The simple fact is that we've gotten *much* better at finding oil in the past few years. I can't find the citation right now ot I'd link to it, but I read somewhere recently that we found more oil in the past decade than we knew existed previously.
So, if that's the case, why hasn't the world price of oil gone through the cellar on the news? Why haven't oil futures sunk like a stone?
Because it isn't true. There have been finds of stupendous quantities of natural gas locked up in methane hydrates on the continental shelves, but not oil. If there had been finds of economically-recoverable oil anything like what you assert, OPEC would be pumping like mad to keep people from investing in new wells instead of cutting back to grab the bucks. --
Because you need to be able to see the traffic sitting next to your rear wheels in order to change lanes safely. You can't see this with a camera mounted in the back window, even if it has a 90 degree FOV. Next question!
For the price of all the equipment, and the time it takes to set up and dismantle DAILY, how many KW's of electricity could you buy instead? How about something a little more proven, like solar panels on the garage?
Just a couple of things:
Something attached to the garage tethers you to home; if you're carrying the renewable power supply, you can recharge wherever. (Though a telescoping tilt-up boom on the back and a generator with a folding rotor would be a whole lot cooler.)
The effort appears to be less about saving money and more about making a point about what is possible if we cared to do it.
if you drive with the windmill in place, it'll eat your gas for lunch.
The wind genny is basically using the car as an anchor; it's on some poles which put it about 12 feet or so off the ground.
That said, it's not necessarily true that driving with the genny in place would kill you. If you were going into a strong enough wind, and weren't going too fast, you could actually get more power out of the genny than it takes to push the car and overcome the drag of the turbine. This works pretty well up to about 2x the wind speed; at 3x wind speed, you're well into the region of diminishing returns. But being able to cruise at 40 MPH all day into the teeth of a 20 MPH wind would be cool.
For those interested in the math, the power available from a stationary wind turbine is a maximum of 0.295 * area * density * airspeed^3; the best figure of merit is 29.5% instead of 50% because you can't get all the kinetic energy from the incoming air because then it stops dead and can't make way for more airflow. You can actually do better when you're moving into the wind because you leave the spent air behind. Moving directly upwind at 2x the wind speed, if you stopped the air dead with respect to the ground you'd get 2/3 of the air flowing through your turbine and 5/9 of its kinetic energy with respect to the car, for a net power of 5/27 * area * density * airspeed^3. The drag on the turbine is equal to the mass-flow times the speed difference of the air flowing through it, or 2/9 * area * density * airspeed^2. Multiply this by your ground speed (2/3 airspeed) and you get 4/27 * area * density * airspeed^3. This leaves you about 25% extra for losses. You could do better by not slowing the air down quite so much, because the energy is proportional to the difference of speed-squared while the momentum (and thus drag) is directly proportional to the difference in speed; you can improve your efficiency by "skimming the cream". --
And by the way, it does not "kill the environment". Today's cars burn extremely.
Extremely what?
Today's SUV's are certified as "light trucks" for EPA purposes. This means they're allowed to emit lots more nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and unburned hydrocarbons (so-called NMOG, Non-Methane Organic Gases, which are smog precursors) than cars are allowed to. Every mile you drive, you are polluting the air well beyond what a car would.
Then there's the global-warming impact. You may be a denialist, but glaciers are disappearing the world over, pack ice is vanishing in the arctic, ice shelves in the antarctic, and sea levels are rising. Weather is getting more severe the world over. Between Africa drying out and Florida going underwater (not to mention heavily-populated pieces of both coasts) we're going to have a fine time as a result.
If everyone drove something like an Insight or a Prius instead of a gas-guzzling SUV, we'd chop our national CO2 emissions by about a third. We'd also make an enormous dent in our imports, and stop pumping money into dictatorships and banana republics around the world. I find I can get 32 MPG out of my Ford on the highway; what's your excuse for being a wastrel? --
i hope by 'unattractive device' he's referring to the windmill;) (which i found quite jarring to gaze at)
Do you mind using conventional capitalization?
Because it's only used when the car is at rest, it doesn't do much for cruising range. On the other hand, the car probably makes a pretty good anchor for the Whisper wind genny. The real trick would be getting a wind genny you could use while in motion (only works upwind, and not much beyond ground speed of 2x the wind speed), or (in an enlightened world) put wind gennys along windy roads and let vehicles draw power from them via electrified rails. --
distilling alcohol from 3% to 70% is pretty easy, however due to the hydrophillic nature of alcohol, going from 70% to the better than 97% or so needed to be a good fuel for cars takes several distilation cycles, each of which converts higher-grade heat energy into lower-grade heat.
I'm not sure what the requirements are for blending with gasoline, but the Mother Earth News has published plans for stills which will go from beer to 95% in one step. I take your assertion that multiple distillation cycles are required with a few grains of salt.
There are other ways of extracting water to get a bit more purity if you need it: silica gel, calcium chloride... all of which can be regenerated with low-grade heat.
The point I'm trying to make, because it often gets glossed over, it that if you think you can take the Iowa corn crop as it is produced today and think you can get a positive energy result by making fuel out of it, you are mistaken.
If I ever, ever gave anyone the impression I believed otherwise, I apologize.
Oh, FWIW there is a lab-tested method for enzymatically reducing CO2 to methanol; there was an article on the New Scientist web site a few months ago. It looks like it would only need an input of hydrogen or electricity. Now that's renewable. --
I agree with you, but my point was that the danger from energetic particles of heliospheric origin would be much lower for the ISS than for a satellite in geosynchronous orbit.
Well, of course. Geosync is in the outer Van Allen radiation belt! --
Yeah, it probably has a lot to do with the VHF skip. The X-rays from the flare probably generated a lot of strong ionization, and I understand that often pushes the MUF up pretty high. --
Not shielded that well. Especially over the South Atlantic Anomaly, high-energy protons can come in and give astronauts quite a dose. One of the astronauts who flew on Mir mentioned that he could see the Cerenkov radiation flashses inside his eyes as the protons went through his head while Mir went through the SAA.
Fifty miles of atmosphere is a shield that's going to be awfully hard for a space station to equal, let alone beat. --
The concept is that you have a renewable energy source. You effectively are harvesting sunlight.
This only works if the amount of energy you get out of the fuel is greater than the amount of energy it takes to produce the fuel.
That assumes that you are trying to create alcohol as a fully-renewable fuel, rather than as a way of making e.g. natural gas more portable (oxidizing CH4 to CH3OH). Granting that assumption, so far, so good.
In order to distill alcohol to the point where it will burn as a fuel takes more energy than burning the alcohol produces.
Well, let's see. The fuel value of ethanol is what, 9 kilocalories per gram more or less? (I don't have any references handy.) Vaporizing 10 grams of 10% ethanol to distill it down would take about 5400 calories, assuming you actually boil all the water.
But wait; you're assuming that the distillation process is run by burning part of the product for fuel. In Brazil, they burn the bagasse (the crushed sugar cane stalks) for fuel to run the distilleries. This requires none of the product.
You could go at least one better than that. Distillation doesn't require high-grade heat, anything that will boil water (or even get close) will do. You could feed all the plant stalks and such to ruminants (which convert the cellulose to sugars via the bacteria in their stomachs) and ferment their excrement to get methane. You might burn the methane to distill the alcohol, or you might just set up a big flat-plate solar collector on the side of a shed or building and use free solar heat to distill the alcohol. At a reasonable value of 400 calories per square centimeter per day, sunlight falling on a barn wall or roof could boil about 7.4 kilos of mixture per square meter of collector per day. If that mixture starts as 10% ethanol and you boil half of it in the process of driving off the alcohol as vapor, you can distill 14.8 kilos of "beer" each day and get maybe 1200 grams of ethanol, after losses. That's about 1/3 gallon per square meter per day, 30 gallons per square meter per summer, 6000 gallons per summer for a 2200 ft^2 barn covered with collectors.
The economics probably suck, but the energetics work at that point.
Conclusion: alcohol is not a renewable fuel source. Now, if you are locating a nuclear plant next to the distillary to make up the difference...
Or if you have a stationary engine for electrical generation, and use the waste heat to run the distillery....
Your conclusion is predicated on your assumptions, which are not required. That may be how Archer Daniels Midland does it, but I think we should tell them to get lost anyway. --
Vapor lock is pretty much a non-problem with modern fuel-injected engines. Most such engines have a fuel rail that's fed by a high-pressure pump, and a pressure regulator which operates by venting fuel into a return line; the return line goes back to the gas tank. If you got a vapor bubble in the injector supply rail, it would last about five seconds before it was flushed out the return line and replaced by cooler fuel from the tank, and the high pressure of the fuel in the injector rail makes it much harder to form vapor bubbles in the first place. --
A century ago, petroleum was in demand for things like lubricating oil and lamp oil (kerosene). Heavier fractions had other uses, but there was this light stuff that the refiners called "naptha". They didn't have very much use for it (it was too volatile to be used in lamps, too dangerous) so they sold part of it as cleaning fluid and the like and dumped the rest.
Along came the automobile. Naptha (gasoline) turned out to be a fairly good match for the fuel-air mixing technologies of the day. So all kinds of cars got designed to use gasoline, as opposed to kerosene or alcohols (which required growing and harvesting a crop, then fermenting it). This led to a distribution network for gasoline.
Fast-forward to 2000. Gasoline still has a huge infrastructure, largely because of historical accident. You can buy methane and propane fuel kits for lots of engines (IMPCO, out of Tukwila WA is a biggie in the biz), but going cross-country with such a vehicle is a bit chancy due to spottiness of suppliers (with the obvious impact on buyer demand). Brazil is promoting ethanol (not methanol, IIRC) because it has plenty of acreage suitable for sugar cane and world prices are low (compared to tariff-driven US prices).
Storage is an issue for some of these fuels. Ethanol and methanol aren't difficult, but propane and especially compressed natural gas require pressure cylinders (heavy ones, for CNG). The kind of tanks that just fit into the various nooks in the bottom of a vehicle can't be built for the pressurized fuels. Combine this with the large volume required to store compressed gases, and you start taking away from the passenger compartment or cargo space.
There are some alternative fuels without so many problems. California has a network of stations dispensing M-85 (85% methanol, 15% gasoline). The gasoline fraction of M-85 allows reasonable cold starting, and the energy per unit volume is about 60% or so of gasoline so range is not seriously compromised. On top of this, it's not very difficult to make an engine which can run on M-85 or gasoline interchangeably. This gets around the problem of customer acceptance being killed by inability to find fuel.
It's one thing for Toysmart to violate your 4th Ammendment rights, but when the FBI does it -- all hell breaks loose and people actually get punished for it. Or at least, that's how it's supposed to work.
I think the lesson of Ruby Ridge and other FBI actions is that nobody actually gets punished for over-reaching, even when they kill civilians while operating under blatantly illegal orders. Not the operatives, not the supervisors, not the bureaucrats in DC. Nobody is accountable. --
If the government says: "This is the law." and your company says "Screw the law, we won't do it." then odds are pretty good your company won't be around much longer.
And if your company says "The law only tells us we have to comply with your request; it doesn't tell us how we have to do it. Your Carnivore box looks cool to you, but it messes with our network. If you have enough network experts to make a Carnivore, you also have enough to make something that works without being disruptive." You think a judge is going to find for the FBI, when the company can prove harm? (And especially given the Friend of the Court briefs from the ACLU, EFF, and all kinds of other organizations, detailing how any device that can cast a net as wide as Carnivore's is bound to catch things that are none of the government's business?)
I know that people who are under investigation are currently required to be informed of the fact once the investigation is complete. Can you imagine every subscriber of a big ISP getting a little letter from the FBI a couple of times a year, mentioning "Oh by the way, our traffic sniffer selected a couple of your e-mails for scrutiny and thought your browsing habits were a bit suspicious - but not to worry." --
Which is worse, that the government is trying to snoop on you without your knowledge, or that a business can usurp the power of the government, and refuse to comply for 'business' reasons.
Worse than that is a government which dictates your network standards and OS selection so it's compatible with what they decided to use for a snooper. In other words, doing to ISPs what they did to the telcos (but perhaps without any money paid to the ISPs to compensate them for the expense).
That said, Carnivore is a horrible idea. If the telco can restrict snooping access to particular lines by selecting only the ones used by the persons under investigation, that's fine. Using an undocumented, un-accountable black box to snoop everything going through an ISP is not acceptable; it's tantamount to letting the cops snoop everything on an entire phone exchange because of a single suspect using it.
Amusing thought: How secure are the Carnivore boxen, and how much egg would the FBI have on its face if someone successfully hacked them? If the FBI isn't having nightmares over this possibility, they're not smart enough to be running something like Carnivore. --
Radiation won't do the job. One of the items recovered during the Apollo moon landings was the camera off one of the unmanned Surveyor landers. When the lens was being examined back on Earth, someone found a bacterium that had been hidden away between a couple of the glass elements; it had been baking in lunar heat for two weeks at a time, then freezing at hundreds of degrees below zero for another two weeks while being zapped by solar protons and unfiltered cosmic rays for several years.
They cultured the little bug they found, and a few days later had a whole Petri dish full of bacteria. I think you understand the implications.
Making a spacecraft suitable for baking isn't all that difficult; the Viking landers were sterilized before launch to Mars (kind of hard to look for novel life if you've got to sort it out of all kinds of stuff you brought along). On the other hand, there isn't a known Earth bug that can grow and reproduce without liquid water, which is going to be in rather short supply at Titan temperatures. I'll bet a beer that the scientists will want to play it safe, though. --
People predicted that by 2000, we'd all be living on Mars or the Moon. But we aren't. Why not? Because there's no demand for those kind of ideas.
Demand, from whom? Governments have pretty much set themselves up as the only market for manned spaceflight, directly and indirectly (look at all the politics around the Space Shuttle to keep it and its highly profitable service and refit business going, and then think about what the suppression of cheaper routes to orbit means for privately-funded manned missions). Governments don't see any reason to go to the Moon, or Mars.
Many individuals and some groups see things differently (look at the other replies above, or check out the Mars Society). They'd spend their own money to go, if they could get access. But the governmental-sponsored monopolies lock out the competition to the established players. --
Pointing out that the emperor is strutting around in the buff is good enough for most discussions, most days. Besides, the ones with the weaker convictions might start questioning their dogma in the face of such obviously pertinent questions. That never hurts. --
Oh, from your other question: I was using P to be pressure, and v to be specific volume (volume / mass). In the thermo convention I learned, V would be the total volume (v * mass). Or maybe I have it reversed. When I go to a reference, I have no trouble picking it up from context.
Now you're being more reasonable, even though you're not admitting that I also could be right. We just don't know enough. ... My first post, from which all this stems, merely points out that I thought that perhaps the shoes could be damaging to the legs if used for a long time (which I also pointed out was not intended).
Heck, one can get repetitive-motion injuries and strains without any mechanical assistance whatsoever. That much I agree with 100%. However, I do not agree that injuries are a necessary or even likely consequence of using powered boots. That would depend entirely on the design and also the training of the users.
Let's try an example of the possible here. I can leap a set of 4 stairs in a single step, unaided. This is a height of roughly 70 cm. If my leg bends to give 7.5 cm and my toes flex another 7.5 cm, that is a total stroke of 15 cm for the launch. That's an acceleration of nearly 5 G's. If I was using boots which were set to an acceleration of 4 G's (constant over the stroke), a 30 cm stroke would launch me upwards by an additional 1.2 meters. More to the point, the stresses imposed by the boots would be 20% less than the stresses from the single step I can already make.
The combined height is 1.9 meters. That's a bit higher than my own height. Being able to take one step and leap onto something at the height of my own head... that sounds fun. -- Ancient Goth: Someone who overthrew the Roman Empire.
You're talking about events that occurred about one hundred years ago. They're irrelevant.
You think so? The lead-acid battery was pretty much state of the art in 1900. Guess what? The lead-acid battery is still the price-performance leader for lots of battery applications a century later! Nickel-cadmium, lithium-ion and nickel-metal hydride have pushed the performance limits out farther, but they're still too expensive for all but hand-scale consumer devices. In the mean time gasoline devices have become several times as efficient, lighter, more powerful, cleaner, and vastly easier to use. Something is only irrelevant if it no longer applies to the current situation. I don't see that things have changed enough to invalidate the conclusion consumers reached 90 years ago: battery-electric vehicles aren't suitable for many people's purposes, and are thus not very desirable.
It happened when Amoco's purchased solar technology patents and subsequent used extreme licensing costs to bury those patents.
Details, along with the patent numbers, please.
It's happened just this summer when the accusations by the oil companies that government regulations to reduce the amount of sulpher and other components are responsible for the enormous increase in gasoline costs.
Those accusations are absolutely accurate. The government created a situation where gasoline blended for one market could not be legally shipped to another market, thus market forces could not be used to balance glitches in supply. Combine this with a relatively inelastic demand, and you get price spikes wherever the supply is squeezed even a little bit. This is absolutely elementary supply and demand economics, and the public ado and accusations levelled at the oil companies are either an illustration of the economic illiteracy of the political left, a witch-hunt mentality in general, or perhaps elements of both.
The point is that electric cars (or other low-emissions vehicles) may well be as advanced or more advanced that the common internal combustions models if the petroleum companies were not making research into these vehicles very difficult.
That statement contains a claim. Substantiate that claim (and log in, put your reputation behind your words). As for myself, I haven't heard of any patent difficulties plaguing Honda for the Insight, Toyota for the Prius, or the Parnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV) for their diesel-electric hybrid efforts. If you have any light to offer in lieu of the heat of empty accusations, do the world a favor and post it. --
you're also not a very nice person, you keep attacking me personally, quite unneccesarily.
What I meant to attack is your claim to authority, not you personally. Studying the chemistry of plant enzymes for 10 years doesn't make one an authority on petroleum refining either. And I would hope that someone with the education you claim to have would be able to examine your assumptions a bit more closely. An example:
Energy is only transmitted in an unstable system where the sum of forces is not zero. So, I am in fact right.
"Unstable system" is not a term I have seen used in kinetics, but I can offer what I think is a counterexample. Consider a brick being pulled by a string. The string is pulled by a winch, which is attached to a pylon in the ground (which is perfectly flat). The brick is being pulled at constant speed toward the winch. The pulling force of the string is exactly equal to the friction of the brick against the ground, so the sum of the forces is zero and brick does not accelerate. However, the string is STILL transmitting energy to the brick, which energy is converted to heat by friction against the ground.
Still think you're right? I might agree, once you are finished writing down all your assumptions. For instance, I agree that your gas-piston example would probably be too stressful for people to endure. I do not agree that the assumptions in your example were necessary for such a device, so the conclusion you drew was not valid.
I admit that there could be a way that the shoes could be only mildly concussive.
It's nice of you to do that after I offered a method (a separate combustion chamber and regulating valves) that could eliminate the concussion entirely. I agree that neither of us knows the details of what the inventor is actually doing, but you should have sufficient knowledge and imagination to see what is within the realm of physical possibility. Your assumptions are too narrow to yield valid conclusions, and that's what I'm trying to hammer you into admitting (the hammer being a useful device for applying brief, large forces to objects which cannot be moved with the static force of one's muscles alone;-). -- Ancient Goth: Someone who overthrew the Roman Empire.
Re:neh, just my uninformed thoughts on this..
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Gas-Powered Shoes?
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Slowly pushing against something (like with your legs) to get up would not be damaging because it's a smooth movement and doesn't jolt anything. Suddenly being shot off your feet by a large explosion in your shoes would certainly jolt something, and I sure wouldn't want to be in shoes like that.
That's okay so far. What you really need to do is examine your assumptions and see if any of them are invalid, which would make the conclusion questionable. In other words, if you know that "If A and B, then C" is true but B turns out to be false, it's possible (but not proven) that C is false.
You press your hand against your wrist slowly, and it doesn't hurt; you're just slowly applying pressure. Hit yourself on the wrist with your hand, and it may hurt, because you're rapidly applying pressure.
Your peak pressure is probably higher, too. To analyze this requires some knowledge of momentum (momentum = force * time). If your hand presses against your wrist you have only the static force of your muscles applying pressure, but when your hand first builds up speed over some distance (and time) and then slams into your wrist it stops in a very short time, so the force must be large compared to what the muscles applied to get it moving. It's the same principle behind driving a nail with a hammer; you can't push a large nail directly with your hand, but your hand can impart momentum to the hammer over a large distance/time. That momentum can move the nail, but for a much shorter time (smaller time, larger force).
Some things may be "common sense", but common sense is only valid for the areas where we have enough experience to have it trained to be correct. Outside those areas there's no substitute for checking the facts and doing the numbers. The other thing is, "Common sense ain't so common." -- Roy Rogers.
I bet I'm wrong, but that's what I think.
Not bad for fourteen. Take physics and calculus and chemistry when you get the chance, you'll find that a whole lot of things that used to be mysteries suddenly go together like pieces of a puzzle. There's a lot of stuff out there that needs to be looked at by people in a position of knowledge and with fresh viewpoints, and you may very well be someone to find an important insight that everyone else has missed. "If I have achieved so much, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." Go climb up onto the shoulders of Newton and Laplace and Leibniz and Kelvin and Avogadro, and tell the world what you see.
One more little thing while I'm pontificating. There are a lot of people out there who are pushing agendas, and they depend on the ignorance of the public (especially in science) to get people to believe them. Watch out for these people. The truth is their worst enemy. -- Ancient Goth: Someone who overthrew the Roman Empire.
Just look at the electric car, which could have gone mainstream decades ago in an effort to lessen damage to the environment. Many suspect that Oil-drilling interests, who had too much to lose with the advent of electric motoring, used their influence to bribe car manufacturers into avoiding and dragging on it's development in order to preserve the status quo.
There are a few problems with this conspiracy theory. To list just the ones off the top of my head:
Electric cars were once more popular than gasoline cars. They are undeniably simpler, quieter, and smoother than primitive autos like the Model T, and they sold quite well.
The electric car lost its popularity before the rise of Big Oil, while Edison (the beneficiary of electric-car "fuel" sales) was enjoying his heyday. Hell, Edison was winning the competition for the domestic lighting market, beating out kerosene.
The petroleum-powered car beat the electric because it was technically superior, especially in range. When cars and roads became better and people wanted to go longer distances, batteries were unable to provide sufficient energy. A battery takes hours to recharge, a gas tank takes minutes to refill (and a gas can is a lot lighter to carry than a battery if you run out in an inconvenient place). What would you rather drive?
Similar dissection skewers your claims with regard to space exploration.
The same applies with space exploration. Humanity, in its currently divided (politically and ethically), and competitive (economically) state is ill-suited for space exploration and the encountering of any alien life.
Yeah, the discovery of microbes on Mars would really threaten the entire World Order... NOT! I'm afraid it really is all down to economics and coalition politics; "human social development" has nothing at all to do with it. --
Slashdot Mirror
Because it isn't true. There have been finds of stupendous quantities of natural gas locked up in methane hydrates on the continental shelves, but not oil. If there had been finds of economically-recoverable oil anything like what you assert, OPEC would be pumping like mad to keep people from investing in new wells instead of cutting back to grab the bucks.
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See response #287 in this thread for a refutation of that assertion, with calculations.
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- Something attached to the garage tethers you to home; if you're carrying the renewable power supply, you can recharge wherever. (Though a telescoping tilt-up boom on the back and a generator with a folding rotor would be a whole lot cooler.)
- The effort appears to be less about saving money and more about making a point about what is possible if we cared to do it.
Okay, I'll shut up now.--
That said, it's not necessarily true that driving with the genny in place would kill you. If you were going into a strong enough wind, and weren't going too fast, you could actually get more power out of the genny than it takes to push the car and overcome the drag of the turbine. This works pretty well up to about 2x the wind speed; at 3x wind speed, you're well into the region of diminishing returns. But being able to cruise at 40 MPH all day into the teeth of a 20 MPH wind would be cool.
For those interested in the math, the power available from a stationary wind turbine is a maximum of 0.295 * area * density * airspeed^3; the best figure of merit is 29.5% instead of 50% because you can't get all the kinetic energy from the incoming air because then it stops dead and can't make way for more airflow. You can actually do better when you're moving into the wind because you leave the spent air behind. Moving directly upwind at 2x the wind speed, if you stopped the air dead with respect to the ground you'd get 2/3 of the air flowing through your turbine and 5/9 of its kinetic energy with respect to the car, for a net power of 5/27 * area * density * airspeed^3. The drag on the turbine is equal to the mass-flow times the speed difference of the air flowing through it, or 2/9 * area * density * airspeed^2. Multiply this by your ground speed (2/3 airspeed) and you get 4/27 * area * density * airspeed^3. This leaves you about 25% extra for losses. You could do better by not slowing the air down quite so much, because the energy is proportional to the difference of speed-squared while the momentum (and thus drag) is directly proportional to the difference in speed; you can improve your efficiency by "skimming the cream".
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Today's SUV's are certified as "light trucks" for EPA purposes. This means they're allowed to emit lots more nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and unburned hydrocarbons (so-called NMOG, Non-Methane Organic Gases, which are smog precursors) than cars are allowed to. Every mile you drive, you are polluting the air well beyond what a car would.
Then there's the global-warming impact. You may be a denialist, but glaciers are disappearing the world over, pack ice is vanishing in the arctic, ice shelves in the antarctic, and sea levels are rising. Weather is getting more severe the world over. Between Africa drying out and Florida going underwater (not to mention heavily-populated pieces of both coasts) we're going to have a fine time as a result.
If everyone drove something like an Insight or a Prius instead of a gas-guzzling SUV, we'd chop our national CO2 emissions by about a third. We'd also make an enormous dent in our imports, and stop pumping money into dictatorships and banana republics around the world. I find I can get 32 MPG out of my Ford on the highway; what's your excuse for being a wastrel?
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Because it's only used when the car is at rest, it doesn't do much for cruising range. On the other hand, the car probably makes a pretty good anchor for the Whisper wind genny. The real trick would be getting a wind genny you could use while in motion (only works upwind, and not much beyond ground speed of 2x the wind speed), or (in an enlightened world) put wind gennys along windy roads and let vehicles draw power from them via electrified rails.
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There are other ways of extracting water to get a bit more purity if you need it: silica gel, calcium chloride... all of which can be regenerated with low-grade heat.
If I ever, ever gave anyone the impression I believed otherwise, I apologize.Oh, FWIW there is a lab-tested method for enzymatically reducing CO2 to methanol; there was an article on the New Scientist web site a few months ago. It looks like it would only need an input of hydrogen or electricity. Now that's renewable.
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Yeah, it probably has a lot to do with the VHF skip. The X-rays from the flare probably generated a lot of strong ionization, and I understand that often pushes the MUF up pretty high.
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Fifty miles of atmosphere is a shield that's going to be awfully hard for a space station to equal, let alone beat.
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But wait; you're assuming that the distillation process is run by burning part of the product for fuel. In Brazil, they burn the bagasse (the crushed sugar cane stalks) for fuel to run the distilleries. This requires none of the product.
You could go at least one better than that. Distillation doesn't require high-grade heat, anything that will boil water (or even get close) will do. You could feed all the plant stalks and such to ruminants (which convert the cellulose to sugars via the bacteria in their stomachs) and ferment their excrement to get methane. You might burn the methane to distill the alcohol, or you might just set up a big flat-plate solar collector on the side of a shed or building and use free solar heat to distill the alcohol. At a reasonable value of 400 calories per square centimeter per day, sunlight falling on a barn wall or roof could boil about 7.4 kilos of mixture per square meter of collector per day. If that mixture starts as 10% ethanol and you boil half of it in the process of driving off the alcohol as vapor, you can distill 14.8 kilos of "beer" each day and get maybe 1200 grams of ethanol, after losses. That's about 1/3 gallon per square meter per day, 30 gallons per square meter per summer, 6000 gallons per summer for a 2200 ft^2 barn covered with collectors.
The economics probably suck, but the energetics work at that point.
Or if you have a stationary engine for electrical generation, and use the waste heat to run the distillery....Your conclusion is predicated on your assumptions, which are not required. That may be how Archer Daniels Midland does it, but I think we should tell them to get lost anyway.
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Vapor lock is pretty much a non-problem with modern fuel-injected engines. Most such engines have a fuel rail that's fed by a high-pressure pump, and a pressure regulator which operates by venting fuel into a return line; the return line goes back to the gas tank. If you got a vapor bubble in the injector supply rail, it would last about five seconds before it was flushed out the return line and replaced by cooler fuel from the tank, and the high pressure of the fuel in the injector rail makes it much harder to form vapor bubbles in the first place.
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Hate to follow myself up but WOW... when I started writing that, there were NO comments on the page!
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Along came the automobile. Naptha (gasoline) turned out to be a fairly good match for the fuel-air mixing technologies of the day. So all kinds of cars got designed to use gasoline, as opposed to kerosene or alcohols (which required growing and harvesting a crop, then fermenting it). This led to a distribution network for gasoline.
Fast-forward to 2000. Gasoline still has a huge infrastructure, largely because of historical accident. You can buy methane and propane fuel kits for lots of engines (IMPCO, out of Tukwila WA is a biggie in the biz), but going cross-country with such a vehicle is a bit chancy due to spottiness of suppliers (with the obvious impact on buyer demand). Brazil is promoting ethanol (not methanol, IIRC) because it has plenty of acreage suitable for sugar cane and world prices are low (compared to tariff-driven US prices).
Storage is an issue for some of these fuels. Ethanol and methanol aren't difficult, but propane and especially compressed natural gas require pressure cylinders (heavy ones, for CNG). The kind of tanks that just fit into the various nooks in the bottom of a vehicle can't be built for the pressurized fuels. Combine this with the large volume required to store compressed gases, and you start taking away from the passenger compartment or cargo space.
There are some alternative fuels without so many problems. California has a network of stations dispensing M-85 (85% methanol, 15% gasoline). The gasoline fraction of M-85 allows reasonable cold starting, and the energy per unit volume is about 60% or so of gasoline so range is not seriously compromised. On top of this, it's not very difficult to make an engine which can run on M-85 or gasoline interchangeably. This gets around the problem of customer acceptance being killed by inability to find fuel.
Did that answer your question?
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I know that people who are under investigation are currently required to be informed of the fact once the investigation is complete. Can you imagine every subscriber of a big ISP getting a little letter from the FBI a couple of times a year, mentioning "Oh by the way, our traffic sniffer selected a couple of your e-mails for scrutiny and thought your browsing habits were a bit suspicious - but not to worry."
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That said, Carnivore is a horrible idea. If the telco can restrict snooping access to particular lines by selecting only the ones used by the persons under investigation, that's fine. Using an undocumented, un-accountable black box to snoop everything going through an ISP is not acceptable; it's tantamount to letting the cops snoop everything on an entire phone exchange because of a single suspect using it.
Amusing thought: How secure are the Carnivore boxen, and how much egg would the FBI have on its face if someone successfully hacked them? If the FBI isn't having nightmares over this possibility, they're not smart enough to be running something like Carnivore.
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They cultured the little bug they found, and a few days later had a whole Petri dish full of bacteria. I think you understand the implications.
Making a spacecraft suitable for baking isn't all that difficult; the Viking landers were sterilized before launch to Mars (kind of hard to look for novel life if you've got to sort it out of all kinds of stuff you brought along). On the other hand, there isn't a known Earth bug that can grow and reproduce without liquid water, which is going to be in rather short supply at Titan temperatures. I'll bet a beer that the scientists will want to play it safe, though.
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Many individuals and some groups see things differently (look at the other replies above, or check out the Mars Society). They'd spend their own money to go, if they could get access. But the governmental-sponsored monopolies lock out the competition to the established players.
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Pointing out that the emperor is strutting around in the buff is good enough for most discussions, most days. Besides, the ones with the weaker convictions might start questioning their dogma in the face of such obviously pertinent questions. That never hurts.
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Let's try an example of the possible here. I can leap a set of 4 stairs in a single step, unaided. This is a height of roughly 70 cm. If my leg bends to give 7.5 cm and my toes flex another 7.5 cm, that is a total stroke of 15 cm for the launch. That's an acceleration of nearly 5 G's. If I was using boots which were set to an acceleration of 4 G's (constant over the stroke), a 30 cm stroke would launch me upwards by an additional 1.2 meters. More to the point, the stresses imposed by the boots would be 20% less than the stresses from the single step I can already make.
The combined height is 1.9 meters. That's a bit higher than my own height. Being able to take one step and leap onto something at the height of my own head... that sounds fun.
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Ancient Goth: Someone who overthrew the Roman Empire.
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Still think you're right? I might agree, once you are finished writing down all your assumptions. For instance, I agree that your gas-piston example would probably be too stressful for people to endure. I do not agree that the assumptions in your example were necessary for such a device, so the conclusion you drew was not valid.
It's nice of you to do that after I offered a method (a separate combustion chamber and regulating valves) that could eliminate the concussion entirely. I agree that neither of us knows the details of what the inventor is actually doing, but you should have sufficient knowledge and imagination to see what is within the realm of physical possibility. Your assumptions are too narrow to yield valid conclusions, and that's what I'm trying to hammer you into admitting (the hammer being a useful device for applying brief, large forces to objects which cannot be moved with the static force of one's muscles alone--
Ancient Goth: Someone who overthrew the Roman Empire.
Some things may be "common sense", but common sense is only valid for the areas where we have enough experience to have it trained to be correct. Outside those areas there's no substitute for checking the facts and doing the numbers. The other thing is, "Common sense ain't so common." -- Roy Rogers.
Not bad for fourteen. Take physics and calculus and chemistry when you get the chance, you'll find that a whole lot of things that used to be mysteries suddenly go together like pieces of a puzzle. There's a lot of stuff out there that needs to be looked at by people in a position of knowledge and with fresh viewpoints, and you may very well be someone to find an important insight that everyone else has missed. "If I have achieved so much, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." Go climb up onto the shoulders of Newton and Laplace and Leibniz and Kelvin and Avogadro, and tell the world what you see.One more little thing while I'm pontificating. There are a lot of people out there who are pushing agendas, and they depend on the ignorance of the public (especially in science) to get people to believe them. Watch out for these people. The truth is their worst enemy.
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Ancient Goth: Someone who overthrew the Roman Empire.
- Electric cars were once more popular than gasoline cars. They are undeniably simpler, quieter, and smoother than primitive autos like the Model T, and they sold quite well.
- The electric car lost its popularity before the rise of Big Oil, while Edison (the beneficiary of electric-car "fuel" sales) was enjoying his heyday. Hell, Edison was winning the competition for the domestic lighting market, beating out kerosene.
- The petroleum-powered car beat the electric because it was technically superior, especially in range. When cars and roads became better and people wanted to go longer distances, batteries were unable to provide sufficient energy. A battery takes hours to recharge, a gas tank takes minutes to refill (and a gas can is a lot lighter to carry than a battery if you run out in an inconvenient place). What would you rather drive?
Similar dissection skewers your claims with regard to space exploration. Yeah, the discovery of microbes on Mars would really threaten the entire World Order... NOT! I'm afraid it really is all down to economics and coalition politics; "human social development" has nothing at all to do with it.--