TiO2 is already a major constituent of white paint.
Patenting TiO2 as a pollution catalyst is a somewhat novel and likely to be challenngeable idea.
Painting roads is, well, laughable.
Roads need to be grippy, and somewhat porous. Painting somewhat compromises these traits.
In harsh climates, road stripes, which are much tougher than any paint you could ever afford to put all over the roads, and doesnt undergo much tire wear, still wears out in a year or two. Imagine how long the catalyst paint would last.
White roads are likely to be hard on the eyes.
Who's going to pay 30% more for this?
Concrete buildings are rarely painted, for obvious reasons-- the paint fades or chips off in a few years, requiring major repainting.
The alternative is to put the stuff into the concrete mix, but that's very wasteful, not to mention expensive.
Trying to put it only in the outer surface layers of the mix is likely to lead to very interesting swirl and mottle patterns, perhaps unsightly.
Like many ideas, this one sounds super at the start, not so wonderful after a little reflection.
In case you didnt get it, some bozon is suggesting they can heat a building with sewer water thbat's at 65 degrees.
As they said on the MST3K parody of "The Mole People":
"Oh NO! Light just slightly brighter than what we're accustomed to!"
You cannot "heat a building 95% of the time" with a temp lower than your desired temperature. Maybe the soft-pedalled HEAT PUMP can. And with water five degrees warmer than the groundwater, the heat pump will be about 1.2% more efficient. Which can never pay off the added cost, not even the interest on the cost. No way, no how. They'd be much better off spending the $20K on a more efficient heat pump.
>Ocean Power Delivery is a company that branched off the research done in Edinburgh University, including Stephen Salter, on wave power. It has received over £6m in venture capitalist money...
My point exactly. If this technology had any track record or hope of doing so, the money would have been available at x% interest from any big bank.
Venture capital is usually invested in long-shot possibilities. A large percentage of the investments are a total loss. A small percentage may succeed, in which case the venture capitalists grab a huge share of the profits or a part of the company. It's like dancing with the Devil.
Also note those folks are not exactly setting the world on fire. Their "latest news" is from June, and is just the announcement that they've dealt with the VC devils. Not a good sign.
>10 years, Are you kidding? You can easily build it to last 75 or hundreds of years with proper maintenance.
That's for things in fresh water, and things that can be taken out of the water to be scraped and repainted.
None of those things apply for a seawater desalinizer. Think of supertankers, which cost tens of millions of dollars, and only last a few decades before rust overwhelms them.
>Take the word of a civil engineer. The moving parts may be more difficult, but I doubt it. We've got movable dams that are just about zero maintenance, that have been standing there for almost 40 years now.
You don't dam the ocean, so I suspect you're talking about fresh water devices. Totally different animals compared to saltwater energy-extraction thingies. Once you assemble that big a device in the water, you can't take it out again for repainting.
>Also, funding for projects like this doesn't work like a bank loan. You simply take a percentage of the profit in exchange for providing funding.
The people and institutions that have that kind of money are quite expert at evaluating the risk/reward ratio. Nobody is interested in investing in ventures that have huge risks and no possibility of making a profit.
If you read The Fine Article, you might notice a certain shortage of facts. Like the costs. Economics are important. You don't want to waste money on schemes that are many many times more expensive than proven methods.
In general, it's not feasible to capture wave power. The stuff is too diffuse-- it takes too much infrastructure to capture too little energy to even pay back the cost of building the contraption.
It doesnt matter whether you use the mechanical energy to generate electricity, desalinate water, or make tea. You can't build a wave energy capture device that's rugged enough to survicve the storm, corrosion and other hazards at a reasonable cost.
As a starting point, let's take their (unsubstantiated) estimate of 2,000 cubic meters per day. A quick google shows that's worth about $1,000 to $3,000. Assuming the waves are active 75% of the time we could expect maybe $2,000 a day from this device. That's about $700,000 a year. Kinda impressive at first glance. But will that be enough to even pay for the gadget over time? Let's estimate, generously, that the device will last ten years. And that we can borrow money to build it at 5% interest. If it and the pipeline to shore can be built for $10 million, we need to pay at least approx $1.5 mil a year to make headway on the principal and interest. Plus the cost of staff and maintenance. We're still a factor of more than two away from breaking-even. And that's assuming no risks due to weather or unanticipated problems with new technology.
maybe it might make a bit more sense to use like exponential notation? A billion in the USA isw 10^9, in the UK, 10^12. A quintillion is even less well defined.
BTW if a quintillion is 10^18, it's not that much. Our Sun puts out every second about 10^11 equivalent megatons of energy 50 x 10^18 is only 50 (US) billion times as much.
>And even if your numbers were correct about the percentages...
>The majority has always been right, hasn't it? Am I right or am I right?
You miss the point. This isnt a random on-the-street survey of bobbleheads, where the majority can be swayed byu the phase of the moon or what they had for lunch. it's a set of written papers, on which these scientists have spent their lives and risk their reputations. Quite a difference.
You're believing something written by a JOURNALIST? Lem,me tell you what a journalist is:
They're somebody that couldnt get a job actually DOING anything. Instead they go around to people that have done something, find a "lead", usually some irrelevant human-interest angle, then report what they thoguht they saw to people that know even less that they do.
For example, think back to some TV or newspaper story where you happened to have first-hand info about it. How close was the story to even being on the same planet as your information? About 88% of the time, mostly off base.
The problem with this "story", as that's an apt description, is that there are about 940 published peer-reviewed papers on global warming. Now out of 940 papers, guess how many of them are agin it? About 9. Guess how many totally crazy scientific papers get past the peer-review process? Maybe 1%. Hmmmmm....
So this mough-breathing, drooling example of a keypuncher has enough ammo to write several articles. And good sounding ones they will be too. All it takes is the ability to play up the 1% nutcase papers and ignore the other 99%.
>Because, of course, we could not fold the objects into something smaller and have the sucker unfold in outer space...
Already assumed. They're talking about millions of these things. If you package a thousand of these 1-gram things, you have a kilogram. if you accelerate a kilogram to escape velocity, it has 1/2mv^2 energy. that's 1/2 of 9km/sec squared, or 40.5 million joules. That's enough heat energy to raise a kilogram of iron to around 11,000 degrees kelvin.
Electromagnetic launchers have to accelerate the sails to escape velocity, nearly 25,000 MPH. The drag on an object goes up as the square of the velocity. Try calculating how much energy you'd have to put into an object to get it through the atmosphere and up to the L1 point. Huge.
Also calculate how hot the object would get from the friction. Very close to the amount of heat a satellite gets on re-entry. Hot enough to melt platinum I suspect.
When the objects gets launched it's going to have the rotational speed of the Earth. All that speed, several hundred to one thousand forty MPH, will have to be somehow undone. It could be done by launching the thing at an angle, but that will require extra oomph, and we're already giving it enough energy to melt it.:(
The objects are going to require some source of energy and smarts and thrusters to maintain position against gravitational wobbles and light pressure. Kind hard to do on a miniscule mass budget of under a gram.
Doesnt anybody with a lick of sense read these articles before posting them?
>Unfortunately, as both the NYT and Washington Post report, the documentary itself is a stinker. They both claim it does little to present actual problems, showing instead unfeasible hacks that admittedly would never work, and contenting itself to merely cast doubt over the voting machines rather than providing any solid evidence.
That's not what the articles said at all! Everyone pls go read the FA's.
They say the show is undramatic, showing lots of lines of computer code, not terribly visually compelling to the average Bubba. And they don't "prove" there was or will be fraud, just that it's very very very possible, and they do it several different ways, on camera. Nobody can at this late date "prove" that fraud occurred or will.
>The education ministries of the countries receiving the laptops make an affirmative decision on >buying them, no one is forcing them on them. I don't think those people count as random >first-worlders.
In most poor countries, the education ministries are staffed by cronies of the president and they can do what they like with first-world aid. For example, you'll see a lot of UN donated rice for sale at the prez's cousin's supermarket. They don't even bother rebagging it out of the "UN FOOD AID, NOT FOR RESALE". I suspect 88% of the laptops will end up being given to cronies of the cronies to garner favors.
>But thanks for your opinion on people in developing nations need. I'm sure your opinion is somehow better than that of a "random first-worlder".
I shudda given my street creds: I'm FROM a third-world country, have spent years there, and have personally seen how things work there. To get a telephone or a plane ticket or a visa or a car you have to know a a friend of a nephew of a Colonel and get his scribble on a piece of paper, which makes the beurocrats jump. Most of the foreign aid somehow goes into swiss bank accounts. The UN infrastructure and homeless person shack building funds go into building beach houses for the Generals. See: Haiti, Brazil, and most of Africa. It's overly optimistic to think the laptop funds will get any better use.
>Why do you assume the target kids don't have that already?
Because some of us HAVE been on the chicken bus for a couple of hours and looked over the villages.
Next month my brother is going to Guatemala to help build a school. Just a little ways out from the capital there are sizeable villages with no schools, or schools without roofs or plumbing, no books, no supplies, etc...
What WE think WE should do with OUR and other people's money to help unspecified others is just about the poorest way to efficiently do anything.
In case you havent been out in the boonies, if you take the chicken bus from any big city in 95% of the countries of the world, out an hour or so, you get to villages where there are no schools, no paper, no pencils, no books, no nuttin!
Those people need:
A SCHOOL! -- meaning four walls and a roof.
A TEACHER! -- meaning somebody that can read nad write and add numbers.
PAPER! -- just the cheapest grade.
PENCILS! -- yes, they do not have pencils.
BOOKS! --
BREAKFAST!
They do not need: money wasted on what random first-worlders thing third worlders need.
I worked in a repair shop with some old timers during the early 80's. One day, a customer brought in a set that didn't work on the SW bands. The old-timer in the shop found a snipped coil and had the set fixed in a matter of minutes.
I asked him how he found the problem so fast. He told me he had disabled the SW bands in that same set 40 years earlier! He further explained that all the repair shops had been under government directive to disable SW reception in any set brought in (by a foreign national) for repair. Our government apparently thought it could minimize espionage in this manner.
In the following couple of years, I fixed no less than a dozen sets that had been disabled in the same manner. Several of those still had the "serviced by" sticker from the same shop on the back. And I have a few in my collection that have been fixed for the same ailment.
Sometimes when you buy an old radio in Wisconsin, where lots of German immigrants settled, you'll find all the shortwave radio coils have been snipped out.
In WW2 the govt censored SW reception by going into people's houses and doctoring their radios so they couldnt puick up far-away radio stations.
Not one of the highpoints of the bill of rights.
hate to be a pencil-necked math geek, but this is nothing like Moore's law.
Moore's law predicts a doubling of performance every 18 months.
Gillette's law seems to be a increment in the number of blades every few years. Let's see:
1901: 1 blade
1971: 2 blades (1/70th of a blade increase per year avg )
1998: 3 blades (1/27th of a blade per year avg )
2006: 5 blades (1/4 of a blade per year avg )
Now the rate is accelerating, but nowhere near Moore's law.
If it was following Moore's law, over 105 years we would have 2^(105/1.5) or about 1180591620717411303424 blades by now. We're only a mere 1180591620717411303419 blades short.
Using a little math, that's
You might be able to channel some energy around an object, but:
There's no way to effectively pass an image through. You can't detect that the light is hitting at a 43 degree angle, therefore you have to pass that photon through and emit it from the other side at the same angle.
Detecting, moving, and reemitting the light loses a certain and irreducible percentage of the light, so the "invisible" image is always going to appear darker.
Doing this from every possible angle of source and destination is almost infinitely complicated.
>well drat, I forgot. I'll go out and help them boys out and pick me up a new icelandic car...err, wait. New cellphone from them....hmm, don't seem to see one at the phone store here....I'm looking...there's a can of whale meat and a bjork video......
:) !
Yep, that is a problem! Places that are poor in natural resources have a harder time of it at first-- they have to sell something intangible, like knowledge or art, or first import stuff they can work on and add value and then sell it. Japan and Korea have gotten very good at this. No word yet from Iceland.
Slashdot Mirror
Figure out the cost of a solar reflector, both for fixed position and steerable ones. One strong enough to survive wind and rain.
Then figure out the cost of maintenance.
Then figure out how to convert this focused sunlight into electricity. Hint: photovoltaic cells won't do it.
Then figure out how much you'll have to pay in interest every yearto borrow that amount of money.
Compare with the wholesale value of thwe generated electricity.
You're likely to find the electricity cannot even pay for the interest cost.
Like many ideas, this one sounds super at the start, not so wonderful after a little reflection.
As they said on the MST3K parody of "The Mole People":
"Oh NO! Light just slightly brighter than what we're accustomed to!"
You cannot "heat a building 95% of the time" with a temp lower than your desired temperature. Maybe the soft-pedalled HEAT PUMP can. And with water five degrees warmer than the groundwater, the heat pump will be about 1.2% more efficient. Which can never pay off the added cost, not even the interest on the cost. No way, no how. They'd be much better off spending the $20K on a more efficient heat pump.
My point exactly. If this technology had any track record or hope of doing so, the money would have been available at x% interest from any big bank.
Venture capital is usually invested in long-shot possibilities. A large percentage of the investments are a total loss. A small percentage may succeed, in which case the venture capitalists grab a huge share of the profits or a part of the company. It's like dancing with the Devil.
Also note those folks are not exactly setting the world on fire. Their "latest news" is from June, and is just the announcement that they've dealt with the VC devils. Not a good sign.
Just google for "the cost of desalinized water". Several charts pop up. I picked a middle value.
That's for things in fresh water, and things that can be taken out of the water to be scraped and repainted.
None of those things apply for a seawater desalinizer. Think of supertankers, which cost tens of millions of dollars, and only last a few decades before rust overwhelms them.
>Take the word of a civil engineer. The moving parts may be more difficult, but I doubt it. We've got movable dams that are just about zero maintenance, that have been standing there for almost 40 years now.
You don't dam the ocean, so I suspect you're talking about fresh water devices. Totally different animals compared to saltwater energy-extraction thingies. Once you assemble that big a device in the water, you can't take it out again for repainting.
>Also, funding for projects like this doesn't work like a bank loan. You simply take a percentage of the profit in exchange for providing funding.
The people and institutions that have that kind of money are quite expert at evaluating the risk/reward ratio. Nobody is interested in investing in ventures that have huge risks and no possibility of making a profit.
In general, it's not feasible to capture wave power. The stuff is too diffuse-- it takes too much infrastructure to capture too little energy to even pay back the cost of building the contraption.
It doesnt matter whether you use the mechanical energy to generate electricity, desalinate water, or make tea. You can't build a wave energy capture device that's rugged enough to survicve the storm, corrosion and other hazards at a reasonable cost.
As a starting point, let's take their (unsubstantiated) estimate of 2,000 cubic meters per day. A quick google shows that's worth about $1,000 to $3,000. Assuming the waves are active 75% of the time we could expect maybe $2,000 a day from this device. That's about $700,000 a year. Kinda impressive at first glance. But will that be enough to even pay for the gadget over time? Let's estimate, generously, that the device will last ten years. And that we can borrow money to build it at 5% interest. If it and the pipeline to shore can be built for $10 million, we need to pay at least approx $1.5 mil a year to make headway on the principal and interest. Plus the cost of staff and maintenance. We're still a factor of more than two away from breaking-even. And that's assuming no risks due to weather or unanticipated problems with new technology.
BTW if a quintillion is 10^18, it's not that much. Our Sun puts out every second about 10^11 equivalent megatons of energy 50 x 10^18 is only 50 (US) billion times as much.
>And even if your numbers were correct about the percentages...
>The majority has always been right, hasn't it? Am I right or am I right?
You miss the point. This isnt a random on-the-street survey of bobbleheads, where the majority can be swayed byu the phase of the moon or what they had for lunch. it's a set of written papers, on which these scientists have spent their lives and risk their reputations. Quite a difference.
They're somebody that couldnt get a job actually DOING anything. Instead they go around to people that have done something, find a "lead", usually some irrelevant human-interest angle, then report what they thoguht they saw to people that know even less that they do.
For example, think back to some TV or newspaper story where you happened to have first-hand info about it. How close was the story to even being on the same planet as your information? About 88% of the time, mostly off base.
The problem with this "story", as that's an apt description, is that there are about 940 published peer-reviewed papers on global warming. Now out of 940 papers, guess how many of them are agin it? About 9. Guess how many totally crazy scientific papers get past the peer-review process? Maybe 1%. Hmmmmm....
So this mough-breathing, drooling example of a keypuncher has enough ammo to write several articles. And good sounding ones they will be too. All it takes is the ability to play up the 1% nutcase papers and ignore the other 99%.
>Because, of course, we could not fold the objects into something smaller and have the sucker unfold in outer space...
Already assumed. They're talking about millions of these things. If you package a thousand of these 1-gram things, you have a kilogram. if you accelerate a kilogram to escape velocity, it has 1/2mv^2 energy. that's 1/2 of 9km/sec squared, or 40.5 million joules. That's enough heat energy to raise a kilogram of iron to around 11,000 degrees kelvin.
Doesnt anybody with a lick of sense read these articles before posting them?
>Unfortunately, as both the NYT and Washington Post report, the documentary itself is a stinker. They both claim it does little to present actual problems, showing instead unfeasible hacks that admittedly would never work, and contenting itself to merely cast doubt over the voting machines rather than providing any solid evidence. That's not what the articles said at all! Everyone pls go read the FA's. They say the show is undramatic, showing lots of lines of computer code, not terribly visually compelling to the average Bubba. And they don't "prove" there was or will be fraud, just that it's very very very possible, and they do it several different ways, on camera. Nobody can at this late date "prove" that fraud occurred or will.
In most poor countries, the education ministries are staffed by cronies of the president and they can do what they like with first-world aid. For example, you'll see a lot of UN donated rice for sale at the prez's cousin's supermarket. They don't even bother rebagging it out of the "UN FOOD AID, NOT FOR RESALE". I suspect 88% of the laptops will end up being given to cronies of the cronies to garner favors.
>But thanks for your opinion on people in developing nations need. I'm sure your opinion is somehow better than that of a "random first-worlder".
I shudda given my street creds: I'm FROM a third-world country, have spent years there, and have personally seen how things work there. To get a telephone or a plane ticket or a visa or a car you have to know a a friend of a nephew of a Colonel and get his scribble on a piece of paper, which makes the beurocrats jump. Most of the foreign aid somehow goes into swiss bank accounts. The UN infrastructure and homeless person shack building funds go into building beach houses for the Generals. See: Haiti, Brazil, and most of Africa. It's overly optimistic to think the laptop funds will get any better use.
oops, it's $398: http://money.cnn.com/2005/11/01/news/fortune500/wa lmart_blackfriday/?cnn=yes
Walmart will soon be selling a real Compaq 2GHz laptop for $349. Why would somebody pay $300 for this other untested thingy?
>Why do you assume the target kids don't have that already?
Because some of us HAVE been on the chicken bus for a couple of hours and looked over the villages.
Next month my brother is going to Guatemala to help build a school. Just a little ways out from the capital there are sizeable villages with no schools, or schools without roofs or plumbing, no books, no supplies, etc...
What WE think WE should do with OUR and other people's money to help unspecified others is just about the poorest way to efficiently do anything.
In case you havent been out in the boonies, if you take the chicken bus from any big city in 95% of the countries of the world, out an hour or so, you get to villages where there are no schools, no paper, no pencils, no books, no nuttin!
Those people need:
They do not need: money wasted on what random first-worlders thing third worlders need.
I found a source on Google News:
I worked in a repair shop with some old timers during the early 80's. One day,
a customer brought in a set that didn't work on the SW bands. The old-timer in
the shop found a snipped coil and had the set fixed in a matter of minutes.
I asked him how he found the problem so fast. He told me he had disabled the SW
bands in that same set 40 years earlier! He further explained that all the
repair shops had been under government directive to disable SW reception in any
set brought in (by a foreign national) for repair. Our government apparently
thought it could minimize espionage in this manner.
In the following couple of years, I fixed no less than a dozen sets that had
been disabled in the same manner. Several of those still had the "serviced by"
sticker from the same shop on the back. And I have a few in my collection that
have been fixed for the same ailment.
Terry
>I think the facts you state are a bit distorted.
No, it's a well-established fact in the old-radio restoration community.
I have a Philips A-57 radio right here, made in 1937. The AM broadcast band coils are there, the SW ones have been clipped out.
Sometimes when you buy an old radio in Wisconsin, where lots of German immigrants settled, you'll find all the shortwave radio coils have been snipped out. In WW2 the govt censored SW reception by going into people's houses and doctoring their radios so they couldnt puick up far-away radio stations. Not one of the highpoints of the bill of rights.
Aluminum goes for about 60 cents a pound, glass much less. A typical disk drive is gonna use under a nickel of raw material in the platters.
Moore's law predicts a doubling of performance every 18 months.
Gillette's law seems to be a increment in the number of blades every few years. Let's see:
1901: 1 blade 1971: 2 blades (1/70th of a blade increase per year avg ) 1998: 3 blades (1/27th of a blade per year avg ) 2006: 5 blades (1/4 of a blade per year avg )
Now the rate is accelerating, but nowhere near Moore's law.
If it was following Moore's law, over 105 years we would have 2^(105/1.5) or about 1180591620717411303424 blades by now. We're only a mere 1180591620717411303419 blades short. Using a little math, that's
You might be able to channel some energy around an object, but:
Yep, that is a problem! Places that are poor in natural resources have a harder time of it at first-- they have to sell something intangible, like knowledge or art, or first import stuff they can work on and add value and then sell it. Japan and Korea have gotten very good at this. No word yet from Iceland.