You can't use waste heat to do work. That's why it's called waste heat. The engine that burns the fuel is already a heat engine, optimized for the conditions in which it is expected to operate. The stirling engine is another form of heat engine which is claimed by many proponents to be "greater than 90% efficient" or somesuch. If a hard number is specified, it most likely means "90% as efficient as the ideal heat engine: the Carnot cycle.
so the efficiency of a "90% efficient" stirling engine would be (.9)*(1-Tc/Th). where Tc (heat sink/cold source) and Th (heat source) are expressed in absolute temperature units (Kelvin or Rankine). But it gets worse. The stirling engine approaches this by approximating the Carnot cycle as closely as practical. The Carnot cycle will extract the greatest amount of useful work from any temperature differential, but one complete cycle is longer than the life of the universe. Stirlings, though efficient in principle, are generally low-power machines. The big advantage of a stirling engine afaik is simplicity. The minimum number of moving parts is somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 so they could concievably be very reliable and easy to repair for remote locations.
Using two engines to extract energy from a single source is wasteful. The output of the first engine is at it's Tcold temperature. The second engine will impede the rejection of heat and raise the Tcold for the first engine, while extracting the leftovers at a much lower efficiency than the first (and the energy the first engine doesn't generate as a result of higher Tcold will be extracted at lower efficiency as well) unless the first engine was horribly poorly designed. In which case, the second engine should've been the first to begin with.
--
"If your plan 'B' is better than your plan 'A' then you've got your plans in the wrong order"
Amtrak though state supported is a business just like the airlines. In fact, just like the airlines, they have found a revinue stream which is far more stable than the whims of millions of customers (or in amtrak's case, thousands of customers).
The "cost per rider" claim is significant. Despite costing MORE than a plane ticket on a discount airline (which afaik are the only airlins not subsidized oddly enough) the trip is STILL mostly financed by taxpayer largess. In the environment in which it exists, rail travel in america is more costly than air travel and far more costly than automobile travel.
This is significant for environmentalists because we currently live in an energy economy. As much as people would like to think of the dollar as the basis of trade in the states, the barrel of oil is really the basic unit. with oil, one man can do the work of a hundred. The price of commodities is therefore an indicator of the oil cost to produce. More expensive commodities are therefore more resource intensive than less expensive commodities.
Based on the cost per passenger mile, rail travel is WORSE overall for the environment than automobile travel except in a few densly populated areas. (the marginal cost to the environment for electrified systems may be lower due to the fixed point cleanup methods, but the whole system is more than just the energy used for travel) Public transportation should concentrate therefore on a "least effort" planning paradigm. (and be as private as possible rather than disguise the costs by subsidizing them with taxes instead of fares) If rail fits into that scheme, great, but rail for rail's sake is pointless to everyone but rail buffs.
"you can't give up freedom to gain security" is not an idyllic statement. It's a deeply cynical statement. It is the belief that giving up liberty for the sake of security will result only in less liberty and no actual increase in security as a best case. In the worst case, even security would be lessened due to the reduced liberty.
This theory can be seen in the mundane example of highway speed limits. There are thousands of deaths each year as a result of accidents occuring at high speeds. The argument for lowering the speed limit often goes like, "If it saves only one life, it will be worth it." Taken to the extreme, if the speed limit were low enough, there would be zero fatalities. The speed at which this occurs is probably below 3mph (walking pace) however.
Of course, the inconvenience of 3mph speed limits is obvious. Slightly less apparant is the shipping complications: some regions may be unable to obtain fresh food and die before they could move to a new location closer to the food source.
Obviously, there is some point at which the number of deaths due to highway accidents is acceptable compared to the benefits obtained by having a certain speed limit.
The same thing with terrorism. It is unreasonable to expect zero deaths due to terrorism. The security measures required for that would be rediculously onerous. We should be concentrating on the most effective ways of reducing the risk and mitigating it rather than eliminating it entirely.
If you need to go to war, you go to war with the weapons you have not the weapons you'd like to have. Of course, that doesn't mean you can't also work on getting the weapons you want, but if you wait until all the ducks are in a row, the enemy will have long since sliped in behind you and snapped your neck already.
You want explosives? shuttle's got explosives! try explosive bolts holding things together, monopropellant hydrazine maneuvering thrusters and ammonium perchlorate + aluminum solid rocket boosters. (perchlorate plant explosion a few years ago was quite impressive.) AND there's REAL PEOPLE INSIDE!
Well we still need relatively cheap heavy launch vehicles to build the space elevator in the first place, so I don't see working on an apollo type project as being an incompatable goal.
We don't have second ammendment rights anymore. and the rules change under martial law anyhow.
people have been conditioned by those awful sappy lawyer shows to accept just about anything the government does (especially to those bad guys who like GUNS) is okay. There is too much apathy in Amerika to actually rise up to support *any* rights, let alone unpopular ones.
I think experience from Ruby Ridge and possibly the Branch Davidians shows that if you tango with lethal force where the government is involved, your tombstone will say, "Here lies so-and-so. He's right dead..."
I think the best thing to do in this circumstance would be to get some kind of legal documentation from the police that took your guns, find a good hiding place and sue the city, state, etc. later. Your case might be stronger if you witness a crime that your gun could've prevented. I don't know how far you'd get, but this is one circumstance where class action lawsuit might be useful. It's really too bad there's no way to bring criminal charges against those who gave the order.
Especially considering this kind of circumstance really hasn't been tested in the courts, there's no reason to die for everyone else's right to bear arms. At least not while legal options remain.
---------
addendum: after I finished entering in my rant, I noticed you wrote, "should be entitled..." (emphasis mine) and that I might have committed the ol' "is-ought" falacy in my response. I've left it as-is because i think it's still relevant, in a "slightly different point of view" kind of way.
took me a minute to realize that POS in your context meant "Point of Sale" and not "Piece of S(hoddy workmanship)" though I suppose both would be appropriate.
You seem to have missed my two original points: It appears that Mr. Fusion wouldn't actually have anything to do with fusion and the idea of stuffing meowing felines into a gas-tank with a tiny wooden plunger designed for this purpose is more than a little funny. (but not much more)
But burning man is a pile of wood. A shuttle launch burns the hydrox equivalent of a nuclear bomb, rattles bones a dozen miles away, lights up the full sky for tens of miles and can be seen from most of florida. If you're a pyro, there's no contest.
I believe your specifications require a format other than HTML. consider the virtues of PDF, a format which specifically had the goal of rendering exactly the same across browsers, platforms, and printers.
Nobody cares where you go. Nobody cares where you are. Nobody cares about you. You crazy paranoid megalomaniac, they're not after you. They only care about important people. like me:)
The technology has been around quite a while. so long in fact that I have a pair from Circuit City that cost around $14 that blocks the low frequency stuff quite well. (so amazingly well on airplanes that I use them even when not listening to anything just to take a nap.)
It's just speakers, an inverting op-amp, and microphones. None of those components are very expensive or complicated, so what's with the bose pricing.
for that matter, what's with bose pricing on any of its equipment. It's still just cheap speakers in a plastic case no matter how you dress it up.
Nothing will happen to the microwave if you put metal objects in it.
You still shouldn't do it though.
If you put in a metal object, the object will get very hot. It will not look hot until you reach in and burn yourself trying to remove it. Then it will still not look hot, but you'll know better because of the burnt flesh stuck to it.
If you put in a metal object that has lots of sharp edges, (such as crinkled up aluminum foil from your hat) it may spark. while it gets very hot.
If you put in a metal object with something flamable (say, aluminum foil rolled up with a paper ball full of grain dust) maybe you could start a fire. if you left it in for a long time. you will probably still be able to use the magnetron after the fire, but the electronics are sure to be toast. (and the carbon scoring will not make the interior very appetizing)
If you insist on putting a hard disk in the microwave however, make sure ot remove any metal coverings. a solid conductive enclosure is almost opaque to radio so the case would get very hot and nothing would happen the platters.
Count me among those who would be satisfied if journalists got basic units correct. Especially the common "mistake" of confusing power and energy. That would be enough for me. I don't even expect them to learn anything about the second law of thermodynamics or to be skeptical of anyone making outrageous claims like "It runs on ordinary water", "we can have a hydrogen economy" etc.
I'll be satisfied for now if they'll just stop talking about a power plant's output in terms of kilowatts per day.
I thought we agreed not to worry so much about the difference between "hypothesis" and "theory" so we wouldn't have to use the "hypothesis of evolution" to destroy the "opiate of the people" and create our socialist paradise.
There is no practical reason why they should've bothered even trying to show the bodies. It's disrespectful to the dead and serves no purpose: we know people died, the visible destruction and the announcements of death tally is sufficient.
Now, although I find it distasteful that they would want to show them and morbid that anyone would want to see them, I am loathe to support outright banning of this type of image or that (slippery slope and all). I'll meet you halfway: they should be allowed to show any bodies for whom they've recieved either 1) prior permission from the deceased or 2) permission from the living heirs of the deceased. If such cannot be found, assume no consent given.
And for the love of all that is holy News Networks, cut down on calling them "corpses." That word reminds of halloween show horrors more than grim realities and insults the dead. I've never heard the word corpses used so extensively (or at all) in any coverage of deadly disasters in the past, so why bandy this buzzword about now? It reminds one of the "gravitas" fiasco of 2000. It's just so gristly and insensitive of a word. I implore you, MSNBCNN/ABCBS&FOX, show some decorum.
Slashdot Mirror
dolphins ARE whales. if you skip the sharks, there would already be 'armed whales' in the water.
You can't use waste heat to do work. That's why it's called waste heat. The engine that burns the fuel is already a heat engine, optimized for the conditions in which it is expected to operate. The stirling engine is another form of heat engine which is claimed by many proponents to be "greater than 90% efficient" or somesuch. If a hard number is specified, it most likely means "90% as efficient as the ideal heat engine: the Carnot cycle.
so the efficiency of a "90% efficient" stirling engine would be (.9)*(1-Tc/Th). where Tc (heat sink/cold source) and Th (heat source) are expressed in absolute temperature units (Kelvin or Rankine). But it gets worse. The stirling engine approaches this by approximating the Carnot cycle as closely as practical. The Carnot cycle will extract the greatest amount of useful work from any temperature differential, but one complete cycle is longer than the life of the universe. Stirlings, though efficient in principle, are generally low-power machines. The big advantage of a stirling engine afaik is simplicity. The minimum number of moving parts is somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 so they could concievably be very reliable and easy to repair for remote locations.
Using two engines to extract energy from a single source is wasteful. The output of the first engine is at it's Tcold temperature. The second engine will impede the rejection of heat and raise the Tcold for the first engine, while extracting the leftovers at a much lower efficiency than the first (and the energy the first engine doesn't generate as a result of higher Tcold will be extracted at lower efficiency as well) unless the first engine was horribly poorly designed. In which case, the second engine should've been the first to begin with.
--
"If your plan 'B' is better than your plan 'A' then you've got your plans in the wrong order"
Amtrak though state supported is a business just like the airlines. In fact, just like the airlines, they have found a revinue stream which is far more stable than the whims of millions of customers (or in amtrak's case, thousands of customers).
The "cost per rider" claim is significant. Despite costing MORE than a plane ticket on a discount airline (which afaik are the only airlins not subsidized oddly enough) the trip is STILL mostly financed by taxpayer largess. In the environment in which it exists, rail travel in america is more costly than air travel and far more costly than automobile travel.
This is significant for environmentalists because we currently live in an energy economy. As much as people would like to think of the dollar as the basis of trade in the states, the barrel of oil is really the basic unit. with oil, one man can do the work of a hundred. The price of commodities is therefore an indicator of the oil cost to produce. More expensive commodities are therefore more resource intensive than less expensive commodities.
Based on the cost per passenger mile, rail travel is WORSE overall for the environment than automobile travel except in a few densly populated areas. (the marginal cost to the environment for electrified systems may be lower due to the fixed point cleanup methods, but the whole system is more than just the energy used for travel) Public transportation should concentrate therefore on a "least effort" planning paradigm. (and be as private as possible rather than disguise the costs by subsidizing them with taxes instead of fares) If rail fits into that scheme, great, but rail for rail's sake is pointless to everyone but rail buffs.
"you can't give up freedom to gain security" is not an idyllic statement. It's a deeply cynical statement. It is the belief that giving up liberty for the sake of security will result only in less liberty and no actual increase in security as a best case. In the worst case, even security would be lessened due to the reduced liberty.
This theory can be seen in the mundane example of highway speed limits. There are thousands of deaths each year as a result of accidents occuring at high speeds. The argument for lowering the speed limit often goes like, "If it saves only one life, it will be worth it." Taken to the extreme, if the speed limit were low enough, there would be zero fatalities. The speed at which this occurs is probably below 3mph (walking pace) however.
Of course, the inconvenience of 3mph speed limits is obvious. Slightly less apparant is the shipping complications: some regions may be unable to obtain fresh food and die before they could move to a new location closer to the food source.
Obviously, there is some point at which the number of deaths due to highway accidents is acceptable compared to the benefits obtained by having a certain speed limit.
The same thing with terrorism. It is unreasonable to expect zero deaths due to terrorism. The security measures required for that would be rediculously onerous. We should be concentrating on the most effective ways of reducing the risk and mitigating it rather than eliminating it entirely.
Ok, I parsed that sentence into "just be sure to turn [the sign] off around mail time" and thought 'you sicko.' before reading the rest. sicko.
to paraphrase mr. rumsfeld,
If you need to go to war, you go to war with the weapons you have not the weapons you'd like to have. Of course, that doesn't mean you can't also work on getting the weapons you want, but if you wait until all the ducks are in a row, the enemy will have long since sliped in behind you and snapped your neck already.
You want explosives? shuttle's got explosives! try explosive bolts holding things together, monopropellant hydrazine maneuvering thrusters and ammonium perchlorate + aluminum solid rocket boosters. (perchlorate plant explosion a few years ago was quite impressive.) AND there's REAL PEOPLE INSIDE!
Well we still need relatively cheap heavy launch vehicles to build the space elevator in the first place, so I don't see working on an apollo type project as being an incompatable goal.
We don't have second ammendment rights anymore. and the rules change under martial law anyhow.
people have been conditioned by those awful sappy lawyer shows to accept just about anything the government does (especially to those bad guys who like GUNS) is okay. There is too much apathy in Amerika to actually rise up to support *any* rights, let alone unpopular ones.
I think experience from Ruby Ridge and possibly the Branch Davidians shows that if you tango with lethal force where the government is involved, your tombstone will say, "Here lies so-and-so. He's right dead..."
I think the best thing to do in this circumstance would be to get some kind of legal documentation from the police that took your guns, find a good hiding place and sue the city, state, etc. later. Your case might be stronger if you witness a crime that your gun could've prevented. I don't know how far you'd get, but this is one circumstance where class action lawsuit might be useful. It's really too bad there's no way to bring criminal charges against those who gave the order.
Especially considering this kind of circumstance really hasn't been tested in the courts, there's no reason to die for everyone else's right to bear arms. At least not while legal options remain.
---------
addendum: after I finished entering in my rant, I noticed you wrote, "should be entitled..." (emphasis mine) and that I might have committed the ol' "is-ought" falacy in my response. I've left it as-is because i think it's still relevant, in a "slightly different point of view" kind of way.
I don't think that kind of journalist ever existed. Keep in mind that the highest award in journalism is the Pulitzer prize.
took me a minute to realize that POS in your context meant "Point of Sale" and not "Piece of S(hoddy workmanship)" though I suppose both would be appropriate.
You seem to have missed my two original points: It appears that Mr. Fusion wouldn't actually have anything to do with fusion and the idea of stuffing meowing felines into a gas-tank with a tiny wooden plunger designed for this purpose is more than a little funny. (but not much more)
the law should be writen so anybody can read it.
But burning man is a pile of wood. A shuttle launch burns the hydrox equivalent of a nuclear bomb, rattles bones a dozen miles away, lights up the full sky for tens of miles and can be seen from most of florida. If you're a pyro, there's no contest.
I believe your specifications require a format other than HTML. consider the virtues of PDF, a format which specifically had the goal of rendering exactly the same across browsers, platforms, and printers.
I've even ditched the search bar now that quick links exist. it's so easy to type [ctrl-l] g search terms [enter] and doesn't even require mousing.
Nobody cares where you go. Nobody cares where you are. Nobody cares about you. You crazy paranoid megalomaniac, they're not after you. They only care about important people. like me :)
so.. It's Mr Fusion! sweet. I hope someone does build a car based on this. and includes a little plunger for the cats that clog its ravenous maw.
Or laywers as lawmakers.
The technology has been around quite a while. so long in fact that I have a pair from Circuit City that cost around $14 that blocks the low frequency stuff quite well. (so amazingly well on airplanes that I use them even when not listening to anything just to take a nap.)
It's just speakers, an inverting op-amp, and microphones. None of those components are very expensive or complicated, so what's with the bose pricing.
for that matter, what's with bose pricing on any of its equipment. It's still just cheap speakers in a plastic case no matter how you dress it up.
Nothing will happen to the microwave if you put metal objects in it.
You still shouldn't do it though.
If you put in a metal object, the object will get very hot. It will not look hot until you reach in and burn yourself trying to remove it. Then it will still not look hot, but you'll know better because of the burnt flesh stuck to it.
If you put in a metal object that has lots of sharp edges, (such as crinkled up aluminum foil from your hat) it may spark. while it gets very hot.
If you put in a metal object with something flamable (say, aluminum foil rolled up with a paper ball full of grain dust) maybe you could start a fire. if you left it in for a long time. you will probably still be able to use the magnetron after the fire, but the electronics are sure to be toast. (and the carbon scoring will not make the interior very appetizing)
If you insist on putting a hard disk in the microwave however, make sure ot remove any metal coverings. a solid conductive enclosure is almost opaque to radio so the case would get very hot and nothing would happen the platters.
Count me among those who would be satisfied if journalists got basic units correct. Especially the common "mistake" of confusing power and energy. That would be enough for me. I don't even expect them to learn anything about the second law of thermodynamics or to be skeptical of anyone making outrageous claims like "It runs on ordinary water", "we can have a hydrogen economy" etc.
I'll be satisfied for now if they'll just stop talking about a power plant's output in terms of kilowatts per day.
I thought we agreed not to worry so much about the difference between "hypothesis" and "theory" so we wouldn't have to use the "hypothesis of evolution" to destroy the "opiate of the people" and create our socialist paradise.
There is no practical reason why they should've bothered even trying to show the bodies. It's disrespectful to the dead and serves no purpose: we know people died, the visible destruction and the announcements of death tally is sufficient.
Now, although I find it distasteful that they would want to show them and morbid that anyone would want to see them, I am loathe to support outright banning of this type of image or that (slippery slope and all). I'll meet you halfway: they should be allowed to show any bodies for whom they've recieved either 1) prior permission from the deceased or 2) permission from the living heirs of the deceased. If such cannot be found, assume no consent given.
And for the love of all that is holy News Networks, cut down on calling them "corpses." That word reminds of halloween show horrors more than grim realities and insults the dead. I've never heard the word corpses used so extensively (or at all) in any coverage of deadly disasters in the past, so why bandy this buzzword about now? It reminds one of the "gravitas" fiasco of 2000. It's just so gristly and insensitive of a word. I implore you, MSNBCNN/ABCBS&FOX, show some decorum.
and, afaik, was originally made by an english parliamentarian (?) 2 centuries previous.