Over the weekend the weather in Denver was very cold! Wouldn't ya' know it, the heat in our house started acting up... that could fill a book! So, let me just tell you about one problem... a dripping air release valve.
Over the years the little valve occasionally spits and sputters a bit, which is it's only job in our hot water heat system. Last week it started dripping... oh bother! I put a little metal lid under it to catch the water where it could evaporate. I quickly found out that the drip was too fast for that and it overflowed the lid. I put a larger lid under the valve and it only required a paper towel spunge and a few trips to the nearby sink to dump the lid.
Saturday night the drip got so fast that it needed dumping every 2 hours... it was 3:00 AM and how was I going to sleep??? I decided to try a siphon wick to see if that would save me from hving to try to seal a hole around a tube to take the water from the lid into the floor overflow drain.
Siphon wicks are often used around machinery. Basically you have a cup with oil in it and a stand tube from the bottom of the cup up the center. a wick is dipped into the oil, is fed down the tube onto a bearing and the top is allowed to fold over the lip of the tube and dangle into the cup of oil. So, one end of the wick is in the cup of oil and the wick goes up over the tube edge then down the center of the tube and out the bottom of the tube above the bearing. This configuration causes a slow steady drip of oil from the wick and can empty the cup! Amazing! It works by cappilary action. If you think that is not strong enough, think about the fact that the same force pulls water up 200' to the top of a tree! http://www33.brinkster.com/iiiii/mccoy/wick.html
For my applidation, I changed the configuration some. Like I said, I did not want to punch a hole in the lid and try to seal it - if I wanted to do that, I could just install a tube drain. So, I took some flexible clear plastic tubing with 1/4" id. I tore a 12" x 3" strip of paper towel and rolled it up into a semi-stiff rope. I pushed the dry towel rope into the tube while twisting it until only a tiny end stuck out. I used some scrap copper wire to tie the tube end into a "J" and hooked that ofer the edge of the lid so that the wick got wet. The tube went over the edge of the boiler case and down to the floor drain.
To my great amazement, the wick immediately pulled the water up, over the bend and started soaking the wick the rest of the way down the tube. The next issue was whether the water would drip off the end of the wick and on down the tube to the drain. It took a while and I was a little nervous because the water was rising in the lid! Soon I saw drips going down the tube! Woo Hoo! Was it fast enough?
It was. Actually, I got another surprise. Every now-and-then the water would start to make little "plugs" in the tube rather than running down the tube. That scared me at first until I saw that the plugs were slowly moving down the tube with new plugs forming above. As soon as there were enough plugs, they would weigh enough to actually start a regular siphon that drained the entire lid very quickly. Then, the system would go back into it's slow drip mode. This tided me over until I could get my heater guy over to take a look on Monday. He was very impressed by my siphon wick gadget and very glad that he was not called at 3:00 AM!
While snooping around for other examples of siphon wick applications for this post, I found the quintessential case... enjoy reading about a siphon wick used to dispense "bear repellant"...
http://www.ultimatesportsmen.com/stories2/curley.html (0ops... link is to a general blog and I can not find that specific post... anyway... the guy said that when he camps he "marks his spot" by pissing on trees around the perimeter! Now, when he wants to be sure it stays fresh, he pees into a bottle and hangs a little bit of wet rope into the bottle and down the side. That starts a siphon wick that produces a slow drip!)
Monday, December 22, 2008
Saturday, December 20, 2008
The no-nap-cap
I have an amazing ability... I can fall asleep from being wide awake in just a few seconds... but only if I am driving. ugh.
You can imagine that this skill has created some interesting times on long driving trips and even occasionally on my short commute to work. What's a guy to do??? I had a sleep study done and found out that I have sleep apnea. I got a CPAP and that helped tremendously with my daytime sleepiness... except as soon as I touch a steering wheel!
Driving sleepiness is a big problem. http://www.drowsydriving.org/ is a site devoted to helping people be more aware of the dangers. It is as dangerous as driving drunk! Here are a few highlights from the drowsy driving site:
• The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that at least 100,000 police- reported crashes each year are the direct result of driver fatigue. (NHTSA)
• Each year drowsy driving crashes result in at least 1,550 deaths, 71,000 injuries and $12.5 billion in monetary losses. (NHTSA)
• Approximately 11 million drivers admit they have had a crash or near crash because they dozed off or were too tired to drive. (2005 Sleep in America poll)
• According to NSF surveys, half of Americans consistently report that they have driven drowsy and approximately 20% admit that they have actually fallen asleep at the wheel in the previous year.
So, I am not alone. Some states have moved toward serious consequences for sleepy drivers. In Massachusetts in 2007, Senator Richard Moore pushed for a law to make it vehicular homicide if a sleepy driver causes a fatal accident. If passed they would join with New Jersey in charging sleepy drivers.
I "got my wake up call" in a little nicer manner. One year as we were loading up the car to start a long trip my wife set a cold spray bottle on the console between us. She looked me in the eye and said "go ahead, make my day". The fear of having my ear filled with icy spray was enough to keep me awake! It also reminded me of a Japanese invention I read about that I can not find by searching the internet... weird. It was a pair of glasses that had a small refrigeration unit - possibly electrothermal cooling - that cooled the g-jo acupressure points (http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/G-Jo_Acupressure_Instant_Relief_With_The_Touch_of_a_Finger.html) on the forehead to reduce sleepiness. Try as I did, I could not find anything about the right g-jo points either! ..maybe I was dreaming... (Now the Japanese have a new thing with glasses. They sense the tilt of the head and if you nod off they vibrate in your ear! It interrupts the sleep inducing alpha waves! They say it tickles too! If I get sleepy in a meeting, I crunch on carrots! http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/1522985/How-the-Japanese-are-getting-a-buzz-out-of-falling-asleep-at-work.html, http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/30/mydo-bururu-glasses-vibrate-your-dome-to-prevent-sleep/)
Anyway, here is what I did to significantly reduce my drowsiness - after working on my sleep problems of course! I decided that I did not need some fancy glasses to cool my pate! Instead, I would use a swamp cooler! That is how I cool my house, so why not my head?
I got a cheap, light brown terry cloth towel and cut it into a long rectangle about 4" by 12". I folded the short edges in to the middle, then folded it in half again. Now, I had a nice neat 4" x 3" terry pad. I got the pad wet and let evaporation do the cooling. I put the pad on my head and enjoyed a very awake and comfortable trip -- no spray in the ear!
I sometimes put ice in the upper fold to jump start the cooling, but usually it is not necessary. I keep the pad quite wet - just short of it dripping. I now carry a pad and a re-filled bottle of water in my car at all times. I think it has saved my life! If I see a sleepy driver on the road, I want to roll down my window and tell him about the no-nap-cap, or maybe grab a spray bottle. : )?
btw... One young person was bugging me at work about my cap idea and how it would not work for him. I agreed. He had a very thick head of hair! I told him that memories are processed during sleep and that the more intelligent you are, the more your brain heats up and wants to sleep. That is why God gave older and wiser men a bald pate to help keep their brains cool. In some cases, the intelligence was so extreme that even the bald pate was not enough to cool the brain, so it takes a little help from a moist pad. He just walked away. I suppose it beats slapping someone.
You can imagine that this skill has created some interesting times on long driving trips and even occasionally on my short commute to work. What's a guy to do??? I had a sleep study done and found out that I have sleep apnea. I got a CPAP and that helped tremendously with my daytime sleepiness... except as soon as I touch a steering wheel!
Driving sleepiness is a big problem. http://www.drowsydriving.org/ is a site devoted to helping people be more aware of the dangers. It is as dangerous as driving drunk! Here are a few highlights from the drowsy driving site:
• The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that at least 100,000 police- reported crashes each year are the direct result of driver fatigue. (NHTSA)
• Each year drowsy driving crashes result in at least 1,550 deaths, 71,000 injuries and $12.5 billion in monetary losses. (NHTSA)
• Approximately 11 million drivers admit they have had a crash or near crash because they dozed off or were too tired to drive. (2005 Sleep in America poll)
• According to NSF surveys, half of Americans consistently report that they have driven drowsy and approximately 20% admit that they have actually fallen asleep at the wheel in the previous year.
So, I am not alone. Some states have moved toward serious consequences for sleepy drivers. In Massachusetts in 2007, Senator Richard Moore pushed for a law to make it vehicular homicide if a sleepy driver causes a fatal accident. If passed they would join with New Jersey in charging sleepy drivers.
I "got my wake up call" in a little nicer manner. One year as we were loading up the car to start a long trip my wife set a cold spray bottle on the console between us. She looked me in the eye and said "go ahead, make my day". The fear of having my ear filled with icy spray was enough to keep me awake! It also reminded me of a Japanese invention I read about that I can not find by searching the internet... weird. It was a pair of glasses that had a small refrigeration unit - possibly electrothermal cooling - that cooled the g-jo acupressure points (http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/G-Jo_Acupressure_Instant_Relief_With_The_Touch_of_a_Finger.html) on the forehead to reduce sleepiness. Try as I did, I could not find anything about the right g-jo points either! ..maybe I was dreaming... (Now the Japanese have a new thing with glasses. They sense the tilt of the head and if you nod off they vibrate in your ear! It interrupts the sleep inducing alpha waves! They say it tickles too! If I get sleepy in a meeting, I crunch on carrots! http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/1522985/How-the-Japanese-are-getting-a-buzz-out-of-falling-asleep-at-work.html, http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/30/mydo-bururu-glasses-vibrate-your-dome-to-prevent-sleep/)
Anyway, here is what I did to significantly reduce my drowsiness - after working on my sleep problems of course! I decided that I did not need some fancy glasses to cool my pate! Instead, I would use a swamp cooler! That is how I cool my house, so why not my head?
I got a cheap, light brown terry cloth towel and cut it into a long rectangle about 4" by 12". I folded the short edges in to the middle, then folded it in half again. Now, I had a nice neat 4" x 3" terry pad. I got the pad wet and let evaporation do the cooling. I put the pad on my head and enjoyed a very awake and comfortable trip -- no spray in the ear!
I sometimes put ice in the upper fold to jump start the cooling, but usually it is not necessary. I keep the pad quite wet - just short of it dripping. I now carry a pad and a re-filled bottle of water in my car at all times. I think it has saved my life! If I see a sleepy driver on the road, I want to roll down my window and tell him about the no-nap-cap, or maybe grab a spray bottle. : )?
btw... One young person was bugging me at work about my cap idea and how it would not work for him. I agreed. He had a very thick head of hair! I told him that memories are processed during sleep and that the more intelligent you are, the more your brain heats up and wants to sleep. That is why God gave older and wiser men a bald pate to help keep their brains cool. In some cases, the intelligence was so extreme that even the bald pate was not enough to cool the brain, so it takes a little help from a moist pad. He just walked away. I suppose it beats slapping someone.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
I do not exist - Cosmos
It has been a while since I wrote about existence... does being too tired and frazzled support that I exist or that I do not exist??? (Theo... I know I can not be a figment of my own imagination... but maybe I am a figment of someone else's imagination... they think, therefore I am...)
I started this train of thought by demonstrating that I am not sane... I do the same thing over and over again expecting a different result - I expect hot water when I turn on the hot water spigot... are you sane? Then I said that I would give 4 simple arguments that I do not exist... and neither do you...
The first argument had to do with physical perception. Our perception of the environment is a remote sensing scam! Our brains could be hooked up to synthetic sensors and we would not even know it! (Matrix movie stuff!) The second argument had to do with a microscopic view of our bodies. We never think about the fact that we are mostly water, Hydrogen, CO2, and Nitrogen. When we die, we basically drift away - literally! Moreover, while we are alive we are a huge collection of "stuff" that is not us (like little eyebrow worms) and the fact that all of the molecules in our bodies, including our bones are totally replaced at least every 3 years!!!
OK, so I do not exist in the way that I think I do when I look in the mirror - eh? So, now let's look farther. The 3rd argument I promised was Cosmology. You know, Carl Sagan's star stuff. "The cosmos is all the stuff that ever was or ever will be." Really? Let's think about how empty the cosmos is. They say that the best vacuum producible on earth barely approaches the vacuum of space. Yet, since 1960 Robert Bussard and other dreamers have been looking at an ionic propulsion system that carries energy (nuclear), but no "fuel" to eject to propel the space craft. Instead, the craft would use an electrostatic field to suck in ionized interstellar hydrogen molecules (2 per cm³). The engine would use another strong electromagnetic system to eject the ions out the back or form a fusion reaction and eject the hot, heavier combinants. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A600436, http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Bussard-ramjet) Wow! They are counting on there being a lot of "stuff" out there!
Another blogger posted a few weeks ago about black holes from "badastronomy.com" (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/10/30/ten-things-you-dont-know-about-black-holes/ (I was sure it was Stapler, but search and Google can't find the post!)). If you were to fill a sphere as big as the orbit of Pluto with air, there would be enough mass to be a black hole! So, while black holes are the densest thing we know, if we look at them as being everything inside the event horizon, then they are very non-dense! We think of air as being light and with no substance, yet air holds up a super-cargo plane!
We think of space as "empty", but is it?. We visited the Mount Palomar observatory in California. We sat on a half-room sized bench which we later found out was a replica of the mirror! We looked at an amazing series of photos taken by the telescope. They surveyed the sky with low magnification and picked the dimmest frame, say f1. Then, they bumped the magnification up and surveyed that frame to select the dimmest sub-frame f2. They bumped the magnification again and surveyed f2 to find it's dimmest sub-frame, f3... etc. through an amazing series of, as I remember, 12 frames. The amazing-est thing is that once they were "blown up" each frame was just as "busy" with "stuff" as the original! The sky is a dense soup of stars !!! Yet it is empty... The last frames showed mostly far away galaxies and quasars!
Did you see the amazing photos that made the email rounds last year showing the relative size of the various planets and stars? It showed our tiny sun was a single pixel on Antares (http://www.webxact.co.uk/2008/08/these-pictures-will-humble-anyone.html). Even though we think of the earth as huge and the sun as very huge, there is so much empty space between us and the moon that it takes days to travel there! Even at the speed of light it takes 8 minutes to get from the sun to the earth! It would take 4 years to get to our nearest neighbor star. Our solar system, our galaxy, our cosmos is just a bunch of specs held together by gravity.
So now, lets look closer. How about that table in front of you? It is solid - right? It is probably strong enough that you would sit or even stand on it... but, does it exist? I mean in the way you perceive it? Take a microscope and bump up the magnification. At not very high magnification, the surface is no longer flat, but is a rough landscape of knotted strings! Bump up the focus more, and the strings become coils of connected dots. Further, and the strings are only specs connected by strong electric fields. Actually, the molecular particles are even smaller, relative to the "orbits" of the electrons than the vast separation of the planets in the solar system! (http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/nuclear/nucuni.html) What??? that table is like empty space! It is just a bunch of specs held together by electrical attraction!!! When did you think of that last? You have know that since elementary school, but do you see that when you perceive that table? Nope. But really, that table does not exist!
The first time I realized this was when I was about 12. I was on one of the very few, long driving trips I took with my parents. I was reading Jules Vern's "Around the world in 80 days", a great science fiction story, which got me into the mood to think... OK, so I was dozing off... We had been studying molecular structure at school (No one told me it was a lie! Next argument about waves...) I remember looking at the plastic cover on the back of my dad's seat and imagining it being a sea of vibrating, spinning, crashing atomic particles... quite an impression! If you know me, think about me growing up "knowing" that the chair I sat in did not exist! Now I make more sense to you - eh? Feel the vibes???
It is actually amazing that we do not just slip through each other, drift right through the earth, or fly apart! Then, there is the issue that the protons, neutrons, and electrons don't exist either... but that is another day, and another post. I do not exist - Condensate.
I started this train of thought by demonstrating that I am not sane... I do the same thing over and over again expecting a different result - I expect hot water when I turn on the hot water spigot... are you sane? Then I said that I would give 4 simple arguments that I do not exist... and neither do you...
The first argument had to do with physical perception. Our perception of the environment is a remote sensing scam! Our brains could be hooked up to synthetic sensors and we would not even know it! (Matrix movie stuff!) The second argument had to do with a microscopic view of our bodies. We never think about the fact that we are mostly water, Hydrogen, CO2, and Nitrogen. When we die, we basically drift away - literally! Moreover, while we are alive we are a huge collection of "stuff" that is not us (like little eyebrow worms) and the fact that all of the molecules in our bodies, including our bones are totally replaced at least every 3 years!!!
OK, so I do not exist in the way that I think I do when I look in the mirror - eh? So, now let's look farther. The 3rd argument I promised was Cosmology. You know, Carl Sagan's star stuff. "The cosmos is all the stuff that ever was or ever will be." Really? Let's think about how empty the cosmos is. They say that the best vacuum producible on earth barely approaches the vacuum of space. Yet, since 1960 Robert Bussard and other dreamers have been looking at an ionic propulsion system that carries energy (nuclear), but no "fuel" to eject to propel the space craft. Instead, the craft would use an electrostatic field to suck in ionized interstellar hydrogen molecules (2 per cm³). The engine would use another strong electromagnetic system to eject the ions out the back or form a fusion reaction and eject the hot, heavier combinants. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A600436, http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Bussard-ramjet) Wow! They are counting on there being a lot of "stuff" out there!
Another blogger posted a few weeks ago about black holes from "badastronomy.com" (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/10/30/ten-things-you-dont-know-about-black-holes/ (I was sure it was Stapler, but search and Google can't find the post!)). If you were to fill a sphere as big as the orbit of Pluto with air, there would be enough mass to be a black hole! So, while black holes are the densest thing we know, if we look at them as being everything inside the event horizon, then they are very non-dense! We think of air as being light and with no substance, yet air holds up a super-cargo plane!
We think of space as "empty", but is it?. We visited the Mount Palomar observatory in California. We sat on a half-room sized bench which we later found out was a replica of the mirror! We looked at an amazing series of photos taken by the telescope. They surveyed the sky with low magnification and picked the dimmest frame, say f1. Then, they bumped the magnification up and surveyed that frame to select the dimmest sub-frame f2. They bumped the magnification again and surveyed f2 to find it's dimmest sub-frame, f3... etc. through an amazing series of, as I remember, 12 frames. The amazing-est thing is that once they were "blown up" each frame was just as "busy" with "stuff" as the original! The sky is a dense soup of stars !!! Yet it is empty... The last frames showed mostly far away galaxies and quasars!
Did you see the amazing photos that made the email rounds last year showing the relative size of the various planets and stars? It showed our tiny sun was a single pixel on Antares (http://www.webxact.co.uk/2008/08/these-pictures-will-humble-anyone.html). Even though we think of the earth as huge and the sun as very huge, there is so much empty space between us and the moon that it takes days to travel there! Even at the speed of light it takes 8 minutes to get from the sun to the earth! It would take 4 years to get to our nearest neighbor star. Our solar system, our galaxy, our cosmos is just a bunch of specs held together by gravity.
So now, lets look closer. How about that table in front of you? It is solid - right? It is probably strong enough that you would sit or even stand on it... but, does it exist? I mean in the way you perceive it? Take a microscope and bump up the magnification. At not very high magnification, the surface is no longer flat, but is a rough landscape of knotted strings! Bump up the focus more, and the strings become coils of connected dots. Further, and the strings are only specs connected by strong electric fields. Actually, the molecular particles are even smaller, relative to the "orbits" of the electrons than the vast separation of the planets in the solar system! (http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/nuclear/nucuni.html) What??? that table is like empty space! It is just a bunch of specs held together by electrical attraction!!! When did you think of that last? You have know that since elementary school, but do you see that when you perceive that table? Nope. But really, that table does not exist!
The first time I realized this was when I was about 12. I was on one of the very few, long driving trips I took with my parents. I was reading Jules Vern's "Around the world in 80 days", a great science fiction story, which got me into the mood to think... OK, so I was dozing off... We had been studying molecular structure at school (No one told me it was a lie! Next argument about waves...) I remember looking at the plastic cover on the back of my dad's seat and imagining it being a sea of vibrating, spinning, crashing atomic particles... quite an impression! If you know me, think about me growing up "knowing" that the chair I sat in did not exist! Now I make more sense to you - eh? Feel the vibes???
It is actually amazing that we do not just slip through each other, drift right through the earth, or fly apart! Then, there is the issue that the protons, neutrons, and electrons don't exist either... but that is another day, and another post. I do not exist - Condensate.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Male and Female... why???
Ge 1:27 - So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (NIV)
Right up there with "Why do I exist?" There is the question "Why did God make women? (or men)" Some like to think about why God made mosquitoes, but I guess women are more interesting to me...
Really, it is sort of odd that he made Adam and then said "It is not good for man to be alone." Did he make a mistake? All the other times he said "It was good." It seems to me that God had not completed his work with Adam. Oops.. now I am back to why he made me... ah Adam... It was very early in the bible, but rather late in the creation: late in the 6th day. After that even He had to take a rest!
In Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible he notices that God changes from "Let there be..." to "Let us make..."
"In the former he speaks as one having authority, in this as one having affection; for his delights were with the sons of men, Prov. 8:31. It should seem as if this were the work which he longed to be at; as if he had said, "Having at last settled the preliminaries, let us now apply ourselves to the business, Let us make man.""
So, if we take Henry's view, God provided all the rest of creation as a setting for his real purpose - to create His image in man... male and female he created them... back to that now... why male and female? Why did it take 2 creatures to image God?
(NIV)
25. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.
26. Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."
27. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
As I pondered this last week. I was thinking about carving... give me a minute...
A while back we took a driving trip up through South Dakota. It was the first time I saw Rushmore! We spent a night in Custer and visited the "National Museum of Wood Carving". That was really cool and contains many amazing works by Dr. H. D. Niblack who worked closely with Disney on many projects. http://www.blackhills.com/woodcarving/tours.htm.
They had classes about wood carving and one of the pamphlets showed some of the creative "simple" techniques to make a successful image. Most things have simple keys once you see them. With carving and sculpting, one way to proceed is to work in 2 dimensions at a time. Imagine that you have a saw blade and you move the wood long that blade using a jig so that it follows the profile of an existing 3D object - like a face. Put the original into a holder and a blank into another holder. Move the jig so that the profile of the 3D face is cut into the blank. Flip it over and do the back of the head. It will not make much sense if you look at it from the front or back, but if you look from the side, you will clearly see the figure. Now, rotate the blocks so that the two sides of the head are cut. Now look! It makes sense! There is a lot of trim work to do, but you have the basic idea.
It is too hard for everyone to have the jigs and power saws, and besides, this is supposed to be carving! So, what they do is have 2 outline pictures of the original one from the side and one from the front. Mathematically, these are two projections of the 3D object onto a 2D space. The carver first cuts the block to match one profile, then turns it in the hand and works on the other profile. Unlike the saw technique, they constantly rotate the wood and jump from one projection to the other, but it is the same idea.
Now... back to the Adam/Eve thing... starting to get my thought? The 2D image of the carving could not contain enough information to image the 3D shape, so they provide 2 different perspectives. The thing that clicked into my brain last week is that this is one reason why God made both Adam and Eve to display his image! So, he used 2 images to display himself more completely in our space!
The animals have male and female too, but I was not just thinking about the physical image although the carving example is just physical. His image is not just the physical aspects but his very nature. There is more to me that just my physical 3D/4D projection in this universe. Even so, our set of dimensions was incapable of displaying his image.
He says that when we marry we become one flesh. What an incredible blessing and responsibility it is to bare his image and what a great work it is to ensure that my marriage also displays him in a more complete way.
btw... I use CrossWalk for most of my online bible work. Check it out!
http://www.crosswalk.com/
http://biblestudy.crosswalk.com/
Right up there with "Why do I exist?" There is the question "Why did God make women? (or men)" Some like to think about why God made mosquitoes, but I guess women are more interesting to me...
Really, it is sort of odd that he made Adam and then said "It is not good for man to be alone." Did he make a mistake? All the other times he said "It was good." It seems to me that God had not completed his work with Adam. Oops.. now I am back to why he made me... ah Adam... It was very early in the bible, but rather late in the creation: late in the 6th day. After that even He had to take a rest!
In Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible he notices that God changes from "Let there be..." to "Let us make..."
"In the former he speaks as one having authority, in this as one having affection; for his delights were with the sons of men, Prov. 8:31. It should seem as if this were the work which he longed to be at; as if he had said, "Having at last settled the preliminaries, let us now apply ourselves to the business, Let us make man.""
So, if we take Henry's view, God provided all the rest of creation as a setting for his real purpose - to create His image in man... male and female he created them... back to that now... why male and female? Why did it take 2 creatures to image God?
(NIV)
25. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.
26. Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."
27. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
As I pondered this last week. I was thinking about carving... give me a minute...
A while back we took a driving trip up through South Dakota. It was the first time I saw Rushmore! We spent a night in Custer and visited the "National Museum of Wood Carving". That was really cool and contains many amazing works by Dr. H. D. Niblack who worked closely with Disney on many projects. http://www.blackhills.com/woodcarving/tours.htm.
They had classes about wood carving and one of the pamphlets showed some of the creative "simple" techniques to make a successful image. Most things have simple keys once you see them. With carving and sculpting, one way to proceed is to work in 2 dimensions at a time. Imagine that you have a saw blade and you move the wood long that blade using a jig so that it follows the profile of an existing 3D object - like a face. Put the original into a holder and a blank into another holder. Move the jig so that the profile of the 3D face is cut into the blank. Flip it over and do the back of the head. It will not make much sense if you look at it from the front or back, but if you look from the side, you will clearly see the figure. Now, rotate the blocks so that the two sides of the head are cut. Now look! It makes sense! There is a lot of trim work to do, but you have the basic idea.
It is too hard for everyone to have the jigs and power saws, and besides, this is supposed to be carving! So, what they do is have 2 outline pictures of the original one from the side and one from the front. Mathematically, these are two projections of the 3D object onto a 2D space. The carver first cuts the block to match one profile, then turns it in the hand and works on the other profile. Unlike the saw technique, they constantly rotate the wood and jump from one projection to the other, but it is the same idea.
Now... back to the Adam/Eve thing... starting to get my thought? The 2D image of the carving could not contain enough information to image the 3D shape, so they provide 2 different perspectives. The thing that clicked into my brain last week is that this is one reason why God made both Adam and Eve to display his image! So, he used 2 images to display himself more completely in our space!
The animals have male and female too, but I was not just thinking about the physical image although the carving example is just physical. His image is not just the physical aspects but his very nature. There is more to me that just my physical 3D/4D projection in this universe. Even so, our set of dimensions was incapable of displaying his image.
He says that when we marry we become one flesh. What an incredible blessing and responsibility it is to bare his image and what a great work it is to ensure that my marriage also displays him in a more complete way.
btw... I use CrossWalk for most of my online bible work. Check it out!
http://www.crosswalk.com/
http://biblestudy.crosswalk.com/
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Stalkerator update
Hi stalkerator fans! ...Ah... Nois... what is a stalkerator???
Don't you read all of my posts throughout all time??? And the comments??? : )?
In the responses to my post "Kepler, what a buoy!" I revealed my invention of a generator based on a stalk of grass. One reader, greentheo, liked it so much that we continued discussing it in the comments. The design went through several stages and I have now gotten some numbers together... Oh buoy! (Actually, the same idea could generate electricity on a buoy.)
The current design is to have our pseudo stalk be a graphite kite tube about 4' tall, perhaps with a ping pong ball on the top for extra drag - like a thistle stalk (make it a steel ball on the buoy). About 3" - 4" from the bottom you attach some kind of gimbal to hold the stalk while allowing it to bob in the wind as stalks do - ya know? Below the gimbal you build a coil around the stalk and glue a nail up the tube shaft inside the coil. below the nail you attach a floating magnet so that the bobbing stalk flops the magnet around under the nail - Cool! An inductance generator!
OK, fine, so would it be any good? I decided it was time to do a little experimenting. I had a nail on a coil from some earlier experiments (Gary's "Gary Effect" was a little far-fetched I think... the nail was just following the field lines... another post another day...) If I put the nail end near a stack of my Neodymium super-magnets, I get a measurable current.
Last year or so I tore apart some computer hard drives and saved the very strong control magnets. They are mounted to steel plates which I think is to strengthen the magnet so they do not explode under their own stress. They are polarized with the two opposite poles near the middle of the bar with maybe some "dead" space between them. I decided to try the induction coil on that and got an interesting sensation... The nail head was big enough to span the DMZ, so it just felt like 2 strong magnets, but the nail point gave a different result. The dead zone almost felt like repulsion as I moved the nail over it. I do not think it was actually repelled, but I was having to hold the nail away from the magnet, so the reduced pull in the DMZ gave the sensation of repulsion. As I moved the nail point across the zone it snapped sharply across to the other side! Ah ha! Just what the stalkerator needs! I can get up to 16 mV even with my poor coil set up. I did not measure milliamps.
I grabbed my stack of tiny Neos and made 7 stacks of 4 each. I arranged 6 of them in a circle around a heavy iron washer with #7 up the middle. I tried having all the same polarity up, but the nail just sort of smooshed from stack to stack with not much generation. So I flipped every other stack. That was better, but what ever pole I picked for the center stack still created sort of a magnetic plateau for the nail to ride. I eliminated the center stack and got much better action. The nail seemed to hop from one stack to the next as it had hopped across the DMZ on the HD magnet. Also, if it did go across the middle it now had a "hole" with significantly lower field strength, so I got some generation even while crossing the center.
With the final configuration and just holding the nail in my hand I easily got 10 mV and .25 mA. I just measured it with my voltmeter, so these numbers would need to be confirmed with a known load to get accurate results. Anyway, using those numbers, .010 V x .00025 A = .0000025 Watt. Wow! That's Some Pig! Let's just say that with a great coil, great magnets, and optimized construction we can get that up to 100 times that... why not? That is .00025 W.
OK, so according to "The Physics Factbook" (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/BoiLu.shtml) the average house uses a bit under 9,000 kWh in a year! Ugh! There is a long way between those decimal points! However, one guy cited got that down to 1,000 kWh per year. If we assumed that we can generate power about half the time and save it until needed, we have 365.24 x 12 = 4383 hours for generation. That would require generation of 228 W (plus change). Lets see, at .00025 W/unit, that is only 912,617 units! OK, 1,000,000 units. (1.09575 Watts per unit per year)
If I put a stalk at the corner of each square foot I could have 1000 stalks in a 100' x 10' plot. Woo Hoo 1 W/year! Let's suppose I build a papercrete house and a bunch of greentheo energy savings strategies to reduce my need to 1,000 kWh/y. That is only 1000' x 1000' for the 1,000,000 units! Gee... if it takes me 1 hour to make, connect, and install each one (after getting the parts and the bridge rectifiers...), then if I have to repair each one after x hours of operation...
My goodness... this is not going well. A common solar cell gives 1.2 W for each 4" square! That one cell working for a year would make just over what 500 square feet of my "grass" would make... with no moving parts... not good news for the stalkerator... : )?
Don't you read all of my posts throughout all time??? And the comments??? : )?
In the responses to my post "Kepler, what a buoy!" I revealed my invention of a generator based on a stalk of grass. One reader, greentheo, liked it so much that we continued discussing it in the comments. The design went through several stages and I have now gotten some numbers together... Oh buoy! (Actually, the same idea could generate electricity on a buoy.)
The current design is to have our pseudo stalk be a graphite kite tube about 4' tall, perhaps with a ping pong ball on the top for extra drag - like a thistle stalk (make it a steel ball on the buoy). About 3" - 4" from the bottom you attach some kind of gimbal to hold the stalk while allowing it to bob in the wind as stalks do - ya know? Below the gimbal you build a coil around the stalk and glue a nail up the tube shaft inside the coil. below the nail you attach a floating magnet so that the bobbing stalk flops the magnet around under the nail - Cool! An inductance generator!
OK, fine, so would it be any good? I decided it was time to do a little experimenting. I had a nail on a coil from some earlier experiments (Gary's "Gary Effect" was a little far-fetched I think... the nail was just following the field lines... another post another day...) If I put the nail end near a stack of my Neodymium super-magnets, I get a measurable current.
Last year or so I tore apart some computer hard drives and saved the very strong control magnets. They are mounted to steel plates which I think is to strengthen the magnet so they do not explode under their own stress. They are polarized with the two opposite poles near the middle of the bar with maybe some "dead" space between them. I decided to try the induction coil on that and got an interesting sensation... The nail head was big enough to span the DMZ, so it just felt like 2 strong magnets, but the nail point gave a different result. The dead zone almost felt like repulsion as I moved the nail over it. I do not think it was actually repelled, but I was having to hold the nail away from the magnet, so the reduced pull in the DMZ gave the sensation of repulsion. As I moved the nail point across the zone it snapped sharply across to the other side! Ah ha! Just what the stalkerator needs! I can get up to 16 mV even with my poor coil set up. I did not measure milliamps.
I grabbed my stack of tiny Neos and made 7 stacks of 4 each. I arranged 6 of them in a circle around a heavy iron washer with #7 up the middle. I tried having all the same polarity up, but the nail just sort of smooshed from stack to stack with not much generation. So I flipped every other stack. That was better, but what ever pole I picked for the center stack still created sort of a magnetic plateau for the nail to ride. I eliminated the center stack and got much better action. The nail seemed to hop from one stack to the next as it had hopped across the DMZ on the HD magnet. Also, if it did go across the middle it now had a "hole" with significantly lower field strength, so I got some generation even while crossing the center.
With the final configuration and just holding the nail in my hand I easily got 10 mV and .25 mA. I just measured it with my voltmeter, so these numbers would need to be confirmed with a known load to get accurate results. Anyway, using those numbers, .010 V x .00025 A = .0000025 Watt. Wow! That's Some Pig! Let's just say that with a great coil, great magnets, and optimized construction we can get that up to 100 times that... why not? That is .00025 W.
OK, so according to "The Physics Factbook" (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/BoiLu.shtml) the average house uses a bit under 9,000 kWh in a year! Ugh! There is a long way between those decimal points! However, one guy cited got that down to 1,000 kWh per year. If we assumed that we can generate power about half the time and save it until needed, we have 365.24 x 12 = 4383 hours for generation. That would require generation of 228 W (plus change). Lets see, at .00025 W/unit, that is only 912,617 units! OK, 1,000,000 units. (1.09575 Watts per unit per year)
If I put a stalk at the corner of each square foot I could have 1000 stalks in a 100' x 10' plot. Woo Hoo 1 W/year! Let's suppose I build a papercrete house and a bunch of greentheo energy savings strategies to reduce my need to 1,000 kWh/y. That is only 1000' x 1000' for the 1,000,000 units! Gee... if it takes me 1 hour to make, connect, and install each one (after getting the parts and the bridge rectifiers...), then if I have to repair each one after x hours of operation...
My goodness... this is not going well. A common solar cell gives 1.2 W for each 4" square! That one cell working for a year would make just over what 500 square feet of my "grass" would make... with no moving parts... not good news for the stalkerator... : )?
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Brown has gas...???
My post about the SMOT had several comments. In one response I mentioned Brown's Gas and got a request to blog about that... so...
Brown's gas is the electrolysis output if do not use a partition so that the hydrogen and oxygen are separated. So, the hh and o are all mixed together... kabOOM!!! No, not really. It does take something to ignite the reaction, but still it is highly explosive.
One of the cool things about this explosive mix is that you can make it on the spot with really simple, home made equipment. A favorite setup I have seen is to buy a bunch (10?) of steel switch plate covers from the hardware store. You stack them up and clamp them together, then drill one of the hole stacks to about 1/4". Next you unclamp them and flip every-other-one around so that the holes are stacked small-big-small-big... Next you assemble the reactor core by using threaded rod or long bolts with insulating 1/16"washers. So, you screw the bolt through a washer, then the first hole, then a washer, 2nd hole, washer, 3rd hole, etc. finally you put on a washer and nut to finish the stack. After you do both sides you have a stack with each bolt in contact with every-other plate on both sides... does that make sense?
If the right screw touches the first plate it misses the second plate then touches the 3rd, etc. At the same time on the left, the bolt misses the first, touches the 2nd, misses the 3rd, etc. If you apply 12v DC with right + and left -, then the plates alternate +, -, + ,- etc. All you do is put this core into some water with a little baking soda, apply 12 v and you get Brown's gas! ( 15 - 20 amps) You should bubble the gas through a water valve so that if it does ever flash back, only the gas in the tube will burn, not the larger amount in the reactor... little boom is good. Here is an example... there are many... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDpNUtXbz9U
So, what do you do with the stuff? Some people are making car kits that use the alternator to generate hho near the air intake. BG creates water when it burns, so you get the cooling and steam expansion benefits of water injection but with the added power of the burning hho. Some people hope to make the system so efficient that you can drive forever on just water... uh guys... remember it takes energy from the alternator to run the electrolysis core... One person said that the energy going into the core was just waste energy that would be going to heat. If that is true then this would be a great advantage indeed. However, it seems to me that whatever energy being used by the core will put additional drag on the engine - have you ever tried to light a bulb with a hand generator??? The energy to make the gas has to come out of the engine power via the alternator. I suppose you could charge a deep cycle battery at home, then use it to generate hho to burn. That can not be as good as just doing an electric drive. Plus in the electric scenario you could use regenerative breaking to recover a large percent of the kinetic energy you put into the car. http://www.runyourcaronwater.com/, http://www.hytechapps.com/, http://aardvark.co.nz/hho_scam.shtml
I am not planning to use hho in my car, but it sure seems like it would be great around the shop! If you have a small unit on your bench you can use a simple brass tube nozzle with a flow control. It burns clean and hot. There are a lot of stories about the unusual properties of the flame. For example, it seems to only heat certain things, like metal. You can cut a piece of steel, but not burn yourself if you touch the tube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKKoU1Fp3gs&feature=related
Near the bottom of the "runyourcarononwater" site there is another very interesting device. They have some sort of electrolysis catalyst cell. The unit is about the size of a drip coffee maker. You buy a "cell" and fill it with any water. Then, for about a month you can plug in devices up to 270 Watt-Hours! After that, you return the cell to the store for a replacement for about $20. (A standard AA battery has about 2.6 WH. http://www.allaboutbatteries.com/Energy-tables.html) If you buy several cells, you can take them all with you and just swap them out for continuous power. - Very cool! That would sure be a lot lighter to carry than my 60 lb 105 WH deep cycle battery up to the camp site! : )? http://www.horizonfuelcell.com/portable_power.htm
Brown's gas is the electrolysis output if do not use a partition so that the hydrogen and oxygen are separated. So, the hh and o are all mixed together... kabOOM!!! No, not really. It does take something to ignite the reaction, but still it is highly explosive.
One of the cool things about this explosive mix is that you can make it on the spot with really simple, home made equipment. A favorite setup I have seen is to buy a bunch (10?) of steel switch plate covers from the hardware store. You stack them up and clamp them together, then drill one of the hole stacks to about 1/4". Next you unclamp them and flip every-other-one around so that the holes are stacked small-big-small-big... Next you assemble the reactor core by using threaded rod or long bolts with insulating 1/16"washers. So, you screw the bolt through a washer, then the first hole, then a washer, 2nd hole, washer, 3rd hole, etc. finally you put on a washer and nut to finish the stack. After you do both sides you have a stack with each bolt in contact with every-other plate on both sides... does that make sense?
If the right screw touches the first plate it misses the second plate then touches the 3rd, etc. At the same time on the left, the bolt misses the first, touches the 2nd, misses the 3rd, etc. If you apply 12v DC with right + and left -, then the plates alternate +, -, + ,- etc. All you do is put this core into some water with a little baking soda, apply 12 v and you get Brown's gas! ( 15 - 20 amps) You should bubble the gas through a water valve so that if it does ever flash back, only the gas in the tube will burn, not the larger amount in the reactor... little boom is good. Here is an example... there are many... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDpNUtXbz9U
So, what do you do with the stuff? Some people are making car kits that use the alternator to generate hho near the air intake. BG creates water when it burns, so you get the cooling and steam expansion benefits of water injection but with the added power of the burning hho. Some people hope to make the system so efficient that you can drive forever on just water... uh guys... remember it takes energy from the alternator to run the electrolysis core... One person said that the energy going into the core was just waste energy that would be going to heat. If that is true then this would be a great advantage indeed. However, it seems to me that whatever energy being used by the core will put additional drag on the engine - have you ever tried to light a bulb with a hand generator??? The energy to make the gas has to come out of the engine power via the alternator. I suppose you could charge a deep cycle battery at home, then use it to generate hho to burn. That can not be as good as just doing an electric drive. Plus in the electric scenario you could use regenerative breaking to recover a large percent of the kinetic energy you put into the car. http://www.runyourcaronwater.com/, http://www.hytechapps.com/, http://aardvark.co.nz/hho_scam.shtml
I am not planning to use hho in my car, but it sure seems like it would be great around the shop! If you have a small unit on your bench you can use a simple brass tube nozzle with a flow control. It burns clean and hot. There are a lot of stories about the unusual properties of the flame. For example, it seems to only heat certain things, like metal. You can cut a piece of steel, but not burn yourself if you touch the tube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKKoU1Fp3gs&feature=related
Near the bottom of the "runyourcarononwater" site there is another very interesting device. They have some sort of electrolysis catalyst cell. The unit is about the size of a drip coffee maker. You buy a "cell" and fill it with any water. Then, for about a month you can plug in devices up to 270 Watt-Hours! After that, you return the cell to the store for a replacement for about $20. (A standard AA battery has about 2.6 WH. http://www.allaboutbatteries.com/Energy-tables.html) If you buy several cells, you can take them all with you and just swap them out for continuous power. - Very cool! That would sure be a lot lighter to carry than my 60 lb 105 WH deep cycle battery up to the camp site! : )? http://www.horizonfuelcell.com/portable_power.htm
Friday, November 14, 2008
What we've got is a demon...
Per Wikipedia: "Maxwell's demon was an 1867 [1] thought experiment by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, meant to raise questions about the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon
I remember studying the demon in high school and thinking how "cool" it would be... and impossible, to have a little "demon" that could sort air into hot and cold molecules! Wow!
Years later, before cyclonic cleaning was common, I learned how a vortex could be used to clean machine cutting oil. I first figured out how it worked at a manufacturing convention when I was a quality engineer at Gerry Baby Products (now defunct... remember the umbrella baby strollers and baby-backpacks they invented?) They had a display with a clear cylinder and dirty cutting oil going in the top. the oil spun and formed a vortex that went back up a center tube in the opposite direction. The oil stopped momentarily then violently spun in a vortex up the center tube and out. With the slowing at the turn and the spinning vortex the fine metal particles were thrown outward and could not go up the inner tube. Voila, clean oil! We see this same idea all the time now in cyclonic, bag-less vacuum cleaners.
Wait, you say! You were talking about Maxwell's demon... how did you get off onto vortex cleaning??? Well, because the vortex is the demon! Just think, it can separate the heavy metal particles from the lighter oil molecules. Interesting. Later, still at Gerry, I discovered that that cleaver demon can indeed be used to sort air molecules into hot and cold sides, just like Maxwell proposed! Incredible!
Here's how it works... you hook up "shop air" at around 80 psi to a vortex tube. Generally the air enters at one end off center so that it spins. Near the far end some of the air turns a corner and goes up a center tube and out while some continues to the end of the tube and out an adjustable hole. Sound familiar? What is amazing is that the "cold" molecules, that is the slower ones, are more likely to be able to turn the corner and spin up the center, while the fast ones can't quite make the turn, so they exit. See the demon at work? You don't? He just sorted the air molecules into two streams with the cold ones coming out the near center and the hot ones going out the far edge. Very smart that demon.
Vortex cooling is used a lot for various things like spot cooling machining operations and cabinet cooling. Check out one vendor http://www.vortec.com/vortex_coolers.php They even have vortex cooled vests that let people work in 200 degree environments! (with protective clothing.)
Maxwell did not say that the demon did not use energy to open and close the tiny door. It was just that the demon was not putting energy into the air to heat it. One side got cold and one got hot but neither heat nor cold was created by the demon, both were already present in the incoming air. What sort of efficiency do you suppose this process gets?
Heat pumps are similar in that they use some energy to move heat from one place to another rather than creating the heat. A refrigerator is a compression-cycle heat pump that takes heat energy from inside the cabinet and pumps it into your kitchen air. Heat pumps for home heating use an almost identical process and apparatus to move heat from the outside air into your house. You could just as well use a thermoelectric cooler or a vortex cooler. However, the good old compression method is around 65% efficient while the thermocouple is lucky to make 8%! Vortex coolers can drop the air temperature by 80 degrees with an efficiency of up to 16%... not bad I guess... (http://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2440/43646/1/hdl_43646.pdf).
You could try to use the heat differential to do work. However, if the hot and cold side are in a fixed volume, then the pressure on the hot side would increase. The demon would need to operate the door more and more, and thus use more and more energy to run the door to keep those fast molecules from passing through to the cold side. A vortex demon needs a free flow of air, not a fixed volume. You could use the hot and cold air streams in the open on a thermocouple to make electricity, but then you would suffer from the poor efficiency of the thermocouple. Hummm... maybe you could use a Sterling cycle engine! Theoretically they can be 100% efficient, but for now, 30% is good... not so good...
Maxwell talked about sorting the molecules, not creating the energy... so if the energy that the cleaver little demon needed to open and close the door was small enough, maybe he could harvest a little heat differential from the hot to cold side to run the door mechanism, and then I could use the rest of the differential to do other things. I could heat my house in the winter and cool it in the summer by just changing some dampers! That would not be violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics any more than using some sunlight to power a photocell (about 10% efficient), after all, sunlight heated the air - right? OK, so it looks like the little vortex is a demon, but he needs too much energy to operate his door... do you know any other demons looking for work???
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Electric car info reports
I thought I had found a great resource about EV - Electric Vehicles until I spent some time on their site. I found a link to EV info in an article at "Popular Science" about capicators for use in EVs at http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2008-10/what-comes-after-batteries. As it turned out they provide reports at a cost, which could be OK except for their criteria for inclusion. Quite a bit of it was reasonable, but one criteria is not good. They will not consider EVs that have less than 50 miles of electric-only range. If you have been keeping up with EVs you know that both Chevy Volt (GM) and ENVI (Chrysler) EVs are due out in 2010. All of those models have a 40 mile electric only range, so they will be eliminated from the reports! I think that is poor form indeed because I have great hopes that real products from GM and Chrysler is exactly what we need for our economy, saving the car industry in America, saving our environment, and having new toys! I would be very happy with an EV that went all electric for 40 miles and would be all electric most days for me. I tried to find a "contact us" link on their site to give them my-2-cents, but alas, they did not want to hear from me. I wonder how their customer service is if you buy a report... In case you are interested, check them out at http://electric-cars-today.com
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
To SMOT or not to SMOT, that is the question
I love to read about "free" energy... zero point energy... you know... crazy stuff...
I do not believe in free energy. However, I do believe that we are bathed in a sea of energy fields. If we can just tap them, then we would have "free" energy - right?
There are a large number of new "wireless" energy devices now. They work by harvesting radio energy that is broadcast from a nearby plug-in source. However, I remember using a crystal to harvest energy out of the air... it was called a crystal radio - anybody else remember those? Tesla wanted to put 12 large antennas around the world (vertexes of an icosahedron as I recall) and broadcast huge amounts of electrical energy for all to use. Just connect a device to a ground, and voila free energy! Except that huge generators had to make the field... oh that...
I am especially interested in magnetism and gravity. (Actually, I think gravity may not be real, but that is another post. Clearly something causes an effect that looks like gravity - sort of like centrifugal force which does not exist either!) Magnetism is the effect of the nuclear energy of charged electrons spinning - nothing new there. So, if that energy is being radiated into space as some of the original energy of the universe, why can't we harvest some of it?
Think about what Tesla and others did with an a true energy collector 200 years ago. You just put a metal plate high in the air, run a wire down near the ground, connect another wire to a grounding rod and put a spark gap and capacitor in the path. Instant free energy! The capacitor charges all by itself! Today, we have to deal with this with any improperly grounded antenna system. Is that "free" energy from nowhere? It seems to be, but not if you think about the energy source, which is the earth's huge electric field. We are just shorting across it and harvesting the energy that is there. Otherwise, that energy just dissipates into space. Isn't magnetism like that?
Most of the time people who make "perpetual motion" machines are just crazy. They are just overlooking or misinterpreting a simple explanation. However, there are plenty of perpetual motion machines if you do not think about their energy source. That is, if you restrict the closed system to exclude the energy source - like the antenna charge.
So, what is a SMOT? It is a Small Magnetic Overunity Toy. You can check it out at http://open-encyclopedia.com/SMOT . Basically, it is 2 magnetic rails that pull a ball up a ramp. The idea is that if the ball overshoots the ramp at the top, then the ball will fall. If it does, then it can land on another ramp and start over. Thus, gravity is providing the force needed to "re gauge" the magnetic ramp. If you arranged the ramp series into a circle, the ball would roll around the circuit "forever". I have not tried to build one yet, and I think I will not hold my breath. However, I think I will try it ! Do I think the SMOT could be a perpetual motion machine? Sure, why not! It is easy to try to find out. But, can the ball be heavy enough and gain enough momentum to escape the magnetic attraction that pulled it up the ramp?
Around 25 years ago or so, I made a significant design improvement in a proven, working permanent magnet motor that I saw in "Popular Science". I have never heard another thing about the motor, so they must not have gotten my memo. Oh well. The original design had a difficult to machine spiral cavity in a strong non-magnetic metal. the spiral was lined with strong magnets all arranged with the same pole facing the center. A rotor is mounted inside the spiral with strong magnets and the same pole facing out. For now, imagine a single magnet on the rotor. You press the rotor into the track and let go. Because of the spiral track the magnetic repulsion will cause the rotor to turn in the direction that increases the separation between the magnets. Cool... perpetual motion???
No perpetual motion here. When the rotor turns around to the widest separation, it hits a "wall". It faces the narrow separation at the start of the spiral. There is no way that the magnetic "ramp" can accelerate the rotor so that it will have enough momentum to squeeze it into that narrow opening. (There is no gravity force to re-gauge it in SMOTese.) So, the inventor put an electromagnet there to give it a kick through the gap. After that, the rotor turns on its own and gains speed until it must once again be pressed through the gap on the next circuit. You can add lots more magnets to the rotor to smooth the operation. So basically the electricity needed to re-gauge the magnets is turned into rotation, like most electric motors.
My improvement eliminated the complex spiral machining. All I did was make a circular cavity and a circular rotor, then set the rotor slightly off center. From the narrow-to-wide half of the circuit the magnet polarities were opposite so that the rotor magnet was repelled toward the biggest gap. Then, I flipped the polarity of the permanent magnets for the second half of the circuit. In this configuration the now opposite polarity rotor magnet is pulled toward the narrow gap. See! No spiral is needed! It worked great, but of course, the electromagnetic pulse is still needed to push it through the magnetic wall at the nearest gap where the cavity magnets change polarity.
I have thought about trying to use the Gary effect to push the magnet through the gap, but I am not convinced that the effect is real. I question some of his observations and have not succeeded in getting the balance "just right" as the Gary proponents say you must.
Now I wonder about SMOTing the thing! I wonder if a SMOT ramp could lift a magnet over the gap, then drop it on the other side! Actually, you could make one long circular ramp with a magnet on a spoke rather than a ball. As the magnet is pulled around the circuit it is also raised (using up some the the energy.) Then, when it gets to the narrow repulsive side, it falls down into the narrow gap to restart the system! If a SMOT can do it, why not this motor? Hummmm it seems unlikely... if a rotor magnet is heavy enough to push back into the magnetic gap, would it be too heavy for the system to lift?... I will have to think about this for 10 years and then never get around to actually trying it... as I usually do.
I do not believe in free energy. However, I do believe that we are bathed in a sea of energy fields. If we can just tap them, then we would have "free" energy - right?
There are a large number of new "wireless" energy devices now. They work by harvesting radio energy that is broadcast from a nearby plug-in source. However, I remember using a crystal to harvest energy out of the air... it was called a crystal radio - anybody else remember those? Tesla wanted to put 12 large antennas around the world (vertexes of an icosahedron as I recall) and broadcast huge amounts of electrical energy for all to use. Just connect a device to a ground, and voila free energy! Except that huge generators had to make the field... oh that...
I am especially interested in magnetism and gravity. (Actually, I think gravity may not be real, but that is another post. Clearly something causes an effect that looks like gravity - sort of like centrifugal force which does not exist either!) Magnetism is the effect of the nuclear energy of charged electrons spinning - nothing new there. So, if that energy is being radiated into space as some of the original energy of the universe, why can't we harvest some of it?
Think about what Tesla and others did with an a true energy collector 200 years ago. You just put a metal plate high in the air, run a wire down near the ground, connect another wire to a grounding rod and put a spark gap and capacitor in the path. Instant free energy! The capacitor charges all by itself! Today, we have to deal with this with any improperly grounded antenna system. Is that "free" energy from nowhere? It seems to be, but not if you think about the energy source, which is the earth's huge electric field. We are just shorting across it and harvesting the energy that is there. Otherwise, that energy just dissipates into space. Isn't magnetism like that?
Most of the time people who make "perpetual motion" machines are just crazy. They are just overlooking or misinterpreting a simple explanation. However, there are plenty of perpetual motion machines if you do not think about their energy source. That is, if you restrict the closed system to exclude the energy source - like the antenna charge.
So, what is a SMOT? It is a Small Magnetic Overunity Toy. You can check it out at http://open-encyclopedia.com/SMOT . Basically, it is 2 magnetic rails that pull a ball up a ramp. The idea is that if the ball overshoots the ramp at the top, then the ball will fall. If it does, then it can land on another ramp and start over. Thus, gravity is providing the force needed to "re gauge" the magnetic ramp. If you arranged the ramp series into a circle, the ball would roll around the circuit "forever". I have not tried to build one yet, and I think I will not hold my breath. However, I think I will try it ! Do I think the SMOT could be a perpetual motion machine? Sure, why not! It is easy to try to find out. But, can the ball be heavy enough and gain enough momentum to escape the magnetic attraction that pulled it up the ramp?
Around 25 years ago or so, I made a significant design improvement in a proven, working permanent magnet motor that I saw in "Popular Science". I have never heard another thing about the motor, so they must not have gotten my memo. Oh well. The original design had a difficult to machine spiral cavity in a strong non-magnetic metal. the spiral was lined with strong magnets all arranged with the same pole facing the center. A rotor is mounted inside the spiral with strong magnets and the same pole facing out. For now, imagine a single magnet on the rotor. You press the rotor into the track and let go. Because of the spiral track the magnetic repulsion will cause the rotor to turn in the direction that increases the separation between the magnets. Cool... perpetual motion???
No perpetual motion here. When the rotor turns around to the widest separation, it hits a "wall". It faces the narrow separation at the start of the spiral. There is no way that the magnetic "ramp" can accelerate the rotor so that it will have enough momentum to squeeze it into that narrow opening. (There is no gravity force to re-gauge it in SMOTese.) So, the inventor put an electromagnet there to give it a kick through the gap. After that, the rotor turns on its own and gains speed until it must once again be pressed through the gap on the next circuit. You can add lots more magnets to the rotor to smooth the operation. So basically the electricity needed to re-gauge the magnets is turned into rotation, like most electric motors.
My improvement eliminated the complex spiral machining. All I did was make a circular cavity and a circular rotor, then set the rotor slightly off center. From the narrow-to-wide half of the circuit the magnet polarities were opposite so that the rotor magnet was repelled toward the biggest gap. Then, I flipped the polarity of the permanent magnets for the second half of the circuit. In this configuration the now opposite polarity rotor magnet is pulled toward the narrow gap. See! No spiral is needed! It worked great, but of course, the electromagnetic pulse is still needed to push it through the magnetic wall at the nearest gap where the cavity magnets change polarity.
I have thought about trying to use the Gary effect to push the magnet through the gap, but I am not convinced that the effect is real. I question some of his observations and have not succeeded in getting the balance "just right" as the Gary proponents say you must.
Now I wonder about SMOTing the thing! I wonder if a SMOT ramp could lift a magnet over the gap, then drop it on the other side! Actually, you could make one long circular ramp with a magnet on a spoke rather than a ball. As the magnet is pulled around the circuit it is also raised (using up some the the energy.) Then, when it gets to the narrow repulsive side, it falls down into the narrow gap to restart the system! If a SMOT can do it, why not this motor? Hummmm it seems unlikely... if a rotor magnet is heavy enough to push back into the magnetic gap, would it be too heavy for the system to lift?... I will have to think about this for 10 years and then never get around to actually trying it... as I usually do.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
I do not exist... Microscope
Ok... So we know that we are insane and we know that we can not prove that we exist by our perceptions because that is all a "matrix" like remote sensing scam... Right? If any of this is not clear to you, try going back a few posts (Don't you hate be'n dumb, I do not exist)
I mentioned that I could think of at least 4 simple arguments that I do not exist. The Matrix thing was one. A mosquito senses me totally differently than I sense me... Who is right? Neither of us experiences the reality of what we perceive but only an affect of that reality. So, now I want to move to the next argument... my microscopic self.
I really do not need to go very far to find out that I am more than what I thought I was. Some say that right now I host thousands of varieties of parasites eating my flesh. (check out http://www.essortment.com/all/humanbodyparas_rayv.htm ) Everything from internal worms, external worms, mites, bacteria, fungi... the list seems to never end! Not all of them are harmful, and I even take a dose of live intestinal "bugs" regularly. So, is that what I see in the mirror? No wonder I am not happy in the morning... Most of these guys can be seen with a microscope. But how about going a bit smaller...
What about the chemical nature of me? In the great series of books by Dr. Paul Brand and Phillip Yancy I learned a lot about my body. ("Where is God when it hurts" about leprosy, "Fearfully and Wonderfully Made," "In His Image") Dr. Brand said that every molecule in my body is different every 3 years. What??? How about bone? Yep, the blasts tunnel through, the clasts fill the holes back up with brand new stuff, and I have a new me. Incredible! That made me change my thoughts about burial. I used to think that I should keep all of my parts together, ya know? But... what parts are me? All of the parts are swapped out all the time! (The Druids put their friends bodies up on a high platform where the scavengers could eat the flesh. When only bones remained, they buried everything but the skull which they kept around so that they could remember their friend... "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him." (Shakespeare, Hamlet))
Now, speaking of death. Think a minute. My body is 65% water... so that is not going to stick around for long. Bye bye me... There are the Big 4 (including the the water) Oxygen (65.0%) Carbon (18.5%) Hydrogen (9.5%) Nitrogen (3.2%). Wow... that sounds like plastic to me. ( http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/1999-05/927309210.An.r.html). So, lets see... basically, 96% of my body will float away as CO2, H2O, Amonia, N2 and other smells. The rest is just "trace minerals" like Calcium (1.5%) Phosphorus (1.0%) Potassium (0.4%) Sulfur (0.3%) Sodium (0.2%) Chlorine (0.2%) Magnesium (0.1%) Iodine (0.1%) and Iron (0.1%), plus a few others.
Did you ever think of your self as a pile of ashes help together by water, carbon, and Nitrogen? God just breathed on a bit of dust ya know... I remember Bill Cosby had a shtick about a dead guy. Cosby hated it when people at funerals always said "Doesn't he look like himself?" He hoped he would not! He thought they should have a recording going that was made by the person before their death. "Hello, this is Bill. Don't I look like myself?"
Anyway, surely you can see that I am not what I believe myself to be. I am not a collection of chemicals... they change all the time. I am not even just myself... I have millions of friends eating me alive - ugh. So, what am I? Am I a program encoded in my DNA? If my hip bone is constantly changing, why does it keep looking like my hip bone? So, am I my hip bone, or am I the code that constructs the hip bone? I certainly do not think of myself as a program, but now I can not think of myself as having a hip bone either.
Yikes... Now, not only can I not sense myself, I actually know that I am a collection of constantly changing stuff! I am certainly do not exist as the me I see in the mirror - right? Maybe I should move on the the other 2 arguments - the Cosmos and the Condensate. We shall see if I exist there.
I mentioned that I could think of at least 4 simple arguments that I do not exist. The Matrix thing was one. A mosquito senses me totally differently than I sense me... Who is right? Neither of us experiences the reality of what we perceive but only an affect of that reality. So, now I want to move to the next argument... my microscopic self.
I really do not need to go very far to find out that I am more than what I thought I was. Some say that right now I host thousands of varieties of parasites eating my flesh. (check out http://www.essortment.com/all/humanbodyparas_rayv.htm ) Everything from internal worms, external worms, mites, bacteria, fungi... the list seems to never end! Not all of them are harmful, and I even take a dose of live intestinal "bugs" regularly. So, is that what I see in the mirror? No wonder I am not happy in the morning... Most of these guys can be seen with a microscope. But how about going a bit smaller...
What about the chemical nature of me? In the great series of books by Dr. Paul Brand and Phillip Yancy I learned a lot about my body. ("Where is God when it hurts" about leprosy, "Fearfully and Wonderfully Made," "In His Image") Dr. Brand said that every molecule in my body is different every 3 years. What??? How about bone? Yep, the blasts tunnel through, the clasts fill the holes back up with brand new stuff, and I have a new me. Incredible! That made me change my thoughts about burial. I used to think that I should keep all of my parts together, ya know? But... what parts are me? All of the parts are swapped out all the time! (The Druids put their friends bodies up on a high platform where the scavengers could eat the flesh. When only bones remained, they buried everything but the skull which they kept around so that they could remember their friend... "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him." (Shakespeare, Hamlet))
Now, speaking of death. Think a minute. My body is 65% water... so that is not going to stick around for long. Bye bye me... There are the Big 4 (including the the water) Oxygen (65.0%) Carbon (18.5%) Hydrogen (9.5%) Nitrogen (3.2%). Wow... that sounds like plastic to me. ( http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/1999-05/927309210.An.r.html). So, lets see... basically, 96% of my body will float away as CO2, H2O, Amonia, N2 and other smells. The rest is just "trace minerals" like Calcium (1.5%) Phosphorus (1.0%) Potassium (0.4%) Sulfur (0.3%) Sodium (0.2%) Chlorine (0.2%) Magnesium (0.1%) Iodine (0.1%) and Iron (0.1%), plus a few others.
Did you ever think of your self as a pile of ashes help together by water, carbon, and Nitrogen? God just breathed on a bit of dust ya know... I remember Bill Cosby had a shtick about a dead guy. Cosby hated it when people at funerals always said "Doesn't he look like himself?" He hoped he would not! He thought they should have a recording going that was made by the person before their death. "Hello, this is Bill. Don't I look like myself?"
Anyway, surely you can see that I am not what I believe myself to be. I am not a collection of chemicals... they change all the time. I am not even just myself... I have millions of friends eating me alive - ugh. So, what am I? Am I a program encoded in my DNA? If my hip bone is constantly changing, why does it keep looking like my hip bone? So, am I my hip bone, or am I the code that constructs the hip bone? I certainly do not think of myself as a program, but now I can not think of myself as having a hip bone either.
Yikes... Now, not only can I not sense myself, I actually know that I am a collection of constantly changing stuff! I am certainly do not exist as the me I see in the mirror - right? Maybe I should move on the the other 2 arguments - the Cosmos and the Condensate. We shall see if I exist there.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Chrysler ENVI is about here!
Finally! I have waited for so long! An electric drive vehicle with a small gas engine to extend the range beyond battery power. Sound like the Chevy Volt? Nope! I get to keep driving a Chrysler Mini Van! Woo Hoo! That is all I have driven since 1985 and I love them! Chrysler says they should be available by 2010. I think the Volt was saying 2015.
Unfortunately, I just bought a used 2009 Mini Van... duh... but I did not see the price on these ENVI guys (say "envy")... so I might have to save pennies for a while anyway. Maybe there will be a tax credit from Uncle Sam! Hey, if we are borrowing money from China to buy oil, why not send that to millions of US families to buy ENVIs!
A few thoughts:
- The vehicle has a single electric motor driving the front wheels. I would prefer 4 wheel electric drive. You do not need a transmission or differential/transaxle with separate motors. I am sure that will come later.
- One of the big opportunities with electric drive is regenerative breaking. This was invented 60 years ago on electric street cars. Some engineer realized that they could save a lot of brake linings by letting the drive motor become generator and dissipating the heat via a bank of resisters. Then, duh... someone finally said, "Ah... boss, why do we waste all that energy to heat when we could charge a battery and use it to accelerate later?" The boss probably got very rich... or maybe his boss... The ENVI system uses RB! Double Woo Hoo!
- Just like the Chevy Volt, the ENVIs have about a 40 mile electric range. So, for my normal day I will never hear the gas motor turn on. I just drive to work, then home, and plug it in. Hummm... I wonder how long that gas will stay good in the gas tank? Will it sludge out? Rust out? Ugh, always something.
- 60 mph in 8.7 seconds ain't bad for a Mini Van! With over 100 mph top speed, I will have just a little extra for highway passing acceleration, ya know?
Check it out:
https://www.chryslerllc.com/en/innovation/envi/specs/chrysler_vehicles.php
Unfortunately, I just bought a used 2009 Mini Van... duh... but I did not see the price on these ENVI guys (say "envy")... so I might have to save pennies for a while anyway. Maybe there will be a tax credit from Uncle Sam! Hey, if we are borrowing money from China to buy oil, why not send that to millions of US families to buy ENVIs!
A few thoughts:
- The vehicle has a single electric motor driving the front wheels. I would prefer 4 wheel electric drive. You do not need a transmission or differential/transaxle with separate motors. I am sure that will come later.
- One of the big opportunities with electric drive is regenerative breaking. This was invented 60 years ago on electric street cars. Some engineer realized that they could save a lot of brake linings by letting the drive motor become generator and dissipating the heat via a bank of resisters. Then, duh... someone finally said, "Ah... boss, why do we waste all that energy to heat when we could charge a battery and use it to accelerate later?" The boss probably got very rich... or maybe his boss... The ENVI system uses RB! Double Woo Hoo!
- Just like the Chevy Volt, the ENVIs have about a 40 mile electric range. So, for my normal day I will never hear the gas motor turn on. I just drive to work, then home, and plug it in. Hummm... I wonder how long that gas will stay good in the gas tank? Will it sludge out? Rust out? Ugh, always something.
- 60 mph in 8.7 seconds ain't bad for a Mini Van! With over 100 mph top speed, I will have just a little extra for highway passing acceleration, ya know?
Check it out:
https://www.chryslerllc.com/en/innovation/envi/specs/chrysler_vehicles.php
I do not exist
I do not exist... neither do you.
Does that make you feel any better about being insane? (If you think you are not insane, please go back 2 posts and read "Don't ya hate be'n dumb?")
There are many stories about those who argue about existence. One story goes that 2 philosophers were arguing through dinner. One held that nothing exists, so the other one began to eat the first one's cake. "Hey! That is my cake!" he protested. "How can that be if nothing exists?" the other answered and finished the cake. I searched a bit but was not able to remember or find who the antagonists were. If anyone knows, please post a comment to remind me!
Another story is about the "The head whacker society." The whacker looks for someone who thinks he does not exist, and proceeds to whack him on the head with a board. Of course the target protests, but the defense is that the wronged party does not exist, so there is no crime. This story was part of a radio ministry illustration. The point was that if a person believes that there is no objective reality, then they would naturally believe that there is no objective right and wrong - everything would be subjective. Every man would be a god unto himself. If I do not actually exist, than Christ's sacrifice is for nothing and God's truth is not absolute. If I believe God does not exist, then I really am insane... or deceived. In that sense, I believe that I exist. There is reality.
Never-the-less... sorry to say it, but that which we perceive of what exists, does not exist! Say What? I believe that I exist, but I do not believe that I am physically what I perceive myself to be... is that any easier? Let's try to get our heads around this idea. I can think of at least 4 simple arguments that "I do not exist" as I perceive myself to be. The first one is illustrated by the movie "The Matrix".
Think about it... My brain, which perceives my existence, does not experience anything. It can not feel, react to light, react to motion, smell, hear, taste. Nope... it is all remote sensing. Once a brain surgeon gets through the skin, he can perform surgery with no further anesthesia because the patients brain can not feel! I think that is what resonates with me in the movie... I can not know... for sure... How can I know that I am not plugged into some matrix? In the movie there was an occasional glitch in the matrix that gave some evidence that the people in the pods were not experiencing reality. In our perceived world, there are no such hiccups, but perhaps that is because our programmer is better than the evil ones in The Matrix. My existence is just perceived by this blob of gray stuff that interprets signals from some remote sensing devices... scary...
"Wait", you say, "just because I can not prove that I am accurately perceiving reality does not prove that I am not." I agree. This argument is simply to set you up for the other 3. I want to put you into the right frame of mind... so to speak...
Consider this... Many bugs do not see the visible light spectrum. They perceive reality totally differently than I do. Have you seen those IR cameras shots displayed on a video monitor so that you can watch yourself? My family recently spent an hour laughing at each other and our selves with the funny eyes, bright and dark patches in odd places... you know... but to a mosquito, that is what they think is reality. So, you see, there is some reality that is radiating energy. I perceive the energy that is in the visible light spectrum while the mosquito perceives the energy that is in the IR spectrum. Both of us are only experiencing an effect of the reality, not the actual reality. Is either receiver accurately perceiving the reality? See what I mean? How do I know that I am what I perceive myself to be? Tricky, isn't it?
Next - from the Matrix, to the Microscope, to the Cosmos, to the Condensate... hold on...
Does that make you feel any better about being insane? (If you think you are not insane, please go back 2 posts and read "Don't ya hate be'n dumb?")
There are many stories about those who argue about existence. One story goes that 2 philosophers were arguing through dinner. One held that nothing exists, so the other one began to eat the first one's cake. "Hey! That is my cake!" he protested. "How can that be if nothing exists?" the other answered and finished the cake. I searched a bit but was not able to remember or find who the antagonists were. If anyone knows, please post a comment to remind me!
Another story is about the "The head whacker society." The whacker looks for someone who thinks he does not exist, and proceeds to whack him on the head with a board. Of course the target protests, but the defense is that the wronged party does not exist, so there is no crime. This story was part of a radio ministry illustration. The point was that if a person believes that there is no objective reality, then they would naturally believe that there is no objective right and wrong - everything would be subjective. Every man would be a god unto himself. If I do not actually exist, than Christ's sacrifice is for nothing and God's truth is not absolute. If I believe God does not exist, then I really am insane... or deceived. In that sense, I believe that I exist. There is reality.
Never-the-less... sorry to say it, but that which we perceive of what exists, does not exist! Say What? I believe that I exist, but I do not believe that I am physically what I perceive myself to be... is that any easier? Let's try to get our heads around this idea. I can think of at least 4 simple arguments that "I do not exist" as I perceive myself to be. The first one is illustrated by the movie "The Matrix".
Think about it... My brain, which perceives my existence, does not experience anything. It can not feel, react to light, react to motion, smell, hear, taste. Nope... it is all remote sensing. Once a brain surgeon gets through the skin, he can perform surgery with no further anesthesia because the patients brain can not feel! I think that is what resonates with me in the movie... I can not know... for sure... How can I know that I am not plugged into some matrix? In the movie there was an occasional glitch in the matrix that gave some evidence that the people in the pods were not experiencing reality. In our perceived world, there are no such hiccups, but perhaps that is because our programmer is better than the evil ones in The Matrix. My existence is just perceived by this blob of gray stuff that interprets signals from some remote sensing devices... scary...
"Wait", you say, "just because I can not prove that I am accurately perceiving reality does not prove that I am not." I agree. This argument is simply to set you up for the other 3. I want to put you into the right frame of mind... so to speak...
Consider this... Many bugs do not see the visible light spectrum. They perceive reality totally differently than I do. Have you seen those IR cameras shots displayed on a video monitor so that you can watch yourself? My family recently spent an hour laughing at each other and our selves with the funny eyes, bright and dark patches in odd places... you know... but to a mosquito, that is what they think is reality. So, you see, there is some reality that is radiating energy. I perceive the energy that is in the visible light spectrum while the mosquito perceives the energy that is in the IR spectrum. Both of us are only experiencing an effect of the reality, not the actual reality. Is either receiver accurately perceiving the reality? See what I mean? How do I know that I am what I perceive myself to be? Tricky, isn't it?
Next - from the Matrix, to the Microscope, to the Cosmos, to the Condensate... hold on...
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Speedier Computers... really...
Computers are getting faster, smaller in size, and bigger in capacity. So what is next?
http://www.popsci.com/corey-binns/article/2008-09/how-your-laptop-will-just-keep-getting-faster
Popular Science has been a favorite of mine since I was a kid. They have a lot of stuff online these days and I admit to spending too many hours scanning photo galleries... although I still do most of my article reading in the good old printed magazine.
I saw a really amazing article today about 3 technological advances that should be having effects soon:
- Memsistor -- they join resistors, capacitors, and inductors as elements of a circuit. Basically, they are resistors that can change resistance and remember the last resistance when the power is off... poof! "Instant on" computers! It can pack 100 gigs in a square centimeter, are faster than flash and very energy efficient.
- Graphene -- Graphite is made of layers (yea, like ogres) and each of those layers is a single layer of honeycomb carbon atoms called Graphene. It is very conductive, is 100 times more efficient than silicon, and has been used to create the smallest transistor so far... 1 atom thick and 10 atoms wide. Yikes!
- Electron spin injection -- only electrons with selected spin (up or down) make it through a gate. If they go through you get a 1 if they scatter you get a 0. Basically, each electron can be a bit. Using this idea, semiconductor lasers can send information between computer elements 1000 times faster and more efficiently... bye bye wires.
Ain't sci-tech fun??? OK, I want 4 gigs of RAM, a 400 gig drive, and a teraHertz clock... on my wrist... now! Why not throw in brain wave control and in-air projected display (both seen this year in simple demo form).
http://www.popsci.com/corey-binns/article/2008-09/how-your-laptop-will-just-keep-getting-faster
Popular Science has been a favorite of mine since I was a kid. They have a lot of stuff online these days and I admit to spending too many hours scanning photo galleries... although I still do most of my article reading in the good old printed magazine.
I saw a really amazing article today about 3 technological advances that should be having effects soon:
- Memsistor -- they join resistors, capacitors, and inductors as elements of a circuit. Basically, they are resistors that can change resistance and remember the last resistance when the power is off... poof! "Instant on" computers! It can pack 100 gigs in a square centimeter, are faster than flash and very energy efficient.
- Graphene -- Graphite is made of layers (yea, like ogres) and each of those layers is a single layer of honeycomb carbon atoms called Graphene. It is very conductive, is 100 times more efficient than silicon, and has been used to create the smallest transistor so far... 1 atom thick and 10 atoms wide. Yikes!
- Electron spin injection -- only electrons with selected spin (up or down) make it through a gate. If they go through you get a 1 if they scatter you get a 0. Basically, each electron can be a bit. Using this idea, semiconductor lasers can send information between computer elements 1000 times faster and more efficiently... bye bye wires.
Ain't sci-tech fun??? OK, I want 4 gigs of RAM, a 400 gig drive, and a teraHertz clock... on my wrist... now! Why not throw in brain wave control and in-air projected display (both seen this year in simple demo form).
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Don't ya hate be'n dumb
I hate being dumb! I hate even more being insane... You know: "Doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result."
Sorry... but I am insane. Oh yea... so are you! You think not? Really...
Paul said in Romans "the things that I want to do I do not do and the things that I do not want to do, I do them anyway". Yep, he was a nut too. Of course, Paul was talking about sin, but isn't waste a sin? Think about the last time you washed your hands. If you are like me you turned on the water, soaped up, rinsed, and dried - right? You have heard the news this last year that you need to wash with soap and HOT water for 20 seconds -- abcdefg hijklmnop qrs tuv wx y and z. Now I know my abc's would you like to sing with me? Go ahead and sing it... Do you wash for that long? I know I don't. However... what about HOT? In a public restroom that has any traffic it is likely that when you turn on the hot spigot you actually get hot water. That does not happen at my house 90% of the time. If I let the water run long enough to get HOT I would be rinsing many, many gallons of good water down the drain. The same thing is true if you want COLD. It is all lukewarm. (Watch out Laodicea! Rev. 3:18 says you are lukewarm and will be spit out! They brougth water from hot and cold springs into Laodicea via aquaducts, but by the time the water got there it was all lukewarm! When will we ever learn?)
So, what do I do? Well, I don't want cold water, so I turn on a mix. That is really handy with the new single knob faucets that most of us have - just lift or pull right to the middle. Even if I am at a sink with 2 knobs, I usually turn on both of them. Now be honest... don't you? See... like I said, you are insane. You do that over and over expecting a different result - HOT water. You do not get it, except maybe 10% of the time... or if you are wlling to wait... which you aren't.
Like I said, I hate being insane. But, I really hate being dumb!!! Why is this dumb? It is because every time you turn on the hot spigot whether with the cold or not, hot water flows into the pipes. It just does not get far enough to reach your spigot. What do you think happens to all of the hot water? Correct. It cools off in the pipe. In the Summer it is helping to heat your home... duh... I would like to think in the Winter it does help to heat my home, but not very much. So basically, it is going to waist. One of the biggest users of energy in our homes, pumping wasted heat into the environment. Dumb!
You can help this by making plumbing runs as short as possible. In my house, most of the bathrooms are "stacked". That only helps a little and the kitchen which is a huge user of hot water is very far from the water heater. Another approach is to have a small under sink heater right where you need it. We have a hot water spigot that is separate from our main water line for hot drinks and soup, but you would not want to use that for washing your hands! We do use it for spot cleaning things and for mixing with lukewarm tap water for some washing of dishes. There are some units that heat the regular tap water... but I do not have that.
Really, just give up on washing your hands with hot water. Just use the lukewarm. NO! Do not turn on the hot! Just the cold - push that knob over to the cold side. It will not be cold - ya know?
Now I am smart... well... maybe not. I have been thinking about this pretty seriously for over 2 weeks and ya know what? I still pull to the middle! It is such a habbit that I have not been able to change! I hate being DUMB... I am insane... "Oh reched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death" (Romans 7)
Sorry... but I am insane. Oh yea... so are you! You think not? Really...
Paul said in Romans "the things that I want to do I do not do and the things that I do not want to do, I do them anyway". Yep, he was a nut too. Of course, Paul was talking about sin, but isn't waste a sin? Think about the last time you washed your hands. If you are like me you turned on the water, soaped up, rinsed, and dried - right? You have heard the news this last year that you need to wash with soap and HOT water for 20 seconds -- abcdefg hijklmnop qrs tuv wx y and z. Now I know my abc's would you like to sing with me? Go ahead and sing it... Do you wash for that long? I know I don't. However... what about HOT? In a public restroom that has any traffic it is likely that when you turn on the hot spigot you actually get hot water. That does not happen at my house 90% of the time. If I let the water run long enough to get HOT I would be rinsing many, many gallons of good water down the drain. The same thing is true if you want COLD. It is all lukewarm. (Watch out Laodicea! Rev. 3:18 says you are lukewarm and will be spit out! They brougth water from hot and cold springs into Laodicea via aquaducts, but by the time the water got there it was all lukewarm! When will we ever learn?)
So, what do I do? Well, I don't want cold water, so I turn on a mix. That is really handy with the new single knob faucets that most of us have - just lift or pull right to the middle. Even if I am at a sink with 2 knobs, I usually turn on both of them. Now be honest... don't you? See... like I said, you are insane. You do that over and over expecting a different result - HOT water. You do not get it, except maybe 10% of the time... or if you are wlling to wait... which you aren't.
Like I said, I hate being insane. But, I really hate being dumb!!! Why is this dumb? It is because every time you turn on the hot spigot whether with the cold or not, hot water flows into the pipes. It just does not get far enough to reach your spigot. What do you think happens to all of the hot water? Correct. It cools off in the pipe. In the Summer it is helping to heat your home... duh... I would like to think in the Winter it does help to heat my home, but not very much. So basically, it is going to waist. One of the biggest users of energy in our homes, pumping wasted heat into the environment. Dumb!
You can help this by making plumbing runs as short as possible. In my house, most of the bathrooms are "stacked". That only helps a little and the kitchen which is a huge user of hot water is very far from the water heater. Another approach is to have a small under sink heater right where you need it. We have a hot water spigot that is separate from our main water line for hot drinks and soup, but you would not want to use that for washing your hands! We do use it for spot cleaning things and for mixing with lukewarm tap water for some washing of dishes. There are some units that heat the regular tap water... but I do not have that.
Really, just give up on washing your hands with hot water. Just use the lukewarm. NO! Do not turn on the hot! Just the cold - push that knob over to the cold side. It will not be cold - ya know?
Now I am smart... well... maybe not. I have been thinking about this pretty seriously for over 2 weeks and ya know what? I still pull to the middle! It is such a habbit that I have not been able to change! I hate being DUMB... I am insane... "Oh reched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death" (Romans 7)
Friday, October 3, 2008
Kepler, what a buoy!
There is some amazing new technology... well if you are thinking in terms of the ice age, 400 years is not a long time... ya know?
Here is a water purifier: www.innovativetech.us/KeplerBuoy.htm
Here is a generator: http://www.anwsite.com/wdpatent.htm
Good old Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) actually invented the Kepler Buoy... imagine that! It is simple really... just put some kind of large surfaced plate on a pole under a buoy... that is about it. Hi tech - eh? So, how does it work? The buoy is coupled to the surface, so it goes up and down with the waves. The plate, on the other hand has a large surface area which resists moving against water. At only a little depth the motion of water is decoupled from the surface... there you have it... the plate moves in a completely different way than the buoy.
You can do anything with that differential motion. Why not use it to desalinate water? Why not use it to pump water? Why not use it to make electricity. Not bad Johannes. I guess he found spare time between his sessions helping Tycho Brahe with his measurements of the planets and figuring out the gravitational laws of elliptical orbits. Rocket science indeed.
Tesla had some ideas that used wave motion too, but he liked to do most of his work in his head. Maybe he actually built this, but probably not. You take some kind of open cup shaped container and anchor it in place it in a body of water so that the lip of the cup is about half way from the average water level and the average crests of the waves. In that configuration, about 1/4 of the water mass is above the lip. As the waves crest over the lip, the cup will fill up to the lip - a level higher than the average level of the body of water. That might not give much "head" in a lake, but could be significant in the ocean. If you allow the water to exit the cup through a turbine at a rate that balances with the rate of filling you have continuous power generation... well as long as there are sufficient waves to power it. Imagine a "cup" as big as the coastline of a state... You can even float it to compensate for tides. I have thought about powering a boat with this too. Water comes into a skirt that surrounds the boat. You have to be able to change the height of the skirt to optimize the water collection. Now just let the water run out of a duct on one side and the boat will move in the opposite direction... ya think? Probably not very fast but a castaway might appreciate it anyway!
Wave action shows how God seems to like to have moving surfaces interacting with each other... like wind making waves. Have you ever thought about grass - it makes waves too! Trees move in the wind in about the same way, but lets think about grass. The grass has a flexible, springy stalk. They have a shape that the wind can transfer energy to, so they bend down, which reduces the force transferred to the stalk. At some point, with the grass leaning over, the force of wind is overcome by the springiness of the stalk. The movement of the stalk has some momentum, so it overshoots the equilibrium point. After the stalk changes directions, it again overshoots the equilibrium point with its momentum carrying it into the wind. The cycle repeats and is completely self regulating. It also works in any direction and in very light wind. I figure God is collecting that energy some how... Cleaver God!
So, how can we use that in as simple a way as Kepler's buoy? Replace the grass stalk with a 4' stalk of fiberglass or carbon fiber tube like those used on bike flags and kites. I think maybe a little ball on the top might help it catch the wind like a thistle. A little way up from the bottom of the stalk attach a gimbal joint to hold the stalk but allow it to swivel any direction. Attach a spring under the stalk with a string up to the bottom of the stalk passing through a fixed ring. As the stalk moves, it pulls the string through the ring to stretch the spring up and down. The spring acts like the returning force of the stalk of grass. now the stalk should bob like a stalk of grass. Attach a magnet to the string below the ring and put a coil of wire around it. As the "grass" bobs, it generates electricity. Or, you could pump water, etc. Oh yea... if you put a flock of tiny stalks on tiny Piezo crystals you could have a tiny generator or microphone.
Imagine acres of close to the ground grass like stalks bobbing up and down generating electricity. I know! Plant it between all of those 100' tall wind turbine towers! OK, so paint it green already! Or put it on roofs...
Waves form in the stock market too! Can we float our boat there too? Why not. We need a lake... the market, some waves... the fluctuations in prices. Let's be cleaver and fill our lake with water that seems to have good waves... you know - up and down, but never too far up or down... just wavey! Say we pick 100 stocks. Take each one and find it's average (maybe with some predictable stuff removed - our boat is floating not anchored to the lake bed.). Plot it's waveyness over time and set a call to buy a bit when it goes below some level below the average. Now, when the stock makes its expected move above the adjusted average half way to the expected high, you sell the bit. That creates a value differential that pumps money into your bank account! With enough stocks you should be able to even out the non-predictable movements... like Monday 9/29/08! Just remember not to sell in a hurricane - a massive swirling low.
I suppose this system has been used for hundreds of years too, but have you ever thought of it as a wavy ocean... I bet that floats your boat...
Here is a water purifier: www.innovativetech.us/KeplerBuoy.htm
Here is a generator: http://www.anwsite.com/wdpatent.htm
Good old Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) actually invented the Kepler Buoy... imagine that! It is simple really... just put some kind of large surfaced plate on a pole under a buoy... that is about it. Hi tech - eh? So, how does it work? The buoy is coupled to the surface, so it goes up and down with the waves. The plate, on the other hand has a large surface area which resists moving against water. At only a little depth the motion of water is decoupled from the surface... there you have it... the plate moves in a completely different way than the buoy.
You can do anything with that differential motion. Why not use it to desalinate water? Why not use it to pump water? Why not use it to make electricity. Not bad Johannes. I guess he found spare time between his sessions helping Tycho Brahe with his measurements of the planets and figuring out the gravitational laws of elliptical orbits. Rocket science indeed.
Tesla had some ideas that used wave motion too, but he liked to do most of his work in his head. Maybe he actually built this, but probably not. You take some kind of open cup shaped container and anchor it in place it in a body of water so that the lip of the cup is about half way from the average water level and the average crests of the waves. In that configuration, about 1/4 of the water mass is above the lip. As the waves crest over the lip, the cup will fill up to the lip - a level higher than the average level of the body of water. That might not give much "head" in a lake, but could be significant in the ocean. If you allow the water to exit the cup through a turbine at a rate that balances with the rate of filling you have continuous power generation... well as long as there are sufficient waves to power it. Imagine a "cup" as big as the coastline of a state... You can even float it to compensate for tides. I have thought about powering a boat with this too. Water comes into a skirt that surrounds the boat. You have to be able to change the height of the skirt to optimize the water collection. Now just let the water run out of a duct on one side and the boat will move in the opposite direction... ya think? Probably not very fast but a castaway might appreciate it anyway!
Wave action shows how God seems to like to have moving surfaces interacting with each other... like wind making waves. Have you ever thought about grass - it makes waves too! Trees move in the wind in about the same way, but lets think about grass. The grass has a flexible, springy stalk. They have a shape that the wind can transfer energy to, so they bend down, which reduces the force transferred to the stalk. At some point, with the grass leaning over, the force of wind is overcome by the springiness of the stalk. The movement of the stalk has some momentum, so it overshoots the equilibrium point. After the stalk changes directions, it again overshoots the equilibrium point with its momentum carrying it into the wind. The cycle repeats and is completely self regulating. It also works in any direction and in very light wind. I figure God is collecting that energy some how... Cleaver God!
So, how can we use that in as simple a way as Kepler's buoy? Replace the grass stalk with a 4' stalk of fiberglass or carbon fiber tube like those used on bike flags and kites. I think maybe a little ball on the top might help it catch the wind like a thistle. A little way up from the bottom of the stalk attach a gimbal joint to hold the stalk but allow it to swivel any direction. Attach a spring under the stalk with a string up to the bottom of the stalk passing through a fixed ring. As the stalk moves, it pulls the string through the ring to stretch the spring up and down. The spring acts like the returning force of the stalk of grass. now the stalk should bob like a stalk of grass. Attach a magnet to the string below the ring and put a coil of wire around it. As the "grass" bobs, it generates electricity. Or, you could pump water, etc. Oh yea... if you put a flock of tiny stalks on tiny Piezo crystals you could have a tiny generator or microphone.
Imagine acres of close to the ground grass like stalks bobbing up and down generating electricity. I know! Plant it between all of those 100' tall wind turbine towers! OK, so paint it green already! Or put it on roofs...
Waves form in the stock market too! Can we float our boat there too? Why not. We need a lake... the market, some waves... the fluctuations in prices. Let's be cleaver and fill our lake with water that seems to have good waves... you know - up and down, but never too far up or down... just wavey! Say we pick 100 stocks. Take each one and find it's average (maybe with some predictable stuff removed - our boat is floating not anchored to the lake bed.). Plot it's waveyness over time and set a call to buy a bit when it goes below some level below the average. Now, when the stock makes its expected move above the adjusted average half way to the expected high, you sell the bit. That creates a value differential that pumps money into your bank account! With enough stocks you should be able to even out the non-predictable movements... like Monday 9/29/08! Just remember not to sell in a hurricane - a massive swirling low.
I suppose this system has been used for hundreds of years too, but have you ever thought of it as a wavy ocean... I bet that floats your boat...
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
kenaf it!
Amazing what you stumble across while surfing...I have read a lot lately about Hemp, but Do you know about kenaf? It is a plant that grows in southern states that can completely replace tree pulp for paper production! I have been dreaming of that for years! They say that the paper is even better than tree pulp paper in color, texture, strength, etc. They can use the tree pulp processing equipment without modification and they use no chlorine processing or dioxins. The paper is recyclable, and does not take 20 years to grow! Check it out. http://www.visionpaper.com/aboutvis.htmlKenaf could also supply biomass for cellulosic fuel production.
Not all of the plant can go to paper, so the rest can go to a biofuel processes. I was reading a couple of weeks ago about duck weed for biofuel... can't use that for paper, but they harvest it with a pump! It produces the largest amount of captured carbon per hour than any other plant in the world. There are varieties that live almost anywhere in the world. Others are looking at algae to use in similar ways too. (http://push.pickensplan.com/forum/topic/show?id=2187034:Topic:78813)
A cool thing about this biomass stuff is that they only harvest the captured hydro-carbon chain molecules, which basically come from the air. Not only does that eliminate the carbon footprint, but the part of the plant that comes from the ground, like minerals, can be returned to the ground after the fuel production so that the soil does not become depleted... Kenaf it!
cpt
Not all of the plant can go to paper, so the rest can go to a biofuel processes. I was reading a couple of weeks ago about duck weed for biofuel... can't use that for paper, but they harvest it with a pump! It produces the largest amount of captured carbon per hour than any other plant in the world. There are varieties that live almost anywhere in the world. Others are looking at algae to use in similar ways too. (http://push.pickensplan.com/forum/topic/show?id=2187034:Topic:78813)
A cool thing about this biomass stuff is that they only harvest the captured hydro-carbon chain molecules, which basically come from the air. Not only does that eliminate the carbon footprint, but the part of the plant that comes from the ground, like minerals, can be returned to the ground after the fuel production so that the soil does not become depleted... Kenaf it!
cpt
Nois what....
You know... "nois fopro toa sutafo"!
OK, don't strain too hard... it means nothing! It is a shortened version of my favorite saying. I wanted to be sure that it had no actual meaning... did not want to offend anyone... and it seemed vaguely Portuguese, so I sent it to a friend in Brazil to check. He assures me that it has no meaning at all, expect that some of the words seem vaguely Portuguese as I thought. If you are aware of any meaning that I should know about, please let me know!
So why, you may ask, would you pick that silly title??? Well, my favorite saying is "Nothing is Foolproof to a Sufficiently Tallented Fool!" That is the story of my life! I love to find a different way to break something that someone thinks is unbreakable! Or find a way to do something that someone else says can not be done. Or look at some idea from some crazy perspective. It gives me endless hours of pleasure to look at a problem in some totally different light.
Then when I try to explain it to someone... their eyes glaze over... my voice becomes a drone... My wife tells me to listen for someone to start saying "Ah-huh"... "Ah-huh"... A sure sign that we have parted minds.
With this blog you do not have to say "Ah-huh"... just close it when it starts to drone in your head...
OK, don't strain too hard... it means nothing! It is a shortened version of my favorite saying. I wanted to be sure that it had no actual meaning... did not want to offend anyone... and it seemed vaguely Portuguese, so I sent it to a friend in Brazil to check. He assures me that it has no meaning at all, expect that some of the words seem vaguely Portuguese as I thought. If you are aware of any meaning that I should know about, please let me know!
So why, you may ask, would you pick that silly title??? Well, my favorite saying is "Nothing is Foolproof to a Sufficiently Tallented Fool!" That is the story of my life! I love to find a different way to break something that someone thinks is unbreakable! Or find a way to do something that someone else says can not be done. Or look at some idea from some crazy perspective. It gives me endless hours of pleasure to look at a problem in some totally different light.
Then when I try to explain it to someone... their eyes glaze over... my voice becomes a drone... My wife tells me to listen for someone to start saying "Ah-huh"... "Ah-huh"... A sure sign that we have parted minds.
With this blog you do not have to say "Ah-huh"... just close it when it starts to drone in your head...
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