The smaller the steam turbine, the less efficient it is.
If you put 9 or 10 stages in series, boost the diameter, and lower the ideal blade speed, they get much more efficient. Also, there are special low-pressure turbine designs that you can put on after the high-pressure turbines. Then you can add reheat stages, where you take out the no longer superheated, but still pretty high pressure steam, resuperheat it, then put back into the same or another turbine.
The turbine(s) now fill a building, or the aft 1/2 of an aircraft carrier, but they do a lot better at efficiently converting energy.
Back in the not so old days, the Navy used single stage turbines to run most pumps that were going to be on more or less continuously. They were still in the steam training plant at Great Lakes when I was there in 1976. But it turned out to be more efficient to run the steam to a turbo-generator, then use the electricity to run the pumps. The energy lost from condensing steam in all those small diameter lines was pretty bad by itself. Add in the low efficiency of a single stage turbine, and they were a lost cause.
"users turn like rabid wolves on any company that makes even the smallest error, and no prisoners are taken"
That is at least as good a description of the Mac market as the Windows browser market.
Even M$ was not immune from the wrath of the Mac community for borking Word 6 and Excel five during the conversion from 68k to Power PC. And they caught it again with announcement that VBA is going away on the next Mac version of Office.
Woe unto anyone or any company who puts a Windows interface on a Mac application.
I've been wondering how much longer they will keep the copper going in any case. If cell phones are cheaper to maintain than the copper networks, then there is going to be an inducement to give up on the wires. If they were just starting to provide phone service to an are now, would they even bother with wire? Or use cellular from the start.
And if they are thinking about shutting down the copper, then maintenance gets cut back to a minimal level. And you stop buying new equipment altogether.
The Mac II released in 1987 had 8-bit color quickdraw. 32 bit color Quickdraw was a software addition in system 6.05 and came out in 1989. System 7 (1991?) included 32 bit Quickdraw on any machine that could run it. I used to run color on the second screen of my SE-30. The second screen was attached to a Micron video card in the SE's expansion slot.
I thought I would never fill up that 30 MB aftermarket hard drive.:-)
"all those balanced budgets, that surplus, the prosperity,"
those ALL came to be after Newt Gingrich became speaker.
As for how the country survived, an awful lot of Westerners were pretty much run in to the ground. Mining jobs were hammered by Bruce Babbit, who declared he didn't like the mine patenting laws, and therefore was not going to follow them. He was not expected to resign, unlike Republicans who don't feel like obeying the law. And, of course, loggers where hammered into near oblivion to save a small owl that is now being eaten by the more efficient barred owl, to the great dismay of the environmentalists. Ranchers? Hammered, as their cows are eating sacred grass! Oh, the horrors!
As for international respect, I distinctly remember some place called Mogadishu where our servicemen were shot and dragged around behind a truck.
As for peace, Balkans war comes to mind. And our own government was doing the terrorist's job for them at Waco and Ruby Ridge. Who needs Al Queda if you have the FBI issuing shoot to kill orders against unarmed civilians? And did the agent who did the dirty deed get in trouble? Why no, he got off clean as a whistle. The GI's at that prison got in all sorts or trouble for taking the clothes off of their prisoners, and other Marines get busted for shooting back not carefully enough at the people shooting at them, but an FBI agent can blow away an unarmed woman holding a baby without even a black mark on his record. As long as the woman is a rural white who married a white man who might possibly be somewhat racist.
Maybe Bush isn't quite as bad as I thought. Or if he is shooting people down at Gitmo, at least it's being kept a lot quieter.
"Microsoft is basically buying rights to all of the patents owned by the companies they sign these deals with, so MS can go ahead and infringe on them at will."
As much as I hate to stand up for Bill, if you buy a license to a patent, or cross-license patents, you are not infringing that patent. If they have decided to license every patent in the country because it's cheaper than paying out settlement after settlement, because they have admitted they are kleptomaniacs, that is their perogative.
On the other hand, if they want to claim Linux is infringing, they should post the list of infringed patents. Not just because it's morally right, but because they are gutting their own legal case, and possibly setting themselves up for a racketeering charge down the road.
D; I'm not a student, or a teacher so I don't qualify for the discount; I don't want to lie about it; and $350 is too much for the 4 hours a year I need a spreadsheet.
And there are better word processors than Word. It's bloated itself to the point where it barely runs at all, and argues with me about what I want to do. At work, (where they are enamored with all things M$) I've started using Wordpad more and more, because it doesn't flipping argue with me.
And don't even get me started on Outlook's habit of randomly changing fonts in mid e-mail.
Or on svchost.exe hogging 98% of CPU and 100 MB RAM for no obvious reason at random times through the day, but I honestly don't think that is Office's fault. That's just general M$ idiocy.
Back to Office, if Bill will offer Excel alone for $99, no strings or special conditions, I'll buy it. Otherwise, I'm taking my business elsewhere.
Actually, it's quite complicated to pick a data set. For instance, in the course of my job today, I was looking at the record temperature records for June in Moses Lake WA. From 1995 until now, there have been precisely zero new record highs set. There have been 6 new record lows set. So based on that data set, global cooling is much more likely than global warming.
Is it a valid data set for that purpose? No.
Even if it was, there could be confounding factors. Maybe warmer oceans are making more clouds and cooling the local climate, since Moses Lake is downwind of the Pacific.
Since 1995, personally I have become more convinced there is global warming, and less convinced the it's all humanity's fault. (If it has not cooled down to some extent by 2020, then I'll have to change my mind about the solar output cycles.) And my conviction that there is nothing substantial we can do about without directly or indirectly killing 2 or 3 billlion people hasn't changed. We are stuck with it, so prepare to roll with the punchs.
$65 a barrel oil will do more to reduce fossil fuel consumption than any amount of frantic arm waving. The generation doing the frantic armwaving now doesn't remember the riots of the '60s, and how completely useless they were at actually getting anything useful done. And if you don't like corn-based ethanol as an alternative fuel, then invest in a startup to develop something better (sugar beets, cellulose, algae, a GM cold climate sugar cane?) and put the corn people out of business.
Better yet, can it recognize a ripe apple? Or a strawberry? When it can, then the agricultural robots can go into production. The force feedback "fingertips" already exist.
At the right price, I might even buy my own heavily armored blackberry picker. I'd certainly like to rent one. Change the software and maybe the picking attachment, and one machine could handle several crops.
"Which leads to the simple logical conclusion that God is evil."
Ah, Catharism. The God of the old testament is "evil God", the God that Jesus spoke of in the New testament is the good God.
That got a whole lot of people burned at the stake in the south of France. Pope "Innocent" cleaned that sect right out, because clearly Jesus said "Slaughter all who believe in multiple gods." Well, He must have said it somewhere, a Pope can not be wrong.
By the way, your Indulgence money is late. Your ancestors will be burning in Hell shortly. (Another Pope Approved Message from your God.)
"Then your kid will yell child abuse to the local Children Protective Services and have you arrested."
YMMV of course, but my stepdaughter tried that one on me. The CPS person came out, investigated, took the girl outside and chewed her ass out for five minutes. End of that incident. Except for the two months of grounding.
Don't panic if CPS calls. They know the difference between a real abuse and a brat trying to get their way.
"Hydrogen will never be a good replacement for gasoline."
I agree completely. I work a a plant that uses hydrogen in it's process. Nasty stuff from the safety point of view. Our cars would have to be inspected to airplane schedules to keep them safe.
The best way to handle hydrogen is to attach one carbon and one oxygen. Make methanol. Then you can use the same liquid fuel distribution system we already have. And methanol works in fuel cells too.
Even more interesting, the programmers at work ARE electricians. You'll be programming PLCs and DCS systems, not file systems or even in C, but you will be programming.
Interestingly enough, if you work for a manufacturing company, you don't need a electrician's license either.
And of course, electricians are NON-exempt labor, so time and a half applies, as well as guaranteed lunch breaks, morning and afternoon breaks and so forth.
"I've been delaying my next Mac purchase until Leopard is out, so now they will be without my money for a few more months."
Me too. Resolution independence is the killer feature for me. If I'm going to get an iMac, then I'd like to be able to read the screen. I keep my current 17" screen at 1024X768 so I can read it. I want 12 point text 12 point, and I also want 96 or 108 dpi, whatever the pixel density on the monitor works out to. That will do more good than anti-aliasing (blurring to me)the font.
Spaces might be nice, the rest is eye candy. KDE is good enough. Anything better is nice but not essential.
"I'm still pleased with the fact that because I work 9:30 to 6pm I see daylight on my drive home three weeks earlier than usual."
And that's the people who like DST. I work 7:30 to 4 pm, and I don't like it. The shift workers work 6:30 to 6:30, and then hit the hay, so they're not getting a lot of benefit either.
Not in the US. Sugar cane will grow in South Florida, the soggy corner of Texas, and bayou country. Now sugar beets will grow elsewhere, but they don't seem to be suitable for some reason. At least I haven't heard anything on sugar beet ethanol.
The other key points you miss are:
The technology for corn-based ethanol is available NOW. The equipment for corn-based ethanol is available NOW. The business-plan for corn-based ethanol is available NOW. You can take the above, go to the bank and get a loan to build the plant NOW.
Then, in five years, with a good cash flow, you can go back to the bank with a plan to build a sidestream cellulose digester for the left-over corn-based biomass. A few years after that, (after you get it working) you can go back for another sidestream cellulose digester tuned for switchgrass, hemp, or pigweeds for that matter. (Now there is is fast growing fuel crop for you Ph.D. candidates to target.)
Eventually, the corn system gets shut down because something more profitable has come out, and everyone is happy. But if you keep waiting for the perfect answer, we will be burning fossil fuels for another hundred years.
To put it in PC terms, are you going to stick to your 2 Ghz P-4 until until Nehalem ships, or is a Conroe worth having for the work it can do between now and then? Another example: should you keep running an incandescent light because a technology even better than CFL (which does have that annoying mercury problem) is right around the corner? Or should you grab the CFL and call it good enough for now?
"Shouldn't the app be in the menu instead of in some folder hidden somewhere?"
I see your problem, as I had it too. Things were actually tidier in the OS 8 days. And you can't move apps in the Applications folder without risking breakage on updates, so what I've done is customize things into three parts.
The most common apps are moved to the dock. What Apple thinks should be there did not match my opinions, so I moved them on or off until the dock was actually useful. And I moved the dock to the side instead of the bottom. There are 11 icons in the top section of the dock.
The second tier of apps (occasional use) are in a folder sitting in the bottom section of the dock, just above the trash can. The folder actually holds aliases of the apps to avoid the issues mentioned above. There are a dozen aliases in the folder.
The third tier is still in the applications folder. However, the Applications folder is on the dock. There are 58 of them not counting what is in the sub-folders like Apple's Utilities and my Video Stuff.
I find this triage system works well for me. It definitely works better than the infinite 'row through the start menu' system on the XP box at work. However, I am a positional person. I don't generally read the text on the icons, I swing the mouse to hit the color, or the menu postition, and go. Bill's "let's randomly rearrange then menus based on what I think you should be doing" is always the first thing I turn off.
While the East Coast was having their warm January, we in Eastern Washington (State) were freezing our butts off. Then they finally started getting walloped with serial blizzards, and we finally warmed up. Over all, about an average winter.
"I mean, I'm not putting on my tinfoil hat just yet, but the timing here seems to be more than coincidental. Just how long has GE been "researching" this technology?"
Since no one cared about the efficiency of incandescent lights until about 10 years ago, I'd guess less than ten years. Given corporate inertia, probably about five.
They never found a solution to the problem before because it wasn't seen as a problem before. Note that they have had "long life" bulbs for a long time, they are rated at 130 to 140 V, and yes they are redder, but they last a long time in hard to get to fixtures.
This same idea came up in the recent Supreme Court patent arguments. One Justice pointed out that moving the garage door sensor from the ground to the top of the door would be "obvious" to the first person whose door was falsely tripped by raccoons, and not really be worthy of a patent. One seldom has a reason to solve a problem until after it occurs at least once.
Why do that? They'll happily trade it all to us for green paper rectangles. Look at the Lumber business. They clearcut their forests, and sell us the wood at a discount.
I'll admit that what they find to do with the green paper rectangles is a bit of a mystery.
Slashdot Mirror
The smaller the steam turbine, the less efficient it is.
If you put 9 or 10 stages in series, boost the diameter, and lower the ideal blade speed, they get much more efficient. Also, there are special low-pressure turbine designs that you can put on after the high-pressure turbines. Then you can add reheat stages, where you take out the no longer superheated, but still pretty high pressure steam, resuperheat it, then put back into the same or another turbine.
The turbine(s) now fill a building, or the aft 1/2 of an aircraft carrier, but they do a lot better at efficiently converting energy.
Back in the not so old days, the Navy used single stage turbines to run most pumps that were going to be on more or less continuously. They were still in the steam training plant at Great Lakes when I was there in 1976. But it turned out to be more efficient to run the steam to a turbo-generator, then use the electricity to run the pumps. The energy lost from condensing steam in all those small diameter lines was pretty bad by itself. Add in the low efficiency of a single stage turbine, and they were a lost cause.
"users turn like rabid wolves on any company that makes even the smallest error, and no prisoners are taken"
That is at least as good a description of the Mac market as the Windows browser market.
Even M$ was not immune from the wrath of the Mac community for borking Word 6 and Excel five during the conversion from 68k to Power PC. And they caught it again with announcement that VBA is going away on the next Mac version of Office.
Woe unto anyone or any company who puts a Windows interface on a Mac application.
Stirring up trouble again?
That is one well-named rock/snowball.
I've been wondering how much longer they will keep the copper going in any case. If cell phones are cheaper to maintain than the copper networks, then there is going to be an inducement to give up on the wires. If they were just starting to provide phone service to an are now, would they even bother with wire? Or use cellular from the start.
And if they are thinking about shutting down the copper, then maintenance gets cut back to a minimal level. And you stop buying new equipment altogether.
The Mac II released in 1987 had 8-bit color quickdraw. 32 bit color Quickdraw was a software addition in system 6.05 and came out in 1989. System 7 (1991?) included 32 bit Quickdraw on any machine that could run it. I used to run color on the second screen of my SE-30. The second screen was attached to a Micron video card in the SE's expansion slot.
:-)
I thought I would never fill up that 30 MB aftermarket hard drive.
"all those balanced budgets, that surplus, the prosperity,"
those ALL came to be after Newt Gingrich became speaker.
As for how the country survived, an awful lot of Westerners were pretty much run in to the ground. Mining jobs were hammered by Bruce Babbit, who declared he didn't like the mine patenting laws, and therefore was not going to follow them. He was not expected to resign, unlike Republicans who don't feel like obeying the law. And, of course, loggers where hammered into near oblivion to save a small owl that is now being eaten by the more efficient barred owl, to the great dismay of the environmentalists. Ranchers? Hammered, as their cows are eating sacred grass! Oh, the horrors!
As for international respect, I distinctly remember some place called Mogadishu where our servicemen were shot and dragged around behind a truck.
As for peace, Balkans war comes to mind. And our own government was doing the terrorist's job for them at Waco and Ruby Ridge. Who needs Al Queda if you have the FBI issuing shoot to kill orders against unarmed civilians? And did the agent who did the dirty deed get in trouble? Why no, he got off clean as a whistle. The GI's at that prison got in all sorts or trouble for taking the clothes off of their prisoners, and other Marines get busted for shooting back not carefully enough at the people shooting at them, but an FBI agent can blow away an unarmed woman holding a baby without even a black mark on his record. As long as the woman is a rural white who married a white man who might possibly be somewhat racist.
Maybe Bush isn't quite as bad as I thought. Or if he is shooting people down at Gitmo, at least it's being kept a lot quieter.
"Microsoft is basically buying rights to all of the patents owned by the companies they sign these deals with, so MS can go ahead and infringe on them at will."
As much as I hate to stand up for Bill, if you buy a license to a patent, or cross-license patents, you are not infringing that patent. If they have decided to license every patent in the country because it's cheaper than paying out settlement after settlement, because they have admitted they are kleptomaniacs, that is their perogative.
On the other hand, if they want to claim Linux is infringing, they should post the list of infringed patents. Not just because it's morally right, but because they are gutting their own legal case, and possibly setting themselves up for a racketeering charge down the road.
D; I'm not a student, or a teacher so I don't qualify for the discount; I don't want to lie about it; and $350 is too much for the 4 hours a year I need a spreadsheet.
And there are better word processors than Word. It's bloated itself to the point where it barely runs at all, and argues with me about what I want to do. At work, (where they are enamored with all things M$) I've started using Wordpad more and more, because it doesn't flipping argue with me.
And don't even get me started on Outlook's habit of randomly changing fonts in mid e-mail.
Or on svchost.exe hogging 98% of CPU and 100 MB RAM for no obvious reason at random times through the day, but I honestly don't think that is Office's fault. That's just general M$ idiocy.
Back to Office, if Bill will offer Excel alone for $99, no strings or special conditions, I'll buy it. Otherwise, I'm taking my business elsewhere.
Actually, it's quite complicated to pick a data set. For instance, in the course of my job today, I was looking at the record temperature records for June in Moses Lake WA. From 1995 until now, there have been precisely zero new record highs set. There have been 6 new record lows set. So based on that data set, global cooling is much more likely than global warming.
Is it a valid data set for that purpose? No.
Even if it was, there could be confounding factors. Maybe warmer oceans are making more clouds and cooling the local climate, since Moses Lake is downwind of the Pacific.
Since 1995, personally I have become more convinced there is global warming, and less convinced the it's all humanity's fault. (If it has not cooled down to some extent by 2020, then I'll have to change my mind about the solar output cycles.) And my conviction that there is nothing substantial we can do about without directly or indirectly killing 2 or 3 billlion people hasn't changed. We are stuck with it, so prepare to roll with the punchs.
$65 a barrel oil will do more to reduce fossil fuel consumption than any amount of frantic arm waving. The generation doing the frantic armwaving now doesn't remember the riots of the '60s, and how completely useless they were at actually getting anything useful done. And if you don't like corn-based ethanol as an alternative fuel, then invest in a startup to develop something better (sugar beets, cellulose, algae, a GM cold climate sugar cane?) and put the corn people out of business.
"I'm trying to find a possible practical use of this research but can't think of any."
you can turn off the cold sensitivity in my teeth any time.
And yes, I'll pay for the privilege.
Nerves in teeth other than pressure sensors. Dumbest idea ever.
"What are they going to do about it? Build a wall to block it?"
More likely a very large tinfoil hat.
Better yet, can it recognize a ripe apple? Or a strawberry? When it can, then the agricultural robots can go into production. The force feedback "fingertips" already exist.
At the right price, I might even buy my own heavily armored blackberry picker. I'd certainly like to rent one. Change the software and maybe the picking attachment, and one machine could handle several crops.
"Which leads to the simple logical conclusion that God is evil."
Ah, Catharism. The God of the old testament is "evil God", the God that Jesus spoke of in the New testament is the good God.
That got a whole lot of people burned at the stake in the south of France. Pope "Innocent" cleaned that sect right out, because clearly Jesus said "Slaughter all who believe in multiple gods." Well, He must have said it somewhere, a Pope can not be wrong.
By the way, your Indulgence money is late. Your ancestors will be burning in Hell shortly. (Another Pope Approved Message from your God.)
"Then your kid will yell child abuse to the local Children Protective Services and have you arrested."
YMMV of course, but my stepdaughter tried that one on me. The CPS person came out, investigated, took the girl outside and chewed her ass out for five minutes. End of that incident. Except for the two months of grounding.
Don't panic if CPS calls. They know the difference between a real abuse and a brat trying to get their way.
"Hydrogen will never be a good replacement for gasoline."
I agree completely. I work a a plant that uses hydrogen in it's process. Nasty stuff from the safety point of view. Our cars would have to be inspected to airplane schedules to keep them safe.
The best way to handle hydrogen is to attach one carbon and one oxygen. Make methanol. Then you can use the same liquid fuel distribution system we already have. And methanol works in fuel cells too.
If mercury gets loose, turn it back into cinnabar, use sodium sulfide.
Mercury is a naturally occuring material. Quit panicing already. Turn it back into the rock it used to be and have a beer, and chill out.
Even more interesting, the programmers at work ARE electricians. You'll be programming PLCs and DCS systems, not file systems or even in C, but you will be programming.
Interestingly enough, if you work for a manufacturing company, you don't need a electrician's license either.
And of course, electricians are NON-exempt labor, so time and a half applies, as well as guaranteed lunch breaks, morning and afternoon breaks and so forth.
"I've been delaying my next Mac purchase until Leopard is out, so now they will be without my money for a few more months."
Me too. Resolution independence is the killer feature for me. If I'm going to get an iMac, then I'd like to be able to read the screen. I keep my current 17" screen at 1024X768 so I can read it. I want 12 point text 12 point, and I also want 96 or 108 dpi, whatever the pixel density on the monitor works out to. That will do more good than anti-aliasing (blurring to me)the font.
Spaces might be nice, the rest is eye candy. KDE is good enough. Anything better is nice but not essential.
"I'm still pleased with the fact that because I work 9:30 to 6pm I see daylight on my drive home three weeks earlier than usual."
And that's the people who like DST. I work 7:30 to 4 pm, and I don't like it. The shift workers work 6:30 to 6:30, and then hit the hay, so they're not getting a lot of benefit either.
"the sugar cane required to fuel the plants could easily come from any number of countries including Brazil and Australia "
So we are still dependent on a foreign source of supply for our energy?
And this gains us what?
Not in the US. Sugar cane will grow in South Florida, the soggy corner of Texas, and bayou country. Now sugar beets will grow elsewhere, but they don't seem to be suitable for some reason. At least I haven't heard anything on sugar beet ethanol.
The other key points you miss are:
The technology for corn-based ethanol is available NOW.
The equipment for corn-based ethanol is available NOW.
The business-plan for corn-based ethanol is available NOW.
You can take the above, go to the bank and get a loan to build the plant NOW.
Then, in five years, with a good cash flow, you can go back to the bank with a plan to build a sidestream cellulose digester for the left-over corn-based biomass. A few years after that, (after you get it working) you can go back for another sidestream cellulose digester tuned for switchgrass, hemp, or pigweeds for that matter. (Now there is is fast growing fuel crop for you Ph.D. candidates to target.)
Eventually, the corn system gets shut down because something more profitable has come out, and everyone is happy. But if you keep waiting for the perfect answer, we will be burning fossil fuels for another hundred years.
To put it in PC terms, are you going to stick to your 2 Ghz P-4 until until Nehalem ships, or is a Conroe worth having for the work it can do between now and then? Another example: should you keep running an incandescent light because a technology even better than CFL (which does have that annoying mercury problem) is right around the corner? Or should you grab the CFL and call it good enough for now?
"Shouldn't the app be in the menu instead of in some folder hidden somewhere?"
I see your problem, as I had it too. Things were actually tidier in the OS 8 days. And you can't move apps in the Applications folder without risking breakage on updates, so what I've done is customize things into three parts.
The most common apps are moved to the dock. What Apple thinks should be there did not match my opinions, so I moved them on or off until the dock was actually useful. And I moved the dock to the side instead of the bottom. There are 11 icons in the top section of the dock.
The second tier of apps (occasional use) are in a folder sitting in the bottom section of the dock, just above the trash can. The folder actually holds aliases of the apps to avoid the issues mentioned above. There are a dozen aliases in the folder.
The third tier is still in the applications folder. However, the Applications folder is on the dock. There are 58 of them not counting what is in the sub-folders like Apple's Utilities and my Video Stuff.
I find this triage system works well for me. It definitely works better than the infinite 'row through the start menu' system on the XP box at work. However, I am a positional person. I don't generally read the text on the icons, I swing the mouse to hit the color, or the menu postition, and go. Bill's "let's randomly rearrange then menus based on what I think you should be doing" is always the first thing I turn off.
While the East Coast was having their warm January, we in Eastern Washington (State) were freezing our butts off. Then they finally started getting walloped with serial blizzards, and we finally warmed up. Over all, about an average winter.
"I mean, I'm not putting on my tinfoil hat just yet, but the timing here seems to be more than coincidental. Just how long has GE been "researching" this technology?"
Since no one cared about the efficiency of incandescent lights until about 10 years ago, I'd guess less than ten years. Given corporate inertia, probably about five.
They never found a solution to the problem before because it wasn't seen as a problem before. Note that they have had "long life" bulbs for a long time, they are rated at 130 to 140 V, and yes they are redder, but they last a long time in hard to get to fixtures.
This same idea came up in the recent Supreme Court patent arguments. One Justice pointed out that moving the garage door sensor from the ground to the top of the door would be "obvious" to the first person whose door was falsely tripped by raccoons, and not really be worthy of a patent. One seldom has a reason to solve a problem until after it occurs at least once.
"How long before the US invades Canada?"
Why do that? They'll happily trade it all to us for green paper rectangles. Look at the Lumber business. They clearcut their forests, and sell us the wood at a discount.
I'll admit that what they find to do with the green paper rectangles is a bit of a mystery.