If you're going to go that way, you need different tech. For instance, instead of making an eggshell structure you make an air-mattress formation (parallel tubes) and use a pump to fill it full of mud with a bit of Portland cement added. This gives you an adobe structure on which you can pile more dirt once it's cured. Dirt does a great job of stopping small-arms fire.
Being able to find mud in e.g. deserts is a difficulty.
Keeping an inflatable building inflated requires power. Guess what a disaster area is likely not to have, even if it is nominally within civilization?
The cement-rigidified fabric building only requires inflation while it cures, and does not need doors into a pressurized space. This gets around the power problem, mostly; you're going to need a vehicle to haul the bag to the site anyway, and you can use its exhaust to inflate the support bag. After that, no power required.
It's a shell that's strong in compression. Pile earth on it, and you've got your sound and thermal insulation. The one issue I can see is the small size; 172 square feet isn't much. You'd need a lot of them for any kind of refugee situation, and at $2100 each (about $12/square foot) it's probably as expensive as local housing in most of the world if not more so.
Ah. So one person's opinion in a Usenet series is gospel? And did you notice that he was also talking about high-speed trains?
I notice that he claimed to have worked for Porsche, but he did not mention that Porsche won a number of races right after introducing disc brakes because... their brakes cooled much better and left them more braking power, allowing the drivers to pass other cars while diving into curves before having to slow down themselves.
Finally, your statement "you have been driving a car and not a semi" is irrelevant. Drum brakes on cars have been known to overheat and fade during mountain descents. This problem is known to be much smaller with disc brakes, which have cooling air flowing directly over their braking surfaces (as well as through any internal cooling passages). You can't do that with a drum, period. Your statement "Drum brakes cool better than disc brakes" is simply WRONG.
Check The Panda's Thumb for the latest antics of the creationists. Most of the material pertains to official actions from fundies trying to pass off "intelligent design" as science, but you also hear about fundie teachers doing it one class at a time and occasionally someone will relate a tale of how difficult it is for teachers to actually teach evolution without having some fundie's kid argue that it's all an atheist plot to deny God.
Seriously, do you try to check anything before you spout off? Just in case, y'know, you might have been misinformed or be misremembering something?
And it is going to put wear on your drivetrain.
Applying torque to the wheels is its business, and forces inside the engine will be smaller than under power at the same RPM (little or no combustion forces).
The 10-year old car I sold last year had 168,000 miles on it and still had excellent compression. It regularly went 5,000 miles between oil changes without needing to add oil.
Maybe it is because you have been driving a car and not a semi.
Semi trucks have drum brakes.
Drum brakes cool better than disc brakes. This is because drum brakes have greater surface area.
I haven't looked recently, but I may have seen them as recently as last month at Home Despot.
And any CF that is dimmable will NOT have a magnetic ballast and will NOT flicker at 60 Hz. The electronic ballasts will switch at tens of kHz and will not have flicker you can detect without a chopper wheel or other equipment. Spectrum is another matter, but your eyes adjust to red light of sunset vs. blue light of the sky; what's the big deal? It won't give you eyestrain.
My car burns quite a bit less fuel going downhill in neutral than in gear (like, less than 1/3 as much according to the trip computer), but that is on hills which are not steep enough to need engine braking. If the hill is just steep enough to coast, you are better off cutting the engine speed to idle (cutting engine drag) and letting gravity do the work.
Sorry, you're wrong. Take it from an automotive guy: the engine is controlling its fuel-air ratio to be stoichiometric for the catalytic converter. If you are turning the engine faster by driving it with the car, not only are you increasing the inertial forces on the pistons and the drag against the cylinder walls, but you are pulling more air past the throttle body and having to burn more fuel in it to maintain the correct mixture for pollution control. The only exception to this is if the engine computer recognizes the situation and cuts off fuel delivery to the engine; your car may or may not.
Engine braking is going to save your brake pads and keep you from having brake fade due to overheating on long downgrades, of course. This hasn't been a factor for me in the last ten years; all of my cars have had either front or 4-wheel discs with good cooling, and unless I'm on a twisty 2-lane road I just put the car in neutral and let 'er rip. It's not often that you get a free roller-coaster ride!
I've had some work well, and some die early. My experience:
Lights of America: SUCK. They make a very pretty-looking 3-way circular-tube light, but when the tube goes bad the electronic ballast literally destroys itself trying to re-start it. I have literally four of them waiting for me to be able to find or make replacement shunt resistors; I have to watch the survivors carefully to make sure the tubes are replaced before they croak.
Feit Electric: SUCK. Three folded-tube integral-ballast units died in about a year in my bathroom.
There have been some good points:
GE: GREAT. I have not had a single GE CF die on me yet.
I have some no-name Chinese brand in the bathroom now (no brand name on the bulbs themselves, I just checked). They've been there most of a year; so far, so good.
How much life you get depends on the quality. I'd look for GE and stay away from LoA and Feit, and be careful about no-name brands.
I'm wrong because I can disprove the accepted enviro-political dogma via an objective scientific discourse?
You're wrong because there is plenty of CFC getting to the stratosphere, and the troposphere (esp. the upper troposphere) is well below superheat temperatures for CFC's. The reason you are wrong is that you are ignorant of the roles of convective mixing and molecular diffusion. I bet you couldn't even calculate the Gibb's free energy of a 1 ppm mixture of CFC-12 in air vs. the CFC component purified and separated.
FYI, check the ozone over Switzerland. It doesn't show the extreme cuts of the spring ozone holes, but it ought to show you that depletion is not just a polar phenomenon either. (There's a more general mid-latitude graph down near the bottom of this page.)
Carbon-14 is created by cosmic rays and nuclear explosions. The ultraviolet rays blocked by ozone are far too anemic to create or destroy C-14. What is the supposed link in your bolded text? My bogosity meter is mid-scale.
Volcanic activity causes temporary dips. You can see the effects of major eruptions; ozone goes down, and then back up.
Solar storms may change ozone on a very short time-scale. The thing is, that time scale is so short it doesn't appear to show on long-term measurements; what we DO see in the northern mid-latitudes is a steady year-by-year decline starting at about 1970. This is not explainable by solar storms (if so, you'd expect ozone to follow the sunspot cycle).
... the theoretical maximum power you can get out of solar cells is on the order of 1000W/m^2.
Fine. Suppose that you can get 30%, and that car's effective area is 7 square meters. That's 1000 W/m^2 * 7 *.3 = 2100 W = ~3 HP, which is a fair fraction of a car's cruising requirements and would supply many miles-worth of energy requirements if you charged batteries while the car was parked during the day.
Suppose they installed it over the Salton Sea, and floated black plastic over the water to prevent evaporation (but still use the water as a heat reservoir). Still think California wouldn't go for using a small part of its 376 square miles to eliminate some fossil-fuel needs?
At 49 fps updraft and 70 C (158 F) shaft temperatures, you could have combination sauna sessions and up-and-down parachute rides. Just be careful not to break the glass you come back down on!
Slashdot Mirror
Being able to find mud in e.g. deserts is a difficulty.
The cement-rigidified fabric building only requires inflation while it cures, and does not need doors into a pressurized space. This gets around the power problem, mostly; you're going to need a vehicle to haul the bag to the site anyway, and you can use its exhaust to inflate the support bag. After that, no power required.
Check out structural insulated panels.
It's a shell that's strong in compression. Pile earth on it, and you've got your sound and thermal insulation. The one issue I can see is the small size; 172 square feet isn't much. You'd need a lot of them for any kind of refugee situation, and at $2100 each (about $12/square foot) it's probably as expensive as local housing in most of the world if not more so.
I notice that he claimed to have worked for Porsche, but he did not mention that Porsche won a number of races right after introducing disc brakes because... their brakes cooled much better and left them more braking power, allowing the drivers to pass other cars while diving into curves before having to slow down themselves.
Finally, your statement "you have been driving a car and not a semi" is irrelevant. Drum brakes on cars have been known to overheat and fade during mountain descents. This problem is known to be much smaller with disc brakes, which have cooling air flowing directly over their braking surfaces (as well as through any internal cooling passages). You can't do that with a drum, period. Your statement "Drum brakes cool better than disc brakes" is simply WRONG.
(Don't mod me up, save that for Deep Fried Geekboy.)
Check The Panda's Thumb for the latest antics of the creationists. Most of the material pertains to official actions from fundies trying to pass off "intelligent design" as science, but you also hear about fundie teachers doing it one class at a time and occasionally someone will relate a tale of how difficult it is for teachers to actually teach evolution without having some fundie's kid argue that it's all an atheist plot to deny God.
The 10-year old car I sold last year had 168,000 miles on it and still had excellent compression. It regularly went 5,000 miles between oil changes without needing to add oil.
Semi trucks have drum brakes. Bullshit. Double bullshit for ventilated or cross-drilled discs (there is no such thing as a drum brake with cooling passages through the drum). A quick search for "disc drum brake cooling" brings up "The major advantage of disc brakes over drum brakes is thatAnd any CF that is dimmable will NOT have a magnetic ballast and will NOT flicker at 60 Hz. The electronic ballasts will switch at tens of kHz and will not have flicker you can detect without a chopper wheel or other equipment. Spectrum is another matter, but your eyes adjust to red light of sunset vs. blue light of the sky; what's the big deal? It won't give you eyestrain.
My car burns quite a bit less fuel going downhill in neutral than in gear (like, less than 1/3 as much according to the trip computer), but that is on hills which are not steep enough to need engine braking. If the hill is just steep enough to coast, you are better off cutting the engine speed to idle (cutting engine drag) and letting gravity do the work.
Engine braking is going to save your brake pads and keep you from having brake fade due to overheating on long downgrades, of course. This hasn't been a factor for me in the last ten years; all of my cars have had either front or 4-wheel discs with good cooling, and unless I'm on a twisty 2-lane road I just put the car in neutral and let 'er rip. It's not often that you get a free roller-coaster ride!
- Lights of America: SUCK. They make a very pretty-looking 3-way circular-tube light, but when the tube goes bad the electronic ballast literally destroys itself trying to re-start it. I have literally four of them waiting for me to be able to find or make replacement shunt resistors; I have to watch the survivors carefully to make sure the tubes are replaced before they croak.
- Feit Electric: SUCK. Three folded-tube integral-ballast units died in about a year in my bathroom.
There have been some good points:- GE: GREAT. I have not had a single GE CF die on me yet.
- I have some no-name Chinese brand in the bathroom now (no brand name on the bulbs themselves, I just checked). They've been there most of a year; so far, so good.
How much life you get depends on the quality. I'd look for GE and stay away from LoA and Feit, and be careful about no-name brands.You're a troll.
... is that you believe the cranks over at keelynet. This shows that you have a defective bullshit detector.
FYI, check the ozone over Switzerland. It doesn't show the extreme cuts of the spring ozone holes, but it ought to show you that depletion is not just a polar phenomenon either. (There's a more general mid-latitude graph down near the bottom of this page.)
He's simply wrong.
Carbon-14 is created by cosmic rays and nuclear explosions. The ultraviolet rays blocked by ozone are far too anemic to create or destroy C-14. What is the supposed link in your bolded text? My bogosity meter is mid-scale.
Solar storms may change ozone on a very short time-scale. The thing is, that time scale is so short it doesn't appear to show on long-term measurements; what we DO see in the northern mid-latitudes is a steady year-by-year decline starting at about 1970. This is not explainable by solar storms (if so, you'd expect ozone to follow the sunspot cycle).
Neither of those is true. The ground is both the heat absorber and heat storage medium, and the turbulent airflow will mix it pretty well.
You don't understand
I meant not California
But the Salton Sea.
Suppose they installed it over the Salton Sea, and floated black plastic over the water to prevent evaporation (but still use the water as a heat reservoir). Still think California wouldn't go for using a small part of its 376 square miles to eliminate some fossil-fuel needs?
Deep Space One used that kind of scheme, with gallium-arsenide cells IIRC.
At 49 fps updraft and 70 C (158 F) shaft temperatures, you could have combination sauna sessions and up-and-down parachute rides. Just be careful not to break the glass you come back down on!