gravity or ball point pens because i wasn't commenting on that.
Would the water in a glass stay in the glass - with the least amount of surface possible - if it was in a zero-gravity environment?
Your analysis is completely flawed. First off, in a glass, water does NOT have the lowest surface area. You have to remember that any interface has a surface energy (water/air, water/glass, etc.) A sphere will have the lowest surface area to volume, which is why we see water form up into balls in space where there are no essentially no external forces.
The explantation given previously was fine. But there still is a person here who is decidedly "not rocket-scientist material."
Slashdot Mirror
But I think the extraction method in the article has some promise in making it more cost effective and offers a new way to use it. Not to get picky, but the method in the article is a way to take ethanol and convert it into hydrogen to use in a fuel cell. It doesn't matter if your ethanol comes from corn or petrochemicals. In my personal opinion, we won't be using Biomass fuels until crude oil becomes so scare/expensive that we have too. It seems like the big problem with Biomass is that it costs money for your starting materials (someone has to farm them). Crude oil is just sitting in the ground waiting to be pumped out. Of course, once you run out, game over. Good reason to develop alternate technolgies now. I guess my point is there's lots of ways to power a car (combustion engine, solar, nuclear, fuel cell, etc.) but in terms of all considerations (comfort, safety, performance, etc.), gasoline just works best right now for a variety of reasons. Don't get me wrong, i'd love to see a world with no reliance on fossil fuels, but right now there isn't sufficient driving force to get it to happen.
The reason they're getting subsidies is because converting corn into ethanol cost more than conventional methods (i.e. taking crude oil and running it through a variety of reactors to convert it). If it were more cost efficient that the traditional approach, the government would have no reason to subsidize it. Everyone would do it.
Tell me, if i put a small drop of water in a huge glass (with a wide base), will it always form a small film on the bottom of the glass, regardless of the material i choose? Will it never ball up in the center? I mean, gravity is big, bad, and mean, right?
Oh wait, i really don't care. I know the answer. And you probably do too, but that doesn't really matter. You're really boring me, so let's just say, you are the master of the universe and i am obviously completely wrong because i don't care about working with linus or whatever other dreams computer programers have.
Would the water in a glass stay in the glass - with the least amount of surface possible - if it was in a zero-gravity environment?
Implying to me that you think in a glass water has minimized its surface area. Ok, fine. I say that's not so, and you reply with:
No, water in a glass DOES have the least amount of surface area possible. A liquid will ALWAYS have such.
Well, now it's not just implied. You straight out say something which is obviously false. So i felt that one might benefit from noticing that the surface area is minimized in the form of a sphere and not in any other shape. Apparently you took that as an insult and proceeded to defend your honor, so to speak, by arguing about the whole pen/space issue, which i was never concerned with. I just found it humorous that you would argue quite vigorously that this was true. Perhaps in the second post you meant to say that in a glass water will minimize its potential energy as opposed to surface energy (i.e. surface area).
The point is not that i misunderstood. The problem is that what your wrote was different from what you meant. Which is fine. Language can be quite fickle.
A ballpoint pen is certainly not a closed container. It has to have at least one opening if not more likely two (pop open a bic, it should be fairly obvious). And the ink is not very likely to "flow" around seeing as it is quite viscous and confined within a relatively small capillary. I don't really care about this argument anymore since i was never really commenting on ballpoint pens in space, but more to question how you decided to define this magical surface area that was "minimized" in a glass. That's the only part that i found funny is that you stand by that statement so vigorously. Tell me something, if you were to fill an upside down glass with water (with it's "minimum surface area" as you stated) and lifted the glass, would it still have that minimum surface area, or would it be more? Gosh, i'll have to do the experiment to find out... If your comments were intended to be humorous, i apologize for not getting it. Frankly, you're not very funny and your sarcasm just comes off as stupidity.
Wow, you're quite beligerant and stubborn also. All I was trying to point out was the fact that the reason that water doesn't stay in a glass at zero g, is because without external forces placed upon it, it will minimize its surface area to volume ratio and form into a sphere. And also that a glass is most certainly not a minimization of surface area as you claim. Perhaps you could show me a simple calculation that would show how you decided to define surface area, or is it just arbitrary such that the definition makes whatever you say correct? The reason it adopts the shape of the glass is because gravity has a distinctly larger contribution to the overall energy than the surface energy. So it is able to adopt a configuration which conforms to the glass because the potential energy contribution is much greater that the additional energy required to generate the glass/water interface. This has been quite an interesting discussion, but in the future, perhaps you could include some other insults besides idiot. Being called an idiot is becoming quite tedious. Perhaps try ignoramus, dimwit, imbecile, or my personal favorite nincompoop. Maybe you should put a thesaurus on your christmas list or just use one of the many online options. Certainly this would have given me incentive to not bother trying to straighten your thinking out.
Your definition of surface area is skewed. If you mean surface area exposed to the air. Fine. In a glass, it has less surface area exposed to the air. Hell, why not seal it up in a piece of glass and make it have not air in there. Wouldn't that be spectacular. There is still surface area.
Let's do some easy math. A sphere with radius 1 cm. That makes the volume and surface area as follows
V = [4 pi (1 cm)^3]/3
SA = 4 pi (1 cm)^2
V/SA = (1 cm)/3 = 0.333333 cm
Ok, you with me? Now consider a cube (in free space for now, just to demonstrate my point). Let's say it has the same volume as the sphere. That means that each side of the cube is ([4 pi (1 cm)^3]/3)^(1/3). So,
V = [4 pi (1 cm)^3]/3
SA = V^(2/3)
V/SA = V^(1/3) = ([4 pi (1 cm)^3]/3)^(1/3) = 1.612 cm
Wow, the cube has a lot more surface area than the sphere for the same volume. In free space with no other forces, the only thermodynamic terms you have will be a bulk energy (energy due to the "enclosed" atom, their interactions with each other. this is per volume) and a surface energy (the interaction of atoms on the surface with the second phase, be it air, glass, metal, wax, or whatever combintation of materials you can imagine.) This surface energy term is why water will completely wet some materials (say a rock) and will ball up on others (say a freshly waxed car).
The only thing that changes when you put something in a glass, is that you add a different surface energy term. Let's say that you take you free standing cube and put it in a cube shaped glass. The bulk energy doesn't change, because the shape is the same. The surface energy does change, because before you had all faces of the cube interacting with air, now 5 are interaction with glass. Why do you get a miniscus? Better yet, why will it sometimes curve upward, sometimes curve downward? This is because the interaction with the material the glass is made of is either favorable (water likes material, somewhat more than it likes itself in the bulk form) and you get it curving upward, or it is unfavorable (water likes itself much more, it would like to ball up it possible, into a sphere if it weren't for gravity) and you get it curving downward.
Gravity just adds another parameter to the problem. So in the absence of gravity, if water doesn't like glass, it will ball up into a sphere and eventually leave the glass surface. What gravity does for us is force the water to stay in contact by the glass. Because, if the water wants to ball up to reduce it's interface and bulk energy, it also has to increase it's potential. Because of that, in the presence of gravity, there will be a midway point typically between completely wetting a surface and balling up into a tight sphere on the surface.
My point about your analysis being completely flawed only refered to the question posed about water in a glass at zero gravity. The other portion of the post (which was basically you just thinking through the correct explanation provided by the previous comment because you could believe it without writing it down or something) that was fine. There is a competion between gravity, surface energy and bulk energy, which determines what happens. I agree.
I am however a bit confused as to why you would call me an idiot, when you can't grasp the fact that a cube (or cylinder, the analysis is the same) has more surface area than a sphere for a given volume. My point is that just because the surface is not exposed to air, doesn't mean that the surface doesn't exist. I wasn't even commenting at all on the first portion of your post, which is why i quoted the part in question to start out with. If you read my previous post (preferably with your head out of your ass) you'll notice i don't mention anything about gravity or ball point pens because i wasn't commenting on that.
Would the water in a glass stay in the glass - with the least amount of surface possible - if it was in a zero-gravity environment?
Your analysis is completely flawed. First off, in a glass, water does NOT have the lowest surface area. You have to remember that any interface has a surface energy (water/air, water/glass, etc.) A sphere will have the lowest surface area to volume, which is why we see water form up into balls in space where there are no essentially no external forces.
The explantation given previously was fine. But there still is a person here who is decidedly "not rocket-scientist material."