The Atmospheric Vortex Engine concept http://vortexengine.ca/index.shtml is one way to harvest the heat energy in a large area of ocean surface.
"Mechanical energy is produced when water descends or when warm air rises. The Vortex Engine captures the energy produced when warm air rises by creating an air vortex which acts as a virtual vertical conduit.
The vortex is produced by admitting warm or humid air tangentially into a circular arena. Tangential entries cause the warm moist air to spin as it rises forming an ``anchored vortex''. The vortex engine has the same basis as the proven solar chimney except the physical tube of the solar chimney is replaced with centrifugal force in the vortex."
Basically, these guys propose to create anchored tornadoes and to extract some of the energy using wind turbines around the base.
I'd be in favor of funding more research in this and building a prototype in the gulf of Mexico.
If it were up to me, I'd balance the profit motive of the creator with the public domain value in the following way:
1. for every creative work that you'd like protected by a government-granted exclusive copyright, file a copyright registration form, sort of like a 1040 tax form. This registration gives you a one-year exclusive right, with no restrictions.
2. for years subsequent to the first year, you may apply to extend your copyright by filing another form. On this form, you show how much money you made from selling copies in the previous year. As long as this amount is more than 1% of the best year to date, you can maintain your exclusive copy right. If not, the work goes into the public domain.
So what would a rule like this accomplish?
For works like a book or movie or song, as long as the work was being actively marketed and bringing in a significant amount of money (more than 1% of the strongest year) you get to keep your monopoly right. But if you fail to get the work out into the market, free copying takes over as the distribution mechanism. Disney could no longer keep a movie in hiding for 10 years and then re-release it. They would be forced to continue marketing the work until they failed to rake in 1% of their best year. A newspaper or magazine article would go into the public domain unless the publisher sold enough reprints to keep it above 1% of the first year. Etc. The threshold value is defined by the best year. A hit movie might need to make $500k on DVD or rental royalties annually compared to its $50M initial release. A textbook might need to sell 10 copies per year compared to its first edition of 1000 copies. Etc.
This way, the public domain value is (I feel) appropriately balanced against the value to the author. This takes away the author's current ability to bury a work by neglecting the effort of distribution. Let the public take over when the benefit to the public exceeds the benefit to the author.
Base-load plants are ones that are difficult or impossible to quickly adjust output. Nuclear plants cannot be turned on within minutes of being down-regulated. They have to wait for xenon-135 to decay before they can be safely restarted (see xenon-precluded-startup). Coal plants need to warm up large boilers and their pollution control systems work best at one nominal load.
Hydro is something that can be turned up mid-day and turned down at night. Hydro is just the sort of large-scale energy storage system that is needed to complement non-dispatchable renewables like wind and solar. You can run hydro turbines on cloudy days or exceptionally calm days. So I don't think we should be calling hydro base-load power. It is a relatively precious variable output stored energy source.
Of course some hydro doesn't come with large volume storage behind the dam. I guess that should be considered base-load, but I think most hydro does have a large degree of flexibility about the schedule of water release.
Russia's Federal Nuclear Energy Agency has said it will complete the first of several floating nuclear plants by 2011 and put it into operation at the northern port of Severodvinsk, on the White Sea. Construction will start next year. Each 70-megawatt plant is designed to last 40 years and will cost about $200 million US.
> Haven't you noticed the fact that the so-called security measures enacted since then are unlikely to prevent an identical attack?
I disagree. There has been two real security measures taken since 9/11 that has made a repeat unlikely: (1) reinforcing the cockpit doors and (2) changing the policy of helping the hijacker in the hopes of safely landing the plane. This real security is cheap and effective but largely invisible. The rest (essentially all TSA activity) is theater designed to help get politicians re-elected by making it look like they are doing something about terrorism.
This solution costs about $1000 and 20 minutes per book and takes up a lot less space in my house.
1. Buy a good, fast duplex sheet fed scanner like the Fujitsu SnapScan FI-5110-EOX ($300). This will scan a book to a PDF file in about 15 minutes. I use a new razor knife to cut the binding away about 10--20 pages per swipe.
2. Buy a copy of ABBYY Fine Reader OCR ($300) and OCR the book.
3. Save as PDF with page images on top and OCR underneath in a hidden layer. Keep the resolution at 300 dpi with JPEG quality 70. At this resolution, you can print nearly perfect pages, read it really easily on the screen, and it takes about 0.5MB per page.
4. You have 3500 books, they probably average about 330 pages each, so that's 3500 x 330 x 0.5MB = 577GB. Add a couple of 300GB disks to your PC ($400) and dump the whole pile into "My Documents/books".
5. Let Google Desktop Search go. Within a few hours, you can do a full-text search across all your books. Authors, titles, chapter headings, etc. It works pretty well. I've used this to find stuff from my old college physics and chemistry texts.
I've gone almost completely paperless at home this way. It also works pretty well for keeping track of junk like bank statements, utility bills, patent filings, love letters;-) etc.
The books (less their bindings) get stored in large cardboard boxes out in the garden shed. Pretty compact. I fit about 70--90 books per box. Your 3500 books would fit in ~50 boxes, or 2x5 stacks of 5. Incidentally, I haven't counted, but that's about how many I have, but I have to admit, I haven't scanned them all yet.
If 90% of the mass in the universe is Dark Matter, then it should be strongly detectable by its effect on the orbits of our local planets, but these local orbits have no need for dark matter. Thus, there is a much lower concentration of dark matter here than elsewhere. Why is this? Similarly, why is all the matter in our neighborhood real matter and not antimatter. These questions point to a fundamental flaw in the current cosmological explanations. Dark matter sounds like a real stretch I believe will be explained away by a better understanding of the geometry of space-time. After all dark matter is being conjectured to explain very long range gravity anomolies. Perhaps at large scales, space-time is not curved precisely the way current theories describe.
IMHO Dark Matter and Dark Energy are the modern epicycles. When we really do figure out a consistent geometry of the universe, we will find that all this un-detectable matter and energy that 98% of the universe is made of but of which there is none in our neighborhood was all a fabrication. The real equations will be more complicated than F = m a and even possibly more complicated than Lorentz contraction, but a lot simpler than the idea that the universe is full of stuff that pulls on everything but is otherwise undetectable or that the universe inflated faster than the speed of light for a little while after the big bang. Dark Matter seems much more far-fetched than say the theories of Alexander Mayer Physicist claims time has geometry
The ISS was another child of the Cold War: originally intended to show the Russians up and provide a permanent American presence in space, then hastily amended as a way to keep the Russian space scientists busy while their economy was falling to pieces. Like the Shuttle, it has been redesigned and reduced in scope so many times that it bears no resemblance to its original conception. Launched in an oblique, low orbit that guarantees its permanent uselessness, it serves as yin to the shuttle's yang, justifying an endless stream of future Shuttle missions through the simple stratagem of being too expensive to abandon.
Of course, the ISS has also been preemptively armed with science, but NASA has found much more effective safeguards against potential budget cuts. The station's inordinately expensive modules have mainly come from foreign space agencies, ensuring that even a NASA administrator foolhardy enough to let the thing drop into the sea would contravene a fistful of international treaties. And the station requires a permanent crew, a trick NASA learned from the Shuttle, so that there can be no question of mothballing it or converting it into an unmanned research platform.
In the thirty years since the last Moon flight, we have succeeded in creating a perfectly self-contained manned space program, in which the Shuttle goes up to save the Space Station (undermanned, incomplete, breaking down, filled with garbage, and dropping at a hundred meters per day), and the Space Station offers the Shuttle a mission and a destination. The Columbia accident has added a beautiful finishing symmetry - the Shuttle is now required to fly to the ISS, which will serve as an inspection station for the fragile thermal tiles, and a lifeboat in case something goes seriously wrong.
This closed cycle is so perfect that the last NASA administrator even cancelled the only mission in which there was a compelling need for a manned space flight - the Hubble telescope repair and upgrade - on the grounds that it would be too dangerous to fly the Shuttle away from the ISS, thereby detaching the program from its last connection to reason and leaving it free to float off into its current absurdist theater of backflips, gap fillers, Canadarms and heroic expeditions to the bottom of the spacecraft.
At 900 MHz, a directional antenna the size of a paperback book might have a gain of ~6dBi. To get the necessary 30 dBi I think it would take a dish several meters in diameter. I don't know how to do this calculation, but my intuition suggests that you'll need a few hundred square wavelengths (a few hundred square feet of collector area at 900 MHz or a ~3+ meter diameter dish) to have a gain of ~1000 or 30dB.
Free Space Loss applies only in free space. Over a Florida swamp, the radio signals reflect off the ground and interfere with each other. A better path loss calculation would be to use COST-231/Hata rural. This model is for 500--2000 MHz so the 900 MHz ISM should be well represented. Florida fits the Hata "rural" definition. One parameter left out is the receiver antenna height --- I'll use 1 meter.
instead of sorting by sender do [from:ralph]
instead of sorting by subject search
all threadlist views are already sorted by date
Gmail is just different. After getting used to it, I found it both different and better!
Chris
Slashdot Mirror
The Atmospheric Vortex Engine concept http://vortexengine.ca/index.shtml is one way to harvest the heat energy in a large area of ocean surface.
"Mechanical energy is produced when water descends or when warm air rises. The Vortex Engine captures the energy produced when warm air rises by creating an air vortex which acts as a virtual vertical conduit.
The vortex is produced by admitting warm or humid air tangentially into a circular arena. Tangential entries cause the warm moist air to spin as it rises forming an ``anchored vortex''. The vortex engine has the same basis as the proven solar chimney except the physical tube of the solar chimney is replaced with centrifugal force in the vortex."
Basically, these guys propose to create anchored tornadoes and to extract some of the energy using wind turbines around the base.
I'd be in favor of funding more research in this and building a prototype in the gulf of Mexico.
Chris
If it were up to me, I'd balance the profit motive of the creator with the public domain value in the following way:
1. for every creative work that you'd like protected by a government-granted exclusive copyright, file a copyright registration form, sort of like a 1040 tax form. This registration gives you a one-year exclusive right, with no restrictions.
2. for years subsequent to the first year, you may apply to extend your copyright by filing another form. On this form, you show how much money you made from selling copies in the previous year. As long as this amount is more than 1% of the best year to date, you can maintain your exclusive copy right. If not, the work goes into the public domain.
So what would a rule like this accomplish?
For works like a book or movie or song, as long as the work was being actively marketed and bringing in a significant amount of money (more than 1% of the strongest year) you get to keep your monopoly right. But if you fail to get the work out into the market, free copying takes over as the distribution mechanism. Disney could no longer keep a movie in hiding for 10 years and then re-release it. They would be forced to continue marketing the work until they failed to rake in 1% of their best year. A newspaper or magazine article would go into the public domain unless the publisher sold enough reprints to keep it above 1% of the first year. Etc. The threshold value is defined by the best year. A hit movie might need to make $500k on DVD or rental royalties annually compared to its $50M initial release. A textbook might need to sell 10 copies per year compared to its first edition of 1000 copies. Etc.
This way, the public domain value is (I feel) appropriately balanced against the value to the author. This takes away the author's current ability to bury a work by neglecting the effort of distribution. Let the public take over when the benefit to the public exceeds the benefit to the author.
What do you think?
Chris
Base-load plants are ones that are difficult or impossible to quickly adjust output. Nuclear plants cannot be turned on within minutes of being down-regulated. They have to wait for xenon-135 to decay before they can be safely restarted (see xenon-precluded-startup). Coal plants need to warm up large boilers and their pollution control systems work best at one nominal load.
Hydro is something that can be turned up mid-day and turned down at night. Hydro is just the sort of large-scale energy storage system that is needed to complement non-dispatchable renewables like wind and solar. You can run hydro turbines on cloudy days or exceptionally calm days. So I don't think we should be calling hydro base-load power. It is a relatively precious variable output stored energy source.
Of course some hydro doesn't come with large volume storage behind the dam. I guess that should be considered base-load, but I think most hydro does have a large degree of flexibility about the schedule of water release.
Chris
http://www.nuclear.com/n-plants/index-Floating_N-p lants.html says
July 30, 2005
Floating plant by 2011, Russia sez
Russia's Federal Nuclear Energy Agency has said it will complete the first of several floating nuclear plants by 2011 and put it into operation at the northern port of Severodvinsk, on the White Sea. Construction will start next year. Each 70-megawatt plant is designed to last 40 years and will cost about $200 million US.
it goes on to say this is being funded by China.
Chris
> Haven't you noticed the fact that the so-called security measures enacted since then are unlikely to prevent an identical attack?
I disagree. There has been two real security measures taken since 9/11 that has made a repeat unlikely: (1) reinforcing the cockpit doors and (2) changing the policy of helping the hijacker in the hopes of safely landing the plane. This real security is cheap and effective but largely invisible. The rest (essentially all TSA activity) is theater designed to help get politicians re-elected by making it look like they are doing something about terrorism.
This solution costs about $1000 and 20 minutes per book and takes up a lot less space in my house.
;-) etc.
1. Buy a good, fast duplex sheet fed scanner like the Fujitsu SnapScan FI-5110-EOX ($300). This will scan a book to a PDF file in about 15 minutes. I use a new razor knife to cut the binding away about 10--20 pages per swipe.
2. Buy a copy of ABBYY Fine Reader OCR ($300) and OCR the book.
3. Save as PDF with page images on top and OCR underneath in a hidden layer. Keep the resolution at 300 dpi with JPEG quality 70. At this resolution, you can print nearly perfect pages, read it really easily on the screen, and it takes about 0.5MB per page.
4. You have 3500 books, they probably average about 330 pages each, so that's 3500 x 330 x 0.5MB = 577GB. Add a couple of 300GB disks to your PC ($400) and dump the whole pile into "My Documents/books".
5. Let Google Desktop Search go. Within a few hours, you can do a full-text search across all your books. Authors, titles, chapter headings, etc. It works pretty well. I've used this to find stuff from my old college physics and chemistry texts.
I've gone almost completely paperless at home this way. It also works pretty well for keeping track of junk like bank statements, utility bills, patent filings, love letters
The books (less their bindings) get stored in large cardboard boxes out in the garden shed. Pretty compact. I fit about 70--90 books per box. Your 3500 books would fit in ~50 boxes, or 2x5 stacks of 5. Incidentally, I haven't counted, but that's about how many I have, but I have to admit, I haven't scanned them all yet.
Chris
If 90% of the mass in the universe is Dark Matter, then it should be strongly detectable by its effect on the orbits of our local planets, but these local orbits have no need for dark matter. Thus, there is a much lower concentration of dark matter here than elsewhere. Why is this? Similarly, why is all the matter in our neighborhood real matter and not antimatter. These questions point to a fundamental flaw in the current cosmological explanations. Dark matter sounds like a real stretch I believe will be explained away by a better understanding of the geometry of space-time. After all dark matter is being conjectured to explain very long range gravity anomolies. Perhaps at large scales, space-time is not curved precisely the way current theories describe.
Chris
IMHO Dark Matter and Dark Energy are the modern epicycles. When we really do figure out a consistent geometry of the universe, we will find that all this un-detectable matter and energy that 98% of the universe is made of but of which there is none in our neighborhood was all a fabrication. The real equations will be more complicated than F = m a and even possibly more complicated than Lorentz contraction, but a lot simpler than the idea that the universe is full of stuff that pulls on everything but is otherwise undetectable or that the universe inflated faster than the speed of light for a little while after the big bang. Dark Matter seems much more far-fetched than say the theories of Alexander Mayer Physicist claims time has geometry
Chris
The ISS was another child of the Cold War: originally intended to show the Russians up and provide a permanent American presence in space, then hastily amended as a way to keep the Russian space scientists busy while their economy was falling to pieces. Like the Shuttle, it has been redesigned and reduced in scope so many times that it bears no resemblance to its original conception. Launched in an oblique, low orbit that guarantees its permanent uselessness, it serves as yin to the shuttle's yang, justifying an endless stream of future Shuttle missions through the simple stratagem of being too expensive to abandon.
Of course, the ISS has also been preemptively armed with science, but NASA has found much more effective safeguards against potential budget cuts. The station's inordinately expensive modules have mainly come from foreign space agencies, ensuring that even a NASA administrator foolhardy enough to let the thing drop into the sea would contravene a fistful of international treaties. And the station requires a permanent crew, a trick NASA learned from the Shuttle, so that there can be no question of mothballing it or converting it into an unmanned research platform.
In the thirty years since the last Moon flight, we have succeeded in creating a perfectly self-contained manned space program, in which the Shuttle goes up to save the Space Station (undermanned, incomplete, breaking down, filled with garbage, and dropping at a hundred meters per day), and the Space Station offers the Shuttle a mission and a destination. The Columbia accident has added a beautiful finishing symmetry - the Shuttle is now required to fly to the ISS, which will serve as an inspection station for the fragile thermal tiles, and a lifeboat in case something goes seriously wrong. This closed cycle is so perfect that the last NASA administrator even cancelled the only mission in which there was a compelling need for a manned space flight - the Hubble telescope repair and upgrade - on the grounds that it would be too dangerous to fly the Shuttle away from the ISS, thereby detaching the program from its last connection to reason and leaving it free to float off into its current absurdist theater of backflips, gap fillers, Canadarms and heroic expeditions to the bottom of the spacecraft.
At 900 MHz, a directional antenna the size of a paperback book might have a gain of ~6dBi. To get the necessary 30 dBi I think it would take a dish several meters in diameter. I don't know how to do this calculation, but my intuition suggests that you'll need a few hundred square wavelengths (a few hundred square feet of collector area at 900 MHz or a ~3+ meter diameter dish) to have a gain of ~1000 or 30dB.
Chris
Free Space Loss applies only in free space. Over a Florida swamp, the radio signals reflect off the ground and interfere with each other. A better path loss calculation would be to use COST-231/Hata rural. This model is for 500--2000 MHz so the 900 MHz ISM should be well represented. Florida fits the Hata "rural" definition. One parameter left out is the receiver antenna height --- I'll use 1 meter.
PathLoss = 46.3 + 33.9 log10(f) - 13.82log10(hb) - ((1.1*log10(f) -0.7)hr - (1.56log10(f)-0.8)) + (44.9 - 6.55log10(hb))log10(d)
d = 18 miles = 29 km
hb = 850 feet = 259 meters (base-station height)
hr = 1 meter (receiver height)
f = 912 MHz
PathLoss = 46.3 + 33.9 * log10(912) - 13.82*log10(259) - ((1.1*log10(912) -0.7) - (1.56*log10(912)-0.8)) + (44.9 - 6.55*log10(259))*log10(29)
PathLoss = 157 db
I think they are missing at least 35 dB and the demonstration is bogus.
Chris
instead of sorting by sender do [from:ralph] instead of sorting by subject search all threadlist views are already sorted by date Gmail is just different. After getting used to it, I found it both different and better! Chris