Of course they need water. Where do you think the hydrogen comes from? Plants create oxygen by cracking water molecules and discarding the oxygen. (I haven't studied biology since HS nor chemistry since my first year, and even I knew that.) --
Probably. There is some excess hydrogen in the fuel mix (it cools the flame and recovers energy that is otherwise just dissociating water molecules, and it improves the exhaust velocity and thus the performance), but I don't believe this causes pollution as such. The only pollutant I would expect would be some nitrogen oxides produced as the engine exhaust mixes with the air, and this should be small due to the pressure being low and the reducing environment (from the excess hydrogen). NOx production is favored in high-pressure oxydizing environments, and by the time the SSME exhaust hits air it has expanded and cooled quite a bit. --
It's fun to go nuts over these reports, and dream of a care-free life, but please, let's think about the overall thermodynamics of the situation.
If you had done that first, and looked at the amount of availability (the thermodynamic term for energy which can actually be converted to work) going to waste all around you, you'd have a very different take on the situation. Guaranteed. I'm even willing to put money on it.
What's really going on here?
I'm glad you asked me that.
What's going on here is that someone has found a way to use a natural (harmless to the environment, because already part of it) self-reproducing (cheap) organism to provide large amounts of chemical energy in a very useful form using what appears to be inexpensive methods. This is a huge advance because the expense of collection is radically lowered.
Is it realistic to expect this source of solar energy to compete with solar panels, which provide direct electric current, and which do not suffer from the inate energetic inefficiencies (I'm talking metabolic pathways here, not current efficiency levels) of biological processes?
In a word, yes. Photovoltaic panels and batteries supply power at a cost of about US$.90 per kilowatt-hour. Sunlight, by comparison, is extremely cheap. Pond surface is relatively cheap. If you need something like fuel to run a vehicle (or hydrogen for the fuel cell running your 2002-model laptop), tapping some H2 from the green stuff growing in the pond is likely to be cheaper than converting to electricity via PV, then to H2 via electrolysis. Storing hydrogen isn't a big problem, it can be stashed in metallic hydrides relatively cheaply or chemically converted to other fuels. CO2 and H2 can be catalytically converted to H2O and CH4 (methane, natural gas), ethylene, and I presume methanol as well. Methane is a terrific fuel, ethylene is a great synthetic chemical (think polyethylene plastic just for starters) and methanol is the fuel of choice for some newly-invented fuel cells.
For further reading see: Burning Backwards (New Scientist), an article about converting CO2 back to methanol enzymatically (powered by hydrogen to convert NAD back to NADH), and Viridian Note 129, regarding methanol fuel cells. --
Wpoliticians collecting more and more money over the internet you'd think they would pass more clueful laws about it.
Unfortunately, raising cash is more a function of the campaign manager than the candidate. Worse, the kind of expertise needed to raise money doesn't necessarily imply cluefulness; think about the Internet equivalent of bulk mail appeals, for example. My appraisal of the prospects for Internet campaigning leading to improvements in lawmaking is that it isn't likely. Just look at Holland, MI for a counterexample. The Internet is still a convenient bogeyman, so expect lots of cluelessness for a while. --
Let me turn that around. If a radical special-interest group wants to use a public vote on an un-Constitutional measure to advance their agenda, why should the public have to pay for it? Further, why should the public have to pay to defend against the suits seeking to overturn the un-Constitutional law, instead of having it quashed before getting it on the ballot? IMHO, the proponents ought to be forced to foot the legal bills for this, not the public. -- "There's a word for people who live close to nature -
This "logging software" is installed on each computer. The computers themselves cannot be accessed without logging in (possibly using a system where you swipe your library card to get in? This wouldn't be too expensive to set up). At the end of each month, a letter is mailed to someone (I'd assume the head of a given household), stating the distinct Web pages which were viewed using cards registered to someone in that household, along with the date and time.
Okay... who pays for this? How much paper, how much printing (which has to be laser-printed because every page is different), how much postage? Where do you get the staff to do the printing and mailing? What purchases and services do you cut?
What happens when someone's list is mailed to someone else's address? (Errors are inevitable.) Who's liable for the invasion of privacy?
That idea's still raw, bake it a little more. -- "There's a word for people who live close to nature -
Noone's right to free speech is censored by a library blocking playboy.com
If playboy.com was blocked by the library, kids would have to go out and BUY an issue to read the Jesse Ventura interview. Blocking playboy.com blocks political speech and opinion, simple as that. You do want an informed electorate, don't you? -- "There's a word for people who live close to nature -
... there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to bring an initiative to the ballot in the same way that you or I can.
And if a law can be declared un-Constitutional, their ballot initiative should be able to be declared such and squashed before it ever comes to a vote. See, wasting the public's money to print stuff like that on a ballot is an irreparable harm. So's allowing the violators of the First Amendment to use public funds to push their agenda, and elections are run with (guess what) public funds.
I have to agree with the respondent above. Someone once told me "Democracy is more dangerous than fire; fire can't vote itself immune to water." -- "There's a word for people who live close to nature -
The link was a different bookmark in the link labelled "graph" in response #293 (the parent of my response, the great-grandparent of this one). This would make Matt the Don Knotts guy, not me. -- "There's a word for people who live close to nature -
If I say 2000 is the warmest year in 500 years, that says either a) I don't know anything about the temps before 1500
And what's wrong with that? Not claiming certainty of things not shown by your data is good science.
Check out this graph of the estimated surface temperatures of the Sargasso Sea over the last 3000 years, for example.
Pray tell, what does the temperature in the Sargasso have to do with warming on the continents? It is an acknowledged fact that temperature patterns of land and ocean are DIFFERENT.
In addition, your figure of a 20% human contribution of CO2 is entirely bogus!
From one of your links: atmospheric CO2 has risen from about 293 ppm in 1900 to over 360 ppm today. That's greater than 20%. Your own cite calls you a liar. Oh, I should mention that that page is written by proponents of the Petition Project; it is highly partisan, not neutral.
You are aware that the Petition Project has signed non-climate specialists and such "scientists" as TV weather announcers, while the UCS petition signers are largely climatologists? -- "There's a word for people who live close to nature -
The article says... that the planet has not been this warm since the 1500's
The article does not say that.
It's not at all obvious that our miniscule contributions to the atmosphere have affected this in any way.
Only if you don't know any radiation physics or the like. Climate researchers do, and they take this very seriously. Maybe you ought to take a hint from them, like noticing that someone with a shirt reading "BOMB SQUAD" is running away from something... maybe you should run too? Our contributions are already over 20% of total atmospheric CO2, which is not minuscule by any reasonable measure. If the climate researchers are right, we are risking enormous upheavals in much of the world as rainfall patterns change, storms become more intense and/or hit areas historically untouched, and the habitat zones for both native species and introduced pests move northward.
There is the possibility they could be wrong, but compare them to the bomb squad; if the bomb squad was running away, would you be sufficiently confident in your safety to stand there or would you at least duck and hide until you were sure? You could always bet the bomb was a dud, but you'd be betting your life. I prefer not to bet the world. -- "There's a word for people who live close to nature -
You mean the data from satellite sensors which were sensitive to altitude, and which hadn't been corrected for decay of the orbit? You'd have to be clueless to keep relying on an analysis with KNOWN systematic errors which have been CORRECTED in later analyses. Or you could just be using the data out of context to support a lie. I suppose there are people who'd do that.
Of course, the satellite data doesn't prove anything about global warming. The satellite sensors are measuring air temperature, not ground temperature. You'd expect the "visible" part of the air to remain about the same temperature, because the amount of heat it's receiving doesn't change much. The air is trapping heat on the ground, and that is where the ground-based weather stations (which have been confirming the global-warming models) happen to be. The borehole temperature data confirms that the weather stations are not reading funny due to systematic errors. -- "There's a word for people who live close to nature -
Besides, global warming is proven by multiple independent measurements. The most recent heat-flow measurements show a global temperature increase of 1 degree C in the last 500 years, 50% of that in the 20th century and another 30% in the 19th. (See a BBC article.) Anyone who uses the words "psuedo science propaganda" to describe the majority position of climate specialists who've backed up their opinions with literally mountains of data is a troll. (And anyone who can't spell "pseudo" correctly is marginally literate.) -- "There's a word for people who live close to nature -
After having been recently been accosted in a Big Boy parking lot by an obnoxious person who I presumed to be a Southern Baptist but who I did not care to get to know well enough to ask, I could definitely deal with that. It would lead to a lot less strife in the world, too. Could you possibly imagine two armies going into battle, the atheists waving their swords yelling "THERE IS NO GOD!" and the agnostics with their slings and pikes screaming back "THERE MIGHT BE!"? The idea is enough to make a good belly-laugh. -- "There's a word for people who live close to nature -
Most of the interesting things (unfortunately) have a shit load of math behind them. That's how they "protect" their profession from the "rabble" and keep it expensive and elite.
Bull. Unlike politics or management (or post-modernism), there is no point to obfuscating the details of science and engineering. If there is mathematics involved, it is because you can't properly describe the field without it. Do you think you can describe the trajectory of an artillery shell without partial differential equations? Even closer to home, can you effectively talk about code without mentioning "structures" that have nothing to do with buildings, "functions" that have nothing to do with the uses of something, and "objects" which have no concrete existence?
The language of calculus, of engineering, and of computer science is obscure to the uninitiated. This is not because it is obfuscated, it is because it is specialized and terse. It has to be specialized and terse to be sufficiently precise and accurate to convey concepts correctly and accurately. If it was to "protect" things, it would be constructed to blur the concepts and keep others (even initiates) from understanding them.
The world isn't a simple place. Some things require specialized knowledge, and the specialists to go with it. Specialists give rise to jargon; it's unavoidable. Stop being so bitter and whining that it's not written on the level of Go Dog Go, and stretch your brain to accomodate it. -- "There's a word for people who live close to nature -
... has the passing of useless, incident specific legislation become the passtime of a government who lives moment to moment in a never ending string of knee-jerk reactions?
"Mister President, isn't there something we could appear to be doing?" I've seen this attributed to the man who was, I believe, Secretary of State to one of the Roosevelts. Passing useless feel-good legislation has a long and ugly history, and it's not going to go away as long as voters reward pols for doing it. -- "There's a word for people who live close to nature -
The difficult point is - how do you distinguish the viable possibilities from the fruit-cake ideas? How many of the fruit-cake ideas are actively promoted and backed by vested interests to simply confuse the issue and make it even harder ( ie, dis-information dissemination to overload the public so that they give up in disgust and simply accept what they are told? ).
Sorry, this was the meat of your point and I missed it.
I doubt that any of the fruitcake ideas are cynically promoted. In my position as a person whose technological and scientific literacy is way above the norm, I have seen just how ignorant (clueless) the average person is. Remember, these are the same people who believe in UFO abductions and the like. They hold passionate beliefs for which they have no evidence whatsoever, and see no contradiction in this. Among this mass of scientific illiterates, there are some like Joseph Newman who believe that someone (perhaps they themselves) have The Secret to unlimited energy, and it's being covered up by unnamed "vested interests". Others with a will to believe follow the Newmans and Velikovskys etc. like sheep.
I don't know why they do it. Perhaps it's so much easier for them to believe that some human agency stands in the way of utopia rather than nature, because they cannot accept that the universe could thwart their wish-fulfillment fantasies. At the limit it's a witch-hunt mentality; if they aren't getting what they want, someone's responsible and their head should roll! I have encountered this mentality all over the place, and I can't believe that any significant fraction of these people are paid fruitcakes. I think that the combination of general dumbth and credulity, combined with lousy public education, is quite enough to explain the observations. "Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity." --
I didn't think that the bulb would last forever, but it did last a LONG time - much greater than that of flourescent tubes, which tend to burn out around the electrodes.
That doesn't help you if the phosphors degrade enough. The biggest point of replacing an incandescent with a fluorescent is to get higher efficiency, and sooner or later the fading of the light output makes it worthwhile to replace the bulb even if it hasn't totally failed.
Regarding the RF, was this amount of RF any greater than that which is emitted from a monitor? Especially considering how close you sit to one?
This bulb had emissions of a very different character. They were actual radio emissions, not just magnetic fields. They carried far enough to interfere with other radio gear. While there may or may not be actual hazards associated with the magnetic fields from CRT's, interference to licensed users of the radio spectrum is something the FCC frowns on. If it would be impossible to sell such a bulb in the USA due to interference concerns, it's an excellent reason to deep-six the product.
I don't recall who was developing these bulbs, sorry. If you're interested in inductively-coupled plasmas, I'm sure you could find some sources on the web by searching under the keywords "plasma physics induct". --
Ahh, but this is the primary reason why such theories proliferate. Solar, geothermal, tidal, etc, etc, all have the ability to make major contibutions to our energy needs without the production of toxic pollutants or green house gas emissions.
Without greenhouse gases, certainly. Without toxic pollutants, it's far less clear-cut. Geothermal energy, to name one, brings up toxic brines and radioisotopes (NORM, Naturally Ocurring Radioactive Materials) as part of its normal operation. Use of tidal power disturbs shore ecologies. Solar and wind suffer from the problem that they are diffuse and intermittent sources, and people have been struggling to build robust and inexpensive machinery to use it for centuries. These problems haven't been solved because of conspiracies, they haven't been solved because they're HARD!
A study of these technologies invariably leads you to the conclusion that some very powerful people are doing everything that they can to prevent the adoption of these technologies.
Invariably? I don't think so. I've studied these technologies more than many of the self-styled advocates, and my conclusion is quite different. My advantage is that I'm well-studied in physics, chemistry and thermodynamics compared to the conspiracy theorist; they ask "why didn't they..." without bothering to see if Nature might have made it a less than trivial proposition. The difficulty of the problems has led to investment and industrial R&D going elsewhere, and that is just the way things work. Unless you like throwing money and effort down unproductive ratholes, you'd do the same thing too. What scares me sometimes is how hard it is to get some people to understand that. --
Condense quark soup, and you can get another stable construct, made of -TWO- quarks, rather than three. Such constructs would be meta-stable, but kept under the right conditions could give you an entirely different periodic table.
Condense quark soup, or mix protons and anti-protons, and you do indeed get constructs made of two quarks. They are called mesons, and they are quite unstable. You will not do any chemistry with them because they become electrons, positrons and neutrinos in a rather small number of microseconds. --
can anybody estimate critical mass for the black hole to eat the Earth rather then evaporate.
I can't recall the actual constant, but the Hawking radiation from a BH is proportional to the inverse fourth power of the mass, implying that the lifespan is proportional to the mass cubed. Even looking at the mass of a lead or gold atom, it's obvious that you could not form a BH from them in the first place; the uncertainty of the position of the nuclei is many times the Schwartzchild radius of a BH of their combined mass. (Schwartzchild radius = 2MG/c^2. G, the gravitational constant, is a very small number, c^2 is a pretty big number, and M for 2 gold atoms is less than 10^-21 grams.) --
In the late 1980's-early 1990's, a company (I can't remember the company name) came out with a lightbulb EXACTLY like Tesla's, with the exception that the RF source was built into the base.
The oscillator was built into the base; the "antenna" (induction coil) was in the center of the bulb itself. It induced current into the mercury vapor inside the bulb via good old dB/dt effects (a changing magnetic field induces a voltage). The goal was to build a fluorescent in almost the same form-factor as an incandescent bulb. The bulbs didn't "burn out", true, but the phosphors degraded with use; it would eventually need replacing due to that. The electronics cost money and the RF radiation couldn't be brought down to acceptable levels, which made them a very tough sell. What killed them was the folded-tube compact fluorescent. We don't need RF-excited mercury plasmas to make a small fluorescent bulb, regular old electrodes can do the job. --
I have no clue how that is called or what it was, but I remember very well one cool picture (taken in his lab, that pic is still not in "hands of the democratic governments that want to cover up everything") where he was literally holding an electric ball in his hands.
You can do this yourself, today. Get any fluorescent tube, and put it in a strong RF field. Many things will do to generate such a field; an HF transmitter, a Tesla coil, or the inside of a microwave oven. The lamp will light with no current applied to the terminals. If you made a spherical fluorescent tube and held it in your hands, you'd look just like Tesla.
Tesla was a genius. He was not a magician. There is a difference. --
I have blocked all the ad sites which try to set third-party cookies. Any ad site which tries to set a cookie on my machine goes into my blacklist, and neither Slashdot nor anyone else will get any more impression revenue nor any click-through revenue from me for any ad that comes from that server. Ever. No matter where the original page came from.
If you truly need ad revenue from my activities to run Slashdot, you're going to have to do it without consorting with privacy-invaders. --
I was looking to see if anyone else had noticed this little part of the article:
But sales of Linux brought in only $32 million for the whole year, less than 1 percent of the $5.7 billion market. Windows NT, by comparison, brought in $1.7 billion.
"Microsoft makes more money before the morning coffee break every day of the year" than all the purveyors of Linux made in the entire year, Kusnetzky said.
You could phrase this a little differently, perhaps like this: "Linux vendors only charged $32 million for the entire year, while Windows NT fees brought Microsoft $1.7 billion while shipping only 31% more units." I think phrasing like that would get the suits to finally ask themselves, "What are we getting for all this money we're spending? Is it worth it?" And we can all hope that more of them will answer "No". --
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Probably. There is some excess hydrogen in the fuel mix (it cools the flame and recovers energy that is otherwise just dissociating water molecules, and it improves the exhaust velocity and thus the performance), but I don't believe this causes pollution as such. The only pollutant I would expect would be some nitrogen oxides produced as the engine exhaust mixes with the air, and this should be small due to the pressure being low and the reducing environment (from the excess hydrogen). NOx production is favored in high-pressure oxydizing environments, and by the time the SSME exhaust hits air it has expanded and cooled quite a bit.
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What's going on here is that someone has found a way to use a natural (harmless to the environment, because already part of it) self-reproducing (cheap) organism to provide large amounts of chemical energy in a very useful form using what appears to be inexpensive methods. This is a huge advance because the expense of collection is radically lowered.
In a word, yes. Photovoltaic panels and batteries supply power at a cost of about US$.90 per kilowatt-hour. Sunlight, by comparison, is extremely cheap. Pond surface is relatively cheap. If you need something like fuel to run a vehicle (or hydrogen for the fuel cell running your 2002-model laptop), tapping some H2 from the green stuff growing in the pond is likely to be cheaper than converting to electricity via PV, then to H2 via electrolysis. Storing hydrogen isn't a big problem, it can be stashed in metallic hydrides relatively cheaply or chemically converted to other fuels. CO2 and H2 can be catalytically converted to H2O and CH4 (methane, natural gas), ethylene, and I presume methanol as well. Methane is a terrific fuel, ethylene is a great synthetic chemical (think polyethylene plastic just for starters) and methanol is the fuel of choice for some newly-invented fuel cells.For further reading see:
Burning Backwards (New Scientist), an article about converting CO2 back to methanol enzymatically (powered by hydrogen to convert NAD back to NADH), and
Viridian Note 129, regarding methanol fuel cells.
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"There's a word for people who live close to nature -
What happens when someone's list is mailed to someone else's address? (Errors are inevitable.) Who's liable for the invasion of privacy?
That idea's still raw, bake it a little more.
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"There's a word for people who live close to nature -
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"There's a word for people who live close to nature -
I have to agree with the respondent above. Someone once told me "Democracy is more dangerous than fire; fire can't vote itself immune to water."
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"There's a word for people who live close to nature -
The link was a different bookmark in the link labelled "graph" in response #293 (the parent of my response, the great-grandparent of this one). This would make Matt the Don Knotts guy, not me.
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"There's a word for people who live close to nature -
You are aware that the Petition Project has signed non-climate specialists and such "scientists" as TV weather announcers, while the UCS petition signers are largely climatologists?
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"There's a word for people who live close to nature -
There is the possibility they could be wrong, but compare them to the bomb squad; if the bomb squad was running away, would you be sufficiently confident in your safety to stand there or would you at least duck and hide until you were sure? You could always bet the bomb was a dud, but you'd be betting your life. I prefer not to bet the world.
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"There's a word for people who live close to nature -
Of course, the satellite data doesn't prove anything about global warming. The satellite sensors are measuring air temperature, not ground temperature. You'd expect the "visible" part of the air to remain about the same temperature, because the amount of heat it's receiving doesn't change much. The air is trapping heat on the ground, and that is where the ground-based weather stations (which have been confirming the global-warming models) happen to be. The borehole temperature data confirms that the weather stations are not reading funny due to systematic errors.
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"There's a word for people who live close to nature -
Besides, global warming is proven by multiple independent measurements. The most recent heat-flow measurements show a global temperature increase of 1 degree C in the last 500 years, 50% of that in the 20th century and another 30% in the 19th. (See a BBC article.) Anyone who uses the words "psuedo science propaganda" to describe the majority position of climate specialists who've backed up their opinions with literally mountains of data is a troll. (And anyone who can't spell "pseudo" correctly is marginally literate.)
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"There's a word for people who live close to nature -
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"There's a word for people who live close to nature -
The language of calculus, of engineering, and of computer science is obscure to the uninitiated. This is not because it is obfuscated, it is because it is specialized and terse. It has to be specialized and terse to be sufficiently precise and accurate to convey concepts correctly and accurately. If it was to "protect" things, it would be constructed to blur the concepts and keep others (even initiates) from understanding them.
The world isn't a simple place. Some things require specialized knowledge, and the specialists to go with it. Specialists give rise to jargon; it's unavoidable. Stop being so bitter and whining that it's not written on the level of Go Dog Go, and stretch your brain to accomodate it.
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"There's a word for people who live close to nature -
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"There's a word for people who live close to nature -
I doubt that any of the fruitcake ideas are cynically promoted. In my position as a person whose technological and scientific literacy is way above the norm, I have seen just how ignorant (clueless) the average person is. Remember, these are the same people who believe in UFO abductions and the like. They hold passionate beliefs for which they have no evidence whatsoever, and see no contradiction in this. Among this mass of scientific illiterates, there are some like Joseph Newman who believe that someone (perhaps they themselves) have The Secret to unlimited energy, and it's being covered up by unnamed "vested interests". Others with a will to believe follow the Newmans and Velikovskys etc. like sheep.
I don't know why they do it. Perhaps it's so much easier for them to believe that some human agency stands in the way of utopia rather than nature, because they cannot accept that the universe could thwart their wish-fulfillment fantasies. At the limit it's a witch-hunt mentality; if they aren't getting what they want, someone's responsible and their head should roll! I have encountered this mentality all over the place, and I can't believe that any significant fraction of these people are paid fruitcakes. I think that the combination of general dumbth and credulity, combined with lousy public education, is quite enough to explain the observations. "Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity."
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I don't recall who was developing these bulbs, sorry. If you're interested in inductively-coupled plasmas, I'm sure you could find some sources on the web by searching under the keywords "plasma physics induct".
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Tesla was a genius. He was not a magician. There is a difference.
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If you truly need ad revenue from my activities to run Slashdot, you're going to have to do it without consorting with privacy-invaders.
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