Agreed. The BMI is more like an empirical value than a solid metric. If something like this were to come about, I would not at all be surprised to see a more complex formula derived that would take things like body fat percentage, or torso, abdomen, and thigh girth measurements (compared in some proportion) and include them somehow into such an equation.
Sadly, the doctors will continue to niggle about the significance of each atrribute and they'll never reach a totally accepted standard on something like this, let alone a very hard time reaching one that can be generally accepted.
Bottom line, health is still not an exact science. What may be unhealthy in one individual might be fine in another. While there are general tendencies for something to be healthy or not, such things are not an absolute for all individuals
Well, that would make a rather nice positive (yet self-limiting) feedback loop. If the band sucks, the music stops (or at least gets quieter). You still need to get it going. Do you give the band a limited capacitive jumpstart to get the crowd going or do you wait until the crowd starts chanting and stomping their feet to get the show going?
IIRC, there is a project in a Japanese terminal to do something similar to this using piezoelectric pads. The idea was to capture this miniscule amount of energy to power the train departure/arrival display boards. More of a novelty than something with serious practicality.
But you forgot the part about locking into an unstoppable, repetitious playing of named songs at full volume through whatever audio outputs and speakers are available to it.
Don't forget about that wonderful screen. You got to cycle through some distasteful images with interlaced commentary for added effect. Goatse, perhaps as one?
The problem with coherent light (i.e. LASERs) is that you have to aim them directly at your target. With super high intensity LEDs, you just point in the general direction for the effect. All the range you need is probably 25 feet or less. Remember, this isn't supposed to be a tactical long-range weapon, but something to be used just outside the range of engaging in physical contact with the subject. I'll agree with you that something like this will eventually get folded into a recycled Discovery Channel show at some point if it is adopted.
The idea doesn't surprise me much. Having put together several machine vision systems with high intensity LED lighting, I know the effect that makes this work. The LEDs in the dome lights that I use are quite bright and they are configured only to come on when the camera is capturing an image, thus the LEDs produce a rather fast strobe light (15 - 30 times per second) effect. If you stare at the reflection dome for a moment, it can be quite dizzying.
The LED lights that I use are just as bright as a Xenon strobe, but being solid state, the on/off is _much_ crisper. A Xenon stobe's output graphed looks like a ramp or sawtooth wave, whereas the LEDs make a nearly perfect pulse/square wave. Something tells me it's that very sharp off-to-on AND on-to-off action that makes the difference.
Building off of this, since the players actually didn't have to play the game to get this overpayment, is it still considered winnings? The best analogy of what was going on here would be putting $1 into a standard change machine and it gives you $10 in change. Arguably, one could say that someone who took advantage of this was defrauding the owner of the change machine.
The real question here might be: this machine's primary function was to provide gambling entertainment, however the overpayment received was not in direct relation to gambling activity, does this still fall under this rule?
I'm certain that Ceasar's lawyers are busy working it up from this angle somehow.
Step 1: Player inserts $1
Step 2: Machine indicates the player has ten bets (i.e. $10)
Step 3: Player cashes out and recieves $10
Step 4: Go to step 1 and repeat until the player gets paranoid about being caught.
You see, the process really didn't involve any gambling at all, except being caught.
That in and of itself begs the question whether Ceasars had installed a gaming machine that wasn't compliant with whatever gaming administrative codes were in force. I wonder if the government agency that oversees gambling in Indiana ever wrote them a citation for this.
In the end, though, two wrongs still don't make a right.
You can have it both ways. The point was that you will get a bigger bang for your energy output by growing algae using the waste as a fertilizer rather than extracting methane alone...and you will suck up more CO2 doing so.
Coincidentally, anaerobic digestion also releases some small amount of CO2, but you are correct that using either/both technology remains carbon neutral, strictly in the process cycle anyway.
Wost case - police watch you and I live our BORING lives
And once in a while, something funny, embarassing, or otherwise destructive to one's social character mysteriously shows up on YouTube or a BBC comedy show take-off of "funny videos". Mind you that you can be on your utmost best behavior in public, and still be a hapless victim caught up in someone else's asshattery.
Yeah no one cares too much about what you do as long as it's legal, moral and ethical. But if it's at least mildly entertaining, it's marketable, regardless of whether it's legal, moral, or ethical to do so.
I think the problem that most people have is despite the police being held accountable to very high standards of integrity, police are people, too. Abuse, while rare, still happens because of this fact. Thinking of it in another way, many people consider themselves to be under the constant watch of God. The police are not God, nor can they fully act in a godly, devine, and omnipotent manner. Why try to move them closer (albeit in a very small step) to the empowerment of such that they are incapable of handling? (Okay, there's my crack at philosophy for the day...)
Police usually only act when they have a reasonable amount of proof that some illegal act is/has been committed. It's a precursor to "doing things about it."
It would be far more efficient to capture the hot air coming from them instead and using that in balloons or powering turbines. Besides, they produce an unending supply of that, whereas the supply of politicians themselves tends to be a bit more finite...sort of like the goose that lays golden eggs.
But the lake is still too cold to get an effective production rate of growth. Yes, algae does grow in Lake Michigan quite well, but the water temperature and depth usually keeps that well in check.
Maybe try Lake Erie. It gets much warmer, but also likes to freeze over in the winter.
Well, warm water will grow algae faster than the cold waters of Lake Superior. Lake Erie might be a better choice in that respect (but it freezes over most winters). Algae now also grows better in the great lakes, thanks to the zebra mussel and quagga mussel effect by clarifying the water and lowering the turbidity, allowing sunlight to penetrate deeper than ever before.
Polluted? With fertilizer run-off, human and animal waste perhaps. There's still some mercury from coal power plants, but the lakes (at least the water itself) are cleaner than ever before, thanks mostly to those aformentioned invasive species filtering the stuff out and locking it up in solid form on the bottom.
There are few bodies of surface water that remain in the world where the water can be essentially pumped through sand/charcoal filter beds, ozonated (to kill any remaining microbes) and then be used as drinking water that is actually safer than most well water sources. Virtually every medium/major city on the great lakes uses lake water for their municipal water systems.
A better bet is some cheap desert land that can be irrigated with saltwater, as there are types of algae that grow quite well in water with heavy salt concentrations.
The algae strings together the more desirable longer hydrocarbon chains, as well as concentrating them within the algae cells. Longer molecule chains usually mean a higher energy density. While you could just anaerobically digest the waste and produce methane (the shortest hydrocarbon chain), methane has a much lower energy density compared to biodiesel, not to mention that you would be handling a gas instead of a liquid. You also lose that bonus of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere with anaerobic digestion.
In crudest form, think of the algae as a solar power covnerter that utilizes nutrients in the waste to accelerate its production while removing CO2 from the surrounding air (after it is dissolved in the water).
Make that, "Young, high school aged adolescents are known to really dumb things occasionally."
From what I can tell, the offender is 15 years old. He probably hasn't completed his "introduction to becoming a criminal mastermind" electives yet.
Bottom line, it wasn't a very thought out, or methodically planned act, but rather a kid trying to grab attention/show control by repeatedly making threats with little thought about a strategy, much less getting caught.
Well, that's one idea that has been experimented with and holds some promise. That technology has been pretty much been running neck and neck with high pressure storage vessels. Each technology has its advantages and disadvantages, but neither has been chosen at this point, nor would it be hard to believe that both could be used to some extent if hydrogen saw widespread use. The means of generating and storing hydrogen are so numbered that one could easily do their doctorate thesis on the subject.
Not that I disagree with you that Hydrogen is probably a bad choice for vehicle fuel, there's a few things that are worth pointing out:
1. "A BOMB" Presumably you meant _A_ (as in singular) bomb, and not an atom bomb. Anything highly flammable can be confined and made to explode. Obviously, hydrogen is no different...but a pressurized tank is really no more likely to explode than a gasoline tank. As the hydrogen is released from a compromised vessel, it will burn vigorously, if it has been ignited, just like natural gas, propane and even gasoline. The one nice thing about hydrogen is that it is lighter than air, so if it does leak, it goes up into the sky and dissipates, unlike gasoline vapors, which hug the ground and will occasionally find an ignition source to flash back to the point of the leak.
2-5. Agreed
6. We move natural gas around in pipelines, the same could be done with hydrogen gas. However, it's that expense thing that comes into play. Since the cheapest way to produce hydrogen gas is from steam reformation from natural gas, it would be more economically advantageous to produce hydrogen at least regionally, if not on a smaller scale instead of transporting hydrogen long distances in pipelines.
7. Pretty much the same thing that happens to large propane tanks. If they catch fire, they can BLEVE (boiling liquied expanding vapor explosion). However, if the tanks are placed underground, the point of ignition for the leak would be enough of a distance away from the tank that this would not be a problem. Remember, hydrogen needs oxygen to burn, too.
8. Right now it is, anyway. Might be okay for city buses, perhaps.
9. Agreed
10. One rather well founded piece of speculation is that it will become a module of a system like many components currently in cars that is simply replaced or swapped out. Even master auto technicians don't crack open the case on a computerized engine control module to fix a faulty component on a board, they simply swap out the whole box, potentially sending the faulty unit back to the manufacturer. Why couldn't a similar principle apply here?
Also add 11 to your list that hydrogen is usually just an additional (and perhaps unnecessary) step in energy conversion, not an energy source in and of itself. Everything is solar powered, it's just a matter of how many steps of conversion happen between the point where the solar radiation reached earth and where someone puts it to practical use.
Okay, I've done the Slashdot thing. Countered some of your arguments, although I agree with your stance on the use of hydrogen in privately owned passenger cars. Heck, I even worked in a car analogy (sort of..). Ten reasons on electric cars or ethanol hybrids? Probably can't come up with ten, but the best is "the technology/infrastructure is just not quite there yet"...just the same as it is with hydrogen.
You might be forgetting the peak demand charge. If you work that into the equation ~$20 - $25 per kW at peak demand, or roughly $36,000 to $45,000 of their monthly bill, you start to get back down to $0.08kW-hr for energy costs. And don't forget this is a large non-interuptible customer, so they will pay premium rates because ComEd (or whoever there in East Central IL) can't take them offline on a hot day.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. The BMI is more like an empirical value than a solid metric. If something like this were to come about, I would not at all be surprised to see a more complex formula derived that would take things like body fat percentage, or torso, abdomen, and thigh girth measurements (compared in some proportion) and include them somehow into such an equation.
Sadly, the doctors will continue to niggle about the significance of each atrribute and they'll never reach a totally accepted standard on something like this, let alone a very hard time reaching one that can be generally accepted.
Bottom line, health is still not an exact science. What may be unhealthy in one individual might be fine in another. While there are general tendencies for something to be healthy or not, such things are not an absolute for all individuals
Yes, I saw where you were going with your comment.
FWIW, anyway, here's the equation:
English BMI Formula
BMI = ( Weight in Pounds / ( Height in inches ) x ( Height in inches ) ) x 703
Metric BMI Formula
BMI = ( Weight in Kilograms / ( Height in Meters ) x ( Height in Meters ) )
Well, that would make a rather nice positive (yet self-limiting) feedback loop. If the band sucks, the music stops (or at least gets quieter). You still need to get it going. Do you give the band a limited capacitive jumpstart to get the crowd going or do you wait until the crowd starts chanting and stomping their feet to get the show going?
IIRC, there is a project in a Japanese terminal to do something similar to this using piezoelectric pads. The idea was to capture this miniscule amount of energy to power the train departure/arrival display boards. More of a novelty than something with serious practicality.
The result might be similar to pissing on an electric fence
But you forgot the part about locking into an unstoppable, repetitious playing of named songs at full volume through whatever audio outputs and speakers are available to it.
Don't forget about that wonderful screen. You got to cycle through some distasteful images with interlaced commentary for added effect. Goatse, perhaps as one?
Finally a digital device that will go on an energy hunger strike if it doesn't like its connectivity situation.
So, would this make the iPhone the Gandhi of portable devices?
The problem with coherent light (i.e. LASERs) is that you have to aim them directly at your target. With super high intensity LEDs, you just point in the general direction for the effect. All the range you need is probably 25 feet or less. Remember, this isn't supposed to be a tactical long-range weapon, but something to be used just outside the range of engaging in physical contact with the subject. I'll agree with you that something like this will eventually get folded into a recycled Discovery Channel show at some point if it is adopted.
The idea doesn't surprise me much. Having put together several machine vision systems with high intensity LED lighting, I know the effect that makes this work. The LEDs in the dome lights that I use are quite bright and they are configured only to come on when the camera is capturing an image, thus the LEDs produce a rather fast strobe light (15 - 30 times per second) effect. If you stare at the reflection dome for a moment, it can be quite dizzying.
The LED lights that I use are just as bright as a Xenon strobe, but being solid state, the on/off is _much_ crisper. A Xenon stobe's output graphed looks like a ramp or sawtooth wave, whereas the LEDs make a nearly perfect pulse/square wave. Something tells me it's that very sharp off-to-on AND on-to-off action that makes the difference.
but the Casino must still pay out the winnings
Building off of this, since the players actually didn't have to play the game to get this overpayment, is it still considered winnings? The best analogy of what was going on here would be putting $1 into a standard change machine and it gives you $10 in change. Arguably, one could say that someone who took advantage of this was defrauding the owner of the change machine.
The real question here might be: this machine's primary function was to provide gambling entertainment, however the overpayment received was not in direct relation to gambling activity, does this still fall under this rule?
I'm certain that Ceasar's lawyers are busy working it up from this angle somehow.
Go back and RTFA a little closer.
Step 1: Player inserts $1
Step 2: Machine indicates the player has ten bets (i.e. $10)
Step 3: Player cashes out and recieves $10
Step 4: Go to step 1 and repeat until the player gets paranoid about being caught.
You see, the process really didn't involve any gambling at all, except being caught.
That in and of itself begs the question whether Ceasars had installed a gaming machine that wasn't compliant with whatever gaming administrative codes were in force. I wonder if the government agency that oversees gambling in Indiana ever wrote them a citation for this.
In the end, though, two wrongs still don't make a right.
You can have it both ways. The point was that you will get a bigger bang for your energy output by growing algae using the waste as a fertilizer rather than extracting methane alone...and you will suck up more CO2 doing so.
Coincidentally, anaerobic digestion also releases some small amount of CO2, but you are correct that using either/both technology remains carbon neutral, strictly in the process cycle anyway.
Sort of goes hand in hand with that saying, "it's only illegal if you get caught." 8-)
And once in a while, something funny, embarassing, or otherwise destructive to one's social character mysteriously shows up on YouTube or a BBC comedy show take-off of "funny videos". Mind you that you can be on your utmost best behavior in public, and still be a hapless victim caught up in someone else's asshattery.
Yeah no one cares too much about what you do as long as it's legal, moral and ethical. But if it's at least mildly entertaining, it's marketable, regardless of whether it's legal, moral, or ethical to do so.
I think the problem that most people have is despite the police being held accountable to very high standards of integrity, police are people, too. Abuse, while rare, still happens because of this fact. Thinking of it in another way, many people consider themselves to be under the constant watch of God. The police are not God, nor can they fully act in a godly, devine, and omnipotent manner. Why try to move them closer (albeit in a very small step) to the empowerment of such that they are incapable of handling? (Okay, there's my crack at philosophy for the day...)
Observation is a form of evidence collection.
Police usually only act when they have a reasonable amount of proof that some illegal act is/has been committed. It's a precursor to "doing things about it."
Yeah, for now.
It would be far more efficient to capture the hot air coming from them instead and using that in balloons or powering turbines. Besides, they produce an unending supply of that, whereas the supply of politicians themselves tends to be a bit more finite...sort of like the goose that lays golden eggs.
But the lake is still too cold to get an effective production rate of growth. Yes, algae does grow in Lake Michigan quite well, but the water temperature and depth usually keeps that well in check.
Maybe try Lake Erie. It gets much warmer, but also likes to freeze over in the winter.
Well, warm water will grow algae faster than the cold waters of Lake Superior. Lake Erie might be a better choice in that respect (but it freezes over most winters). Algae now also grows better in the great lakes, thanks to the zebra mussel and quagga mussel effect by clarifying the water and lowering the turbidity, allowing sunlight to penetrate deeper than ever before.
Polluted? With fertilizer run-off, human and animal waste perhaps. There's still some mercury from coal power plants, but the lakes (at least the water itself) are cleaner than ever before, thanks mostly to those aformentioned invasive species filtering the stuff out and locking it up in solid form on the bottom.
There are few bodies of surface water that remain in the world where the water can be essentially pumped through sand/charcoal filter beds, ozonated (to kill any remaining microbes) and then be used as drinking water that is actually safer than most well water sources. Virtually every medium/major city on the great lakes uses lake water for their municipal water systems.
A better bet is some cheap desert land that can be irrigated with saltwater, as there are types of algae that grow quite well in water with heavy salt concentrations.
The algae strings together the more desirable longer hydrocarbon chains, as well as concentrating them within the algae cells. Longer molecule chains usually mean a higher energy density. While you could just anaerobically digest the waste and produce methane (the shortest hydrocarbon chain), methane has a much lower energy density compared to biodiesel, not to mention that you would be handling a gas instead of a liquid. You also lose that bonus of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere with anaerobic digestion.
In crudest form, think of the algae as a solar power covnerter that utilizes nutrients in the waste to accelerate its production while removing CO2 from the surrounding air (after it is dissolved in the water).
Make that, "Young, high school aged adolescents are known to really dumb things occasionally."
From what I can tell, the offender is 15 years old. He probably hasn't completed his "introduction to becoming a criminal mastermind" electives yet.
Bottom line, it wasn't a very thought out, or methodically planned act, but rather a kid trying to grab attention/show control by repeatedly making threats with little thought about a strategy, much less getting caught.
Well, that's one idea that has been experimented with and holds some promise. That technology has been pretty much been running neck and neck with high pressure storage vessels. Each technology has its advantages and disadvantages, but neither has been chosen at this point, nor would it be hard to believe that both could be used to some extent if hydrogen saw widespread use. The means of generating and storing hydrogen are so numbered that one could easily do their doctorate thesis on the subject.
Not that I disagree with you that Hydrogen is probably a bad choice for vehicle fuel, there's a few things that are worth pointing out:
1. "A BOMB" Presumably you meant _A_ (as in singular) bomb, and not an atom bomb. Anything highly flammable can be confined and made to explode. Obviously, hydrogen is no different...but a pressurized tank is really no more likely to explode than a gasoline tank. As the hydrogen is released from a compromised vessel, it will burn vigorously, if it has been ignited, just like natural gas, propane and even gasoline. The one nice thing about hydrogen is that it is lighter than air, so if it does leak, it goes up into the sky and dissipates, unlike gasoline vapors, which hug the ground and will occasionally find an ignition source to flash back to the point of the leak.
2-5. Agreed
6. We move natural gas around in pipelines, the same could be done with hydrogen gas. However, it's that expense thing that comes into play. Since the cheapest way to produce hydrogen gas is from steam reformation from natural gas, it would be more economically advantageous to produce hydrogen at least regionally, if not on a smaller scale instead of transporting hydrogen long distances in pipelines.
7. Pretty much the same thing that happens to large propane tanks. If they catch fire, they can BLEVE (boiling liquied expanding vapor explosion). However, if the tanks are placed underground, the point of ignition for the leak would be enough of a distance away from the tank that this would not be a problem. Remember, hydrogen needs oxygen to burn, too.
8. Right now it is, anyway. Might be okay for city buses, perhaps.
9. Agreed
10. One rather well founded piece of speculation is that it will become a module of a system like many components currently in cars that is simply replaced or swapped out. Even master auto technicians don't crack open the case on a computerized engine control module to fix a faulty component on a board, they simply swap out the whole box, potentially sending the faulty unit back to the manufacturer. Why couldn't a similar principle apply here?
Also add 11 to your list that hydrogen is usually just an additional (and perhaps unnecessary) step in energy conversion, not an energy source in and of itself. Everything is solar powered, it's just a matter of how many steps of conversion happen between the point where the solar radiation reached earth and where someone puts it to practical use.
Okay, I've done the Slashdot thing. Countered some of your arguments, although I agree with your stance on the use of hydrogen in privately owned passenger cars. Heck, I even worked in a car analogy (sort of..). Ten reasons on electric cars or ethanol hybrids? Probably can't come up with ten, but the best is "the technology/infrastructure is just not quite there yet"...just the same as it is with hydrogen.
You might be forgetting the peak demand charge. If you work that into the equation ~$20 - $25 per kW at peak demand, or roughly $36,000 to $45,000 of their monthly bill, you start to get back down to $0.08kW-hr for energy costs. And don't forget this is a large non-interuptible customer, so they will pay premium rates because ComEd (or whoever there in East Central IL) can't take them offline on a hot day.