I have mixed reactions to TFA and what it discusses. I am reasonably good at multitasking: I can hold a conversation with someone while typing email at pretty much full speed and do a good job of both if the conversation isn't particularly important. (replying in detail to "Did you get those boards ordered?" is manageable, while replying in any detail at all to "what sort of filtering do we need on the output?" means I'm not going to be doing anything else for the next ten minutes.) One thing I did notice: a couple years ago I was in a serious car crash and now have a lot of memory problems. I can't recognize faces correctly sometimes, and there are specific classes of words that I have an exceptionally difficult time remembering, for instance. As a result I've had to learn to concentrate much, much more carefully than I used to, and I've lost a lot of my ability to do true multiprocessing: I have to consciously time-slice, and deal with interruptions carefully lest I forget where I was in what I was doing. I seem to be as productive as I used to be, but I think it's mostly because I'm concentrating a lot more intensely. Now, I get more done on fewer things, but overall it's about the same amount of total progress.
There are lots of DIY 'scope kits out there, many that are purely software and rely on your soundcard's digitizer. xoscope is one for linux.
Multimeter. The $3 ones from Harbor Freight are okay, frighteningly enough, but if you get a cheap Craftsman one they're reasonable. I think it's really important because I can practically guarantee you won't put resistors back where they belong if you have to read the color codes, but you will if you can just measure them.
Eventually it's nice to get a bench multimeter and some banana plug to clip/grabber-type leads for it. You can get old HP 3466 bench multimeters off ebay for only somewhat more than new handheld multimeters, and they sure are nice. (I used to build them: reasonably high-quality internals.) It's nice to find a multimeter that can measure more than an amp DC. It's even nicer if you don't have to disassemble it to get to the fuse that'll invariably blow when you somehow manage to put 15A through the meter.
ebay scope probes. I got two 500mhz probes that match my scope for $30 each. (way overkill for most scopes, but I have a nice scope.)
I forgot in my other post in this thread to mention allelectronics.com -- not a great cross-section of material but it's hard to beat the price, especially on proto boards.
jameco.com and digikey.com both sell resistor, capacitor, and transistor assortments, where you get a bag that has 1000 or so components of various values. Sometimes you can even get them in nice individually-labelled drawer sets. It's much more convenient than trying to buy them on your own. here's an example of a jameco assortment. yeah, that's a bit expensive, but believe me you will appreciate it once you've tried buying things in small quantities. It's harder to justify kits of capacitors since you don't know what type you're going to need.
Ask yourself what you want to learn. Radio stuff is different than analog stuff, is different than digital/interface stuff, is (somewhat) different than power stuff. If you like digital, an assortment of 74-series chips might be worthwhile.
IMHO, even though I work for the company that invented the 741, and we use the curve tracer that Bob Widlar used to characterize it, it's a pretty obsolete item. There are so many good opamps out there, that do a fabulous job for the same price.
For transistors I'd recommend a bunch of 2n2222's. They'll get you the hang of what works and what doesn't. FET's are better than transistors: they work the way you think transistors should. Any IRF will work well. Snag is: if you touch the gate lead, the one that controls whether the FET is on or off, chances are you'll fry it from your body's built-up voltage. Treat them very carefully: only work with them when your body's grounded. Same goes with most digital IC's.
Parent's right: you need power supplies. You can't do anything without them and batteries just won't cut it. Find some old AT-style supplies. You can use an ATX but you have to jigger it to get it to run: it won't just run by itself (in my experience) so you have to jumper across some wires so it thinks it's driving a load. That'll give you +12 and +5 volts. If you need some other voltage buy some LM338 adjustable regulators and some 47 uF electrolytic caps. You put 12v into the LM338 and add a variable resistor and a cap across the output and you can get anything from about 1 volt up to about 10 volts on a 12v supply. It's a cheap way to make a reasonable adjustable source. If you're going to be trying to get 4 amps out of it you'll need a heatsink.
It's nice to get a grab bag of LED's and diodes: sometimes they come in useful. Always put a current-limit resistor in series with an LED. You'll never go wrong with a 1K resistor soldered to one leg of the LED: that way you nearly can't fry it.
Read hack-a-day and see what other people are doing. Check out back issues of nuts-n-volts magazine at a local library. Read the Forrest Mims engineer notebooks. Look at places like epanorama.net or web-ee.com and see what they offer. There is an overwhelming amount of material free for the taking.
Well, the research I've seen indicates that high-school driver education classes get more kids on the road sooner, when they're just not ready -- which your experience basically reflects. The problem isn't uneducated drivers, the problem is young drivers. This is an example of my orignal thesis: if you're convinced the problem is 'not educated enough' you just keep jamming more education in there. If the actual problem is 'too young' you're not solving the problem, so the only way adding more education would fix it is if it took so long that the 'too young' problem solved itself.
As other people have said, one issue is that you might cause a bigger earthquake/volcano than you intended. Maybe there was a lot more stress built up than you figured there was. (I live in an area where, in the 1960's, the DoD had the bright idea of making tens of tons of nerve gas and then pumping it into a 5000 meter deep well to get rid of it, which lubricated fault lines that nobody knew were there and caused earthquakes that resulted in structural damage.) Another is, unfortunately, liability. If an earthquake happens, well, it's nobody's fault. But if pumping water into a hot area causes an earthquake, lawsuits will follow, even if the earthquake is (or may be) smaller than it would've been if it'd happend 50 years later with all that extra accumulated energy. Never underestimate liability as a motivational force.
>but I assure you a lot more would if there were a rumor that "studies had proven"
You'd be surprised. New Scientist Magazine just had a series of articles on this general subject last week. They said that "studies had proven" that a large group of people, approaching a majority, didn't actually care what studies had proven unless the result agreed with what they'd already decided. Studies have shown (although not 'proved') that abstinence-only sex education results in higher rates of pregnancy and STD's, or that high-school-taught driver's-ed courses result in higher rates of teen accidents, for instance. Yet both those programs are still very popular.
It's easy to find situations where people think "well, if this isn't working we just need to do it MORE" because they believe there's a causative relationship where there isn't one. I'd argue many of the largest movements in religion and politics are examples of this. People aren't rational, and if you show them science that contradicts their beliefs, most of them will just get mad at you rather than changing their beliefs.
I have no statistics to support this, but if you're driving a manual you're a lot less likely to start something that involves your hands and attention, than if you're driving an automatic. My ex-gf would routinely put on her makeup with her right hand while driving with her left hand on her way to work, use her right hand to hold her coffee cup or cellphone while she talked, in her automatic car. When she had to drive mine she complained that she couldn't do those things because she kept having to 'play with the stupid gearshift' and I felt that made the world a little tiny bit safer.
My brother had one of the first Darwin Fish on his car, because I found it in a catalog when they were brand-new. (Yeah, this was a while ago.) I had to buy him new ones by the bucketload because people kept chipping them off his car -- not to have, just to remove, because they'd leave them in stomped-on flinders behind the car. Luckily his rustbucket didn't mind getting stuff scraped off it repeatedly. He went through about two dozen before he got a better car and stopped putting stickers on it.
Around where I live, it's the "Respect Life" special license plate, because it's usually on a minivan with five kids in the back and the woman who is driving it is turned around facing backwards in her seat, screaming and hitting one of them kids, while wobbling down the street. I kid you not: I've seen that exact scenario half a dozen times, both when on my bike and when driving. My reaction is always to get off the road as soon as possible until they've gone by or gone into a ditch.
See, there's a problem lurking here: people are heterogeneous. Older people -- by which I mean those that have jobs and careers -- tend to listen and buy albums across a broad genre. Younger people tend to want to all listen to the same song, RIGHT NOW, and are no longer interested in it two months later. The latter group are what drive pop superstars and record companies to make millions, and are also the least likely to have either the money to buy everything they want, or the willingness to buy something that they know, on some level, they're going to be tired of in six weeks. So the question becomes: which demographic does the recording industry want to piss off more? Alas for us listen-and-purchase types, I think we represent a much lower profit margin than the kiddies who all want the latest top-10 songs each week.
Me too. Last week, a coworker's ViewSonic LCD monitor suddenly stopped working. I opened it up and all the electrolytics in the power supply (obviously a separately-sourced component) looked preggers: the top where the '+' is stamped (not polarity but for toughness) was pooched out. They say CapXon on the side. I replaced them all with nice Muratas and now the monitor works beautifully. That was Tuesday. Thursday my Dell Inspiron blew up -- flames, loud zapping arcing sound. Since it's still under warranty I didn't open the PS, but looking through the metal shielding, I could see a vaporized electrolytic. Today one of the main power amplifiers on our Eagle semiconductor test system, a $700k machine, failed. Guess what? vaporized electrolytic caps. AAAAAAND I'm in the process of rebuilding a pile of old Hewlett Packard/Agilent 3455 digital voltmeters because they're reading all scuzzy and intermittently from crappy electrolytics in the power supply section. That's just the last two weeks.
I do understand what you're driving at. I'd just go further. There *are* scarce resources: osmium, iridium, gallium, are becoming increasingly difficult to find. But they're not being destroyed, just redistributed in a diffuse form such that they become expensive. Oil/coal/natural gas *are* being destroyed, turned into other chemicals. They're still able to be reclaimed but then you're fundamentally screwed because in order to reclaim/recreate them you have to spend more than the energy you got from destroying them in the first place, which was the whole point of destroying them -- so, once burned, they have a net value of less than zero. But what it all comes down to in the end is the energy it takes to turn X into the more desirable Y. That, in turn, comes down to nuclear power, whether from the fusion bomb we call the Sun and the effect of its light and heat on Earth, or from heat or uranium we extract from the Earth. I think that's the fundamentally limiting factor for any/everything humans do, and we just haven't realized it yet because we're still coasting on cheap energy.
>First, why does the U.S. Constitution apply to foreign nationals captured and held in places that are not the U.S.?
It doesn't. It limits what the US Government can do, here or anywhere else, just as it always has. The location is irrelevant: all that matters is that the US Government only has powers that the Constitution specifically grants it, and holding people indefinitely without charges are not among those powers.
>Second, will Al Qaeda reciprocate?
Dunno. It's completely irrelevant. Robbers don't operate under the law: that doesn't mean that we get to shoot people who we think might be robbers.
>Also, how do you fight a war under rules that were designed for domestic law enforcement?
According to laws? If the laws need to be changed, here's an amazingly revolutionary idea: you CHANGE THEM. You don't just do whatever it is you want and wave your hands and say "well, we had to!" because that's not law, that's dictatorship.
>Scientists are the worst examples of group-think.
Science is in a weird position with respect to belief and questioning: it advances precisely because lots of people do research, that leads to wide-ranging theories, that other people use, so it is iterative and you necessarily rely on other people's work when you do yours. But at the same time, good science requires openness to change, that you be willing at any time to discard all the previous work. It requires filtering, so you can tell which pieces of evidence are wrong, and which pieces indicate that your framework of reasoning is wrong. So, a good scientist should be exactly the opposite of the sort of person that upsets you, but that's exactly what establishes that person as a good scientist. Most of the time, people aren't able to make these sorts of visionary leaps. I don't think it's scientists you're upset about -- I think it's human cognitive processes, and it's just more obvious in science because falsifiability is much more cut-and-dried than it is in many other fields.
I agree with most of your post, except the steel part. We have a *lot* of iron. It's the second most common metal after aluminum, and constitutes 5% of the upper crust of the earth. If we include the core of the earth, the amount of iron the earth contains is close to the amount of silicon. We will never run out of oxygen, silicon, aluminum, or iron, because we can't remove them from the earth in sufficient quantity, given the energy requirements. Iron might become expensive at some point, but it'll always be cheaper than silicon because it takes less energy to purify/reduce to a useful form.
My dad saw some of those pigeons doing their thing at a World's Fair just after WWII. He said they were watching a screen and pecking buttons to keep the reticle mark centered on a target and they did a very good job of it. His understanding was that the project was cancelled because it cost too much to include a camera and sufficiently durable electronics (all tube-based) in a single-use vehicle; it was cheaper to just make a bunch of bombs and drop them all.
>Yes it won't run out for ages, probably not in our lifetime. I wouldn't say the same for the chances of being able to fill up at your local service station though.
My coworker did some research on this over the last week, using data from the Department of Energy website. The stuff he printed out says, pretty clearly, that if we continue using oil at the same rate we are currently using it -- that is, not increasing usage -- the United States would use up its entire domestic supply in three years, and the world would use up its entire available supply in 38 years. Note this is not the amount of proven crude oil: this is the amount of oil extractable from crude oil, oil shale, and currently-existing technology for oil extraction from coal. That's *everything*, all the oil there is, and it'll be gone in under 40 years.
I'm trying to find a mistake in the Department of Energy's numbers, but haven't yet.
I kind of figured that's what you meant, but plenty of people DO use the clutch plate as a braking surface, especially if they fancy themselves high-performance drivers. That kind of behavior is penny wise and pound foolish.
That's awesome. If you do a webpage of the build I'd love to see it. Those are handsome, rocking cars.
The Cobra with a roughly 5 liter engine is a very, very fast car. Admittedly, that's an enormous engine, but it beats the 7 liter engines as far as mileage goes, especially if it's a modern, fuel-injected and somewhat optimized engine.
I ride my bike to work as often as possible (it's 100 km round trip so only a couple times a week.) What I'm building will be a car for fun.
while your math looks good, I question your assumptions somewhat. My first car weighed 800kg. I live in Colorado and have never gone 70mph up a 15% grade, mostly because the only roads I know of that have a speed limit of over 55mph have a max 8% grade. Most of the 10%+ grade stuff is dirt, and the few that are paved are for short segments in hairpin turns. To sum up, if you're willing to stick to the speed limit, you probably don't need anywhere near 60hp, and if you're willing to accept going somewhat more slowly, like people in the still-very-popular enormous bus-like recreational vehicles clearly are, you can use *far* less horsepower.
My dad built a Super7, and I've looked at the Caterhams. Those are really nice: they're fast, handle pretty well, and are lots of fun. There are some downsides. It's somewhat hard to find people to repair them because they're custom, and you might not have time to do the work yourself. You find yourself missing amenities like a roof, a decent heater/defroster, windows that actually seal. They don't do great in the snow or hauling groceries. Plus they don't (that I know of) have any recourse for ABS brakes, airbags, or side-impact protection, if those are important to you. The fundamental idea, though, of building a really lightweight car with a small engine and getting great performance *and* good gas mileage, is awesome. Any lightweight car handles like a champ. I had a Datsun 1200, that I could lift the back end off the ground and turn it by hand (with some serious grunting, mind you) and it handled like a go-cart, just phenomenally fast and stuck to the road. Plus it got like 45 mpg out of that little 1 liter engine. I'd like to build one of these because it actually has a roof and a windshield and heaters and stuff, but like the Caterham it's a welded-tubing, very lightweight frame with a fair-sized engine transplanted in. My girlfriend and I are starting on a Cobra with a Mustang drivetrain, that'll get better mileage than a Mustang and be a *lot* more fun. And, hey, why not build it yourself?
While I think your list is good, I disagree with part of "don't use your brakes" for the simple reason that it takes me 30 minutes and $50 to replace the brakes on my car, but more like 2 days of hard work and $200 -- or more likely I'll have it done, not have my car for a day, and pay $350. *Anticipating* when traffic is likely to slow down and coasting, so I don't have to shift down and absorb forward momentum into the lining of the clutch plate, is a good thing. But unless you're racing, use the engine as a brake but not the clutch.
>OK, I know station wagons aren't exactly considered chic in the US,
Totally depends on the demographic. In Colorado, Subarus are the third-best-selling cars (after Honda and Toyota) and they're practically all "hatchbacks" which are stationwagons by another name. They're what the hip bike racers and snowboarders use, and they're aggressively marketed in outdoor and recreation lifestyle magazines. When I talk to friends on the east coast about my car they say, with a bit of disdain, "oh, I wouldn't want a STATION WAGON" but locally people say "yeah, I'd love one of those little Subarus." They've become regionally hip. (I enjoy passing SUV's uphill on dirt roads while towing a trailer full of more stuff than the SUV could hold -- while getting twice their gas mileage.)
People buy these online, sight-unseen -- they're basically very fancy dovetail jigs. They receive them and hey, presto, aren't allowed to resell something they've bought because the seller says so? That's bogus.
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I have mixed reactions to TFA and what it discusses. I am reasonably good at multitasking: I can hold a conversation with someone while typing email at pretty much full speed and do a good job of both if the conversation isn't particularly important. (replying in detail to "Did you get those boards ordered?" is manageable, while replying in any detail at all to "what sort of filtering do we need on the output?" means I'm not going to be doing anything else for the next ten minutes.)
One thing I did notice: a couple years ago I was in a serious car crash and now have a lot of memory problems. I can't recognize faces correctly sometimes, and there are specific classes of words that I have an exceptionally difficult time remembering, for instance. As a result I've had to learn to concentrate much, much more carefully than I used to, and I've lost a lot of my ability to do true multiprocessing: I have to consciously time-slice, and deal with interruptions carefully lest I forget where I was in what I was doing. I seem to be as productive as I used to be, but I think it's mostly because I'm concentrating a lot more intensely. Now, I get more done on fewer things, but overall it's about the same amount of total progress.
There are lots of DIY 'scope kits out there, many that are purely software and rely on your soundcard's digitizer.
xoscope is one for linux.
Multimeter. The $3 ones from Harbor Freight are okay, frighteningly enough, but if you get a cheap Craftsman one they're reasonable. I think it's really important because I can practically guarantee you won't put resistors back where they belong if you have to read the color codes, but you will if you can just measure them.
Eventually it's nice to get a bench multimeter and some banana plug to clip/grabber-type leads for it. You can get old HP 3466 bench multimeters off ebay for only somewhat more than new handheld multimeters, and they sure are nice. (I used to build them: reasonably high-quality internals.) It's nice to find a multimeter that can measure more than an amp DC. It's even nicer if you don't have to disassemble it to get to the fuse that'll invariably blow when you somehow manage to put 15A through the meter.
ebay scope probes. I got two 500mhz probes that match my scope for $30 each. (way overkill for most scopes, but I have a nice scope.)
I forgot in my other post in this thread to mention allelectronics.com -- not a great cross-section of material but it's hard to beat the price, especially on proto boards.
jameco.com and digikey.com both sell resistor, capacitor, and transistor assortments, where you get a bag that has 1000 or so components of various values. Sometimes you can even get them in nice individually-labelled drawer sets. It's much more convenient than trying to buy them on your own.
here's an example of a jameco assortment. yeah, that's a bit expensive, but believe me you will appreciate it once you've tried buying things in small quantities.
It's harder to justify kits of capacitors since you don't know what type you're going to need.
Ask yourself what you want to learn. Radio stuff is different than analog stuff, is different than digital/interface stuff, is (somewhat) different than power stuff. If you like digital, an assortment of 74-series chips might be worthwhile.
IMHO, even though I work for the company that invented the 741, and we use the curve tracer that Bob Widlar used to characterize it, it's a pretty obsolete item. There are so many good opamps out there, that do a fabulous job for the same price.
For transistors I'd recommend a bunch of 2n2222's. They'll get you the hang of what works and what doesn't. FET's are better than transistors: they work the way you think transistors should. Any IRF will work well. Snag is: if you touch the gate lead, the one that controls whether the FET is on or off, chances are you'll fry it from your body's built-up voltage. Treat them very carefully: only work with them when your body's grounded. Same goes with most digital IC's.
Parent's right: you need power supplies. You can't do anything without them and batteries just won't cut it.
Find some old AT-style supplies. You can use an ATX but you have to jigger it to get it to run: it won't just run by itself (in my experience) so you have to jumper across some wires so it thinks it's driving a load. That'll give you +12 and +5 volts. If you need some other voltage buy some LM338 adjustable regulators and some 47 uF electrolytic caps. You put 12v into the LM338 and add a variable resistor and a cap across the output and you can get anything from about 1 volt up to about 10 volts on a 12v supply. It's a cheap way to make a reasonable adjustable source. If you're going to be trying to get 4 amps out of it you'll need a heatsink.
It's nice to get a grab bag of LED's and diodes: sometimes they come in useful. Always put a current-limit resistor in series with an LED. You'll never go wrong with a 1K resistor soldered to one leg of the LED: that way you nearly can't fry it.
Read hack-a-day and see what other people are doing. Check out back issues of nuts-n-volts magazine at a local library. Read the Forrest Mims engineer notebooks. Look at places like epanorama.net or web-ee.com and see what they offer. There is an overwhelming amount of material free for the taking.
Well, the research I've seen indicates that high-school driver education classes get more kids on the road sooner, when they're just not ready -- which your experience basically reflects. The problem isn't uneducated drivers, the problem is young drivers. This is an example of my orignal thesis: if you're convinced the problem is 'not educated enough' you just keep jamming more education in there. If the actual problem is 'too young' you're not solving the problem, so the only way adding more education would fix it is if it took so long that the 'too young' problem solved itself.
As other people have said, one issue is that you might cause a bigger earthquake/volcano than you intended. Maybe there was a lot more stress built up than you figured there was. (I live in an area where, in the 1960's, the DoD had the bright idea of making tens of tons of nerve gas and then pumping it into a 5000 meter deep well to get rid of it, which lubricated fault lines that nobody knew were there and caused earthquakes that resulted in structural damage.)
Another is, unfortunately, liability. If an earthquake happens, well, it's nobody's fault. But if pumping water into a hot area causes an earthquake, lawsuits will follow, even if the earthquake is (or may be) smaller than it would've been if it'd happend 50 years later with all that extra accumulated energy. Never underestimate liability as a motivational force.
>but I assure you a lot more would if there were a rumor that "studies had proven"
You'd be surprised. New Scientist Magazine just had a series of articles on this general subject last week. They said that "studies had proven" that a large group of people, approaching a majority, didn't actually care what studies had proven unless the result agreed with what they'd already decided. Studies have shown (although not 'proved') that abstinence-only sex education results in higher rates of pregnancy and STD's, or that high-school-taught driver's-ed courses result in higher rates of teen accidents, for instance. Yet both those programs are still very popular.
It's easy to find situations where people think "well, if this isn't working we just need to do it MORE" because they believe there's a causative relationship where there isn't one. I'd argue many of the largest movements in religion and politics are examples of this. People aren't rational, and if you show them science that contradicts their beliefs, most of them will just get mad at you rather than changing their beliefs.
I have no statistics to support this, but if you're driving a manual you're a lot less likely to start something that involves your hands and attention, than if you're driving an automatic. My ex-gf would routinely put on her makeup with her right hand while driving with her left hand on her way to work, use her right hand to hold her coffee cup or cellphone while she talked, in her automatic car. When she had to drive mine she complained that she couldn't do those things because she kept having to 'play with the stupid gearshift' and I felt that made the world a little tiny bit safer.
My brother had one of the first Darwin Fish on his car, because I found it in a catalog when they were brand-new. (Yeah, this was a while ago.) I had to buy him new ones by the bucketload because people kept chipping them off his car -- not to have, just to remove, because they'd leave them in stomped-on flinders behind the car. Luckily his rustbucket didn't mind getting stuff scraped off it repeatedly. He went through about two dozen before he got a better car and stopped putting stickers on it.
Around where I live, it's the "Respect Life" special license plate, because it's usually on a minivan with five kids in the back and the woman who is driving it is turned around facing backwards in her seat, screaming and hitting one of them kids, while wobbling down the street.
I kid you not: I've seen that exact scenario half a dozen times, both when on my bike and when driving. My reaction is always to get off the road as soon as possible until they've gone by or gone into a ditch.
See, there's a problem lurking here: people are heterogeneous. Older people -- by which I mean those that have jobs and careers -- tend to listen and buy albums across a broad genre. Younger people tend to want to all listen to the same song, RIGHT NOW, and are no longer interested in it two months later. The latter group are what drive pop superstars and record companies to make millions, and are also the least likely to have either the money to buy everything they want, or the willingness to buy something that they know, on some level, they're going to be tired of in six weeks.
So the question becomes: which demographic does the recording industry want to piss off more? Alas for us listen-and-purchase types, I think we represent a much lower profit margin than the kiddies who all want the latest top-10 songs each week.
Me too.
Last week, a coworker's ViewSonic LCD monitor suddenly stopped working. I opened it up and all the electrolytics in the power supply (obviously a separately-sourced component) looked preggers: the top where the '+' is stamped (not polarity but for toughness) was pooched out. They say CapXon on the side. I replaced them all with nice Muratas and now the monitor works beautifully. That was Tuesday.
Thursday my Dell Inspiron blew up -- flames, loud zapping arcing sound. Since it's still under warranty I didn't open the PS, but looking through the metal shielding, I could see a vaporized electrolytic.
Today one of the main power amplifiers on our Eagle semiconductor test system, a $700k machine, failed. Guess what? vaporized electrolytic caps.
AAAAAAND I'm in the process of rebuilding a pile of old Hewlett Packard/Agilent 3455 digital voltmeters because they're reading all scuzzy and intermittently from crappy electrolytics in the power supply section.
That's just the last two weeks.
Where the suits are slim, flexible, with lots of gold trim, and sport snazzy built-in guns.
And the suits for women are, inexplicably, 80% transparent.
I do understand what you're driving at. I'd just go further. There *are* scarce resources: osmium, iridium, gallium, are becoming increasingly difficult to find. But they're not being destroyed, just redistributed in a diffuse form such that they become expensive.
Oil/coal/natural gas *are* being destroyed, turned into other chemicals. They're still able to be reclaimed but then you're fundamentally screwed because in order to reclaim/recreate them you have to spend more than the energy you got from destroying them in the first place, which was the whole point of destroying them -- so, once burned, they have a net value of less than zero.
But what it all comes down to in the end is the energy it takes to turn X into the more desirable Y. That, in turn, comes down to nuclear power, whether from the fusion bomb we call the Sun and the effect of its light and heat on Earth, or from heat or uranium we extract from the Earth. I think that's the fundamentally limiting factor for any/everything humans do, and we just haven't realized it yet because we're still coasting on cheap energy.
I'll give this a try:
>First, why does the U.S. Constitution apply to foreign nationals captured and held in places that are not the U.S.?
It doesn't. It limits what the US Government can do, here or anywhere else, just as it always has. The location is irrelevant: all that matters is that the US Government only has powers that the Constitution specifically grants it, and holding people indefinitely without charges are not among those powers.
>Second, will Al Qaeda reciprocate?
Dunno. It's completely irrelevant. Robbers don't operate under the law: that doesn't mean that we get to shoot people who we think might be robbers.
>Also, how do you fight a war under rules that were designed for domestic law enforcement?
According to laws? If the laws need to be changed, here's an amazingly revolutionary idea: you CHANGE THEM. You don't just do whatever it is you want and wave your hands and say "well, we had to!" because that's not law, that's dictatorship.
>Scientists are the worst examples of group-think.
Science is in a weird position with respect to belief and questioning: it advances precisely because lots of people do research, that leads to wide-ranging theories, that other people use, so it is iterative and you necessarily rely on other people's work when you do yours. But at the same time, good science requires openness to change, that you be willing at any time to discard all the previous work. It requires filtering, so you can tell which pieces of evidence are wrong, and which pieces indicate that your framework of reasoning is wrong.
So, a good scientist should be exactly the opposite of the sort of person that upsets you, but that's exactly what establishes that person as a good scientist. Most of the time, people aren't able to make these sorts of visionary leaps.
I don't think it's scientists you're upset about -- I think it's human cognitive processes, and it's just more obvious in science because falsifiability is much more cut-and-dried than it is in many other fields.
I agree with most of your post, except the steel part. We have a *lot* of iron. It's the second most common metal after aluminum, and constitutes 5% of the upper crust of the earth. If we include the core of the earth, the amount of iron the earth contains is close to the amount of silicon. We will never run out of oxygen, silicon, aluminum, or iron, because we can't remove them from the earth in sufficient quantity, given the energy requirements. Iron might become expensive at some point, but it'll always be cheaper than silicon because it takes less energy to purify/reduce to a useful form.
My dad saw some of those pigeons doing their thing at a World's Fair just after WWII. He said they were watching a screen and pecking buttons to keep the reticle mark centered on a target and they did a very good job of it. His understanding was that the project was cancelled because it cost too much to include a camera and sufficiently durable electronics (all tube-based) in a single-use vehicle; it was cheaper to just make a bunch of bombs and drop them all.
>Yes it won't run out for ages, probably not in our lifetime. I wouldn't say the same for the chances of being able to fill up at your local service station though.
My coworker did some research on this over the last week, using data from the Department of Energy website. The stuff he printed out says, pretty clearly, that if we continue using oil at the same rate we are currently using it -- that is, not increasing usage -- the United States would use up its entire domestic supply in three years, and the world would use up its entire available supply in 38 years. Note this is not the amount of proven crude oil: this is the amount of oil extractable from crude oil, oil shale, and currently-existing technology for oil extraction from coal. That's *everything*, all the oil there is, and it'll be gone in under 40 years.
I'm trying to find a mistake in the Department of Energy's numbers, but haven't yet.
I kind of figured that's what you meant, but plenty of people DO use the clutch plate as a braking surface, especially if they fancy themselves high-performance drivers. That kind of behavior is penny wise and pound foolish.
That's awesome. If you do a webpage of the build I'd love to see it. Those are handsome, rocking cars.
The Cobra with a roughly 5 liter engine is a very, very fast car. Admittedly, that's an enormous engine, but it beats the 7 liter engines as far as mileage goes, especially if it's a modern, fuel-injected and somewhat optimized engine.
I ride my bike to work as often as possible (it's 100 km round trip so only a couple times a week.) What I'm building will be a car for fun.
while your math looks good, I question your assumptions somewhat. My first car weighed 800kg. I live in Colorado and have never gone 70mph up a 15% grade, mostly because the only roads I know of that have a speed limit of over 55mph have a max 8% grade. Most of the 10%+ grade stuff is dirt, and the few that are paved are for short segments in hairpin turns.
To sum up, if you're willing to stick to the speed limit, you probably don't need anywhere near 60hp, and if you're willing to accept going somewhat more slowly, like people in the still-very-popular enormous bus-like recreational vehicles clearly are, you can use *far* less horsepower.
My dad built a Super7, and I've looked at the Caterhams. Those are really nice: they're fast, handle pretty well, and are lots of fun.
There are some downsides. It's somewhat hard to find people to repair them because they're custom, and you might not have time to do the work yourself. You find yourself missing amenities like a roof, a decent heater/defroster, windows that actually seal. They don't do great in the snow or hauling groceries. Plus they don't (that I know of) have any recourse for ABS brakes, airbags, or side-impact protection, if those are important to you.
The fundamental idea, though, of building a really lightweight car with a small engine and getting great performance *and* good gas mileage, is awesome. Any lightweight car handles like a champ. I had a Datsun 1200, that I could lift the back end off the ground and turn it by hand (with some serious grunting, mind you) and it handled like a go-cart, just phenomenally fast and stuck to the road. Plus it got like 45 mpg out of that little 1 liter engine.
I'd like to build one of these because it actually has a roof and a windshield and heaters and stuff, but like the Caterham it's a welded-tubing, very lightweight frame with a fair-sized engine transplanted in. My girlfriend and I are starting on a Cobra with a Mustang drivetrain, that'll get better mileage than a Mustang and be a *lot* more fun. And, hey, why not build it yourself?
While I think your list is good, I disagree with part of "don't use your brakes" for the simple reason that it takes me 30 minutes and $50 to replace the brakes on my car, but more like 2 days of hard work and $200 -- or more likely I'll have it done, not have my car for a day, and pay $350.
*Anticipating* when traffic is likely to slow down and coasting, so I don't have to shift down and absorb forward momentum into the lining of the clutch plate, is a good thing. But unless you're racing, use the engine as a brake but not the clutch.
>OK, I know station wagons aren't exactly considered chic in the US,
Totally depends on the demographic. In Colorado, Subarus are the third-best-selling cars (after Honda and Toyota) and they're practically all "hatchbacks" which are stationwagons by another name. They're what the hip bike racers and snowboarders use, and they're aggressively marketed in outdoor and recreation lifestyle magazines. When I talk to friends on the east coast about my car they say, with a bit of disdain, "oh, I wouldn't want a STATION WAGON" but locally people say "yeah, I'd love one of those little Subarus." They've become regionally hip.
(I enjoy passing SUV's uphill on dirt roads while towing a trailer full of more stuff than the SUV could hold -- while getting twice their gas mileage.)
People buy these online, sight-unseen -- they're basically very fancy dovetail jigs. They receive them and hey, presto, aren't allowed to resell something they've bought because the seller says so? That's bogus.