AI timed roads

 OK all you thinkers out there... here is a job for AI...

I am not a climate crazy, but I do think that we are to tend the earth and not harm it. We can talk for years about changing to electric cars to reduce carbon emissions, but then how do we generate all that electricity??? (Mostly by burning coal and natural gas!)

One of my biggest frustrations while driving is start/stop/start/stop/start/stop...!!! Even on 55 mph roads! 3 blocks, light... 3 blocks, light. Do we coast? NO! If we do, we get blown off the road by the guy behind us who wants to go 55 !!

It seems simple: just time the lights! In Denver, over the years there have been a few "timed" streets, like 14th and 15th near downtown. I remember my dad hitting just the right speed so that he could sail a long ways before he hit a light! So there ya go! Time 'em!

Well... not so quick... even a grid of 4 streets, 2 NS, 2 EW is not trivial to time. That creates 12 individual segments, times 2 for both directions... not even talking about turns. Add more so you have 3 NS and 3 EW and it gets very complex, even with all the same speed roads! Add different speed roads, diagonal roads, short roads! It is very quickly a non-solvable problem.

Well, hey... I thought that is what AI does best! Set up each street with cameras that see the approaches and intersections, know all the speed limits (as if humans do those), know how many cars are waiting, know the priorities, know how to weight the priorities as people wait longer... simple, huh?

Now, let the AI monitor all that and control all those lights! If a busy street is not busy at 9:30 Sunday evening, and I approach on a side street, let me go! If I am cruising on a fast road and there are a couple of cars waiting on an access road for a few minutes, let me go!

Can you imagine all the gas and break pads that would be saved??? Remember, all that gas puts kinetic energy into those cars. When the car stops, all that energy is converted to heat in the road, tires, and brakes! Then, we accelerate again! Please mister AI - Help us!

AI will probably tell us to all have electric cars that it drives.... Ragh, rogh, ragh!

Nois

How does the road know the way?

Having established that I do not exist (see earlier posts),  I would now like to tern to some amazing consequences of the fact that we are not what we perceive ourselves to be.  One of the most amazing things to me is that we think we know so much about our world and the universe and yet we do not know the simplest things.  Take gravity for example.  There are many theories of what gravity is, and there are pretty thorough descriptions of how gravity works, but really... no one knows what it is!

What... I thought that since that apple hit Newton on the head we figured out what gravity is... nope!  They can not even agree if gravity happens instantaneously or if it has "gravitons" that must travel at the speed of light.  Humm... how can we do rocket science if we do not understand gravity???

When my 14 year old was 3 we were on a trip to Rocky Mountain National Park.  We had several of our extended family in Colorado and sort of made a tent city!  One afternoon some of us decided to take a drive over Trail Ridge Road to visit Granby.  That was a fun time and on the way home almost everyone "punched out".  My wife was driving and I was riding shotgun... trying to keep my eyes pried open to support her and keep her awake.

After we reached the high point on the ridge and started down I was thinking about the discussions I had been reading about the speed of gravity.  One would think that such a basic question would have an obvious answer... unfortunately, it seemed to have several obvious answers and was intuitively obvious to 3 different groups!  So, they seemed to dismiss each other as incompetent, or dumb... sad thing science...

Suddenly, I heard a small voice from way in the back of the mini van... "Daddy, where are we going?"  I did not want to disturb the sleepers, so I just quietly said "Home."  I heard no more, so I went back to my musing.  In a few minutes, again I heard, "Daddy?"  "Yes."  "Are we going to our house, or back to our tent house?"  I was amazed!  This little one really had a grasp of things!   She was clearly thinking through things as we watched the glory of God's creation streaming past our windows.  "We are going back to our tent house."  Silence... Musing... Silence... "Daddy?"

"Yes."  "How will we know how to get back to our tent house?"  Now I was really awake.  This little one was capturing all of my attention.  What was going on in that pretty little head?  I thought about the scene from "The Hiding Place" where Cory's father decides to only answer the direct question and not weigh the little one down with a long drawn out answer that would be far beyond the question.   So, I just said "We will follow the road."  Silence... Musing...  "Daddy?"

"Yes dear?" "How does the road know the way to the tent?"  ... a 3 year old? I thought for only a second, but for some reason, I felt like I was wading in a river and just stepping into a hidden pool that was much deeper than I was ready for.  "The road knows because it is already there."

I am not sure if she said anything else... my brain was about to pop out of my scull... that was it!  Gravity acted instantaneously, because it was just the expression of the interaction between things that were already there... sort of...  I could not focus what I was thinking... it was just out of reach... but I knew the vision was the key.  Over the next 11 or so years I remembered that moment in the car, the tiny voice  and the feeling of wondering if I would loose my balance as I stepped into the deep pool in my mind and drifted the rest of the way on the road back to the tent house.

I will try to unpack this a bit in a few posts.  I will touch on Fourier transforms, Cheerios, Entropy, Holograms and a few other bushes to run around. While I have read several books, articles, web sites since that day, I do not know of anyone thinking in exactly this way... so here it goes... baring my soul... be gentle.

I do not exist - Condensate

My earlier posts established that I am insane... and you are too... as a matter of fact, I proposed to you that I do not exist... and neither do you.  I promised 4 simple arguments... First, my perception of me... is all in my head!  There is no objective evidence that I exist... my brain is totally isolated from what it perceives.  My argument from the Microscope showed that we are composed of transient stuff... what am I anyway?  Even my bones are totally new every 3 years.  The third argument went from the Cosmic "soup" of stars dense enough to fill high magnification photos, to the vast empty space between the sub atomic particles that compose every object around us.  That chair you are sitting on does not exist... it is just micro dust specs with thousands of times the empty space between.  Or, is it...

In my last existence post I mentioned that the teachers who showed me that my chair did not exist still lied to me!  Even the molecules, atoms, electrons, protons and neutrons do not exist!

What???  It is even more amazing that this was known long before I was born in 1949!  For example, The foundations of quantum physics were laid back in the 20's.  Heisenberg stated his famous Uncertainty Principle in 1927.  One simple example of this is trying to find the location of an electron.  The energy you use to observe the electron, moves the electron so that it is no longer there!  You can measure velocity or position, but not both at the same time.  Another example that I use all the time is tuning my guitar using beat frequencies.  I start by tuning one string to some source, then use that string to tune a second string.  I press the string to a fret so that the two strings play the same pitch.  Then I listen.  If I hear a beat in the sound, I tune the second string until the beat slows down.  In order to tune the string perfectly, I would need to wait forever to prove that there was no beat!  So, I just get it slow enough that I make it faster if I try to get it closer.

All sorts of strange things happen in the realm of quantum physics.  Another example is the double slit experiment.  Back in 1803 Thomas Young explained the phenomenon where light passes through two slits and forms an interference pattern on a screen behind the slits. What should particles do?  If you shoot bullets at a slit in a steel wall, you see a line of bullet holes in the screen behind the wall.  OK, so make two slits, and what would you see?  Yep, 2 lines of holes, each neatly behind the 2 slits.  Easy!  We use electron guns to make (now old style) TV displays (cathode ray tubes).  So, lets shoot electron "bullets" at 2 slits... we should see two neat lines of "electron hits" behind the slits - right?  However, we do not!  Instead, we see electron hits in an interference pattern just like the light made!  What?  The electrons behaved like waves, not like particles.  Some described the electrons as merely "probability" distributions, and others talked about the paths they took.  For example, in 1948 Feynman published his "Path Integral" explanation.  Basically he said that the particle traveled all possible paths to it's destination!  Weird!  More double slit into.

 Of course, one of the most amazing and famous things that was stated around this time was Einsteins formula, E = MC**2 (1917).  Basically, it says that matter and energy are interchangeable!  If you think of that in light of our discussions of particles and waves, you must deal with the fact that those particles we perceive are just a manifestation of the energy that composes them.  If you want to visualize the universe as starting in a big bang, then think about it as God imagining a 4-dimensional (at least) space, then thumping it with a big old finger to instantly create "all the stuff that ever was and ever will be"... stuff = matter = waves = energy.  The wave-particles are all held together by electro/magnetic/atomic force to cause us to perceive them as solid objects... Can you feel the vibs yet?

So, we can not figure out where an electron is, and we see that it behaves as a wave as well as a particle and is just a manifestation of big bang energy.  So basically, we can visualize the electron as "popping in and out" of existence in the vicinity of the nucleus of an atom in one of the discrete bands determined by its quantum state sort of like it would appear randomly in an interference band behind two slits.  The other building blocks of the atoms, the neutrons and protons are made from bosons that behave in similar ways to the electrons, so you see... even the subatomic particles do not exist!  So, the atoms do not exist... so I do not exist!  Simple - eh?

Now for a final example, lets get to the condensate... back in 1924-25 Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein imagined a very odd behavior of matter.  They said that if matter could be cooled to near absolute zero, the atoms would become totally indistinguishable!  Basically, thy would become a glob, not individual anymore.  As it turned out, we did not get to observe this behavior until 1995, right here in good ol'e Colorado at CU.  They used the wave troughs of laser light to grab the atoms, and thus, cool them, and an electro-magnetic field to lock them into the center of the beam so that they could not bounce into other atoms and heat up again.  When they accomplished their goal, they saw the phenomenon. The atoms got "fuzzier" and "fuzzier" until they just merged together into one condensed blob!  Double weird!!  Atoms are not the nice little solar systems we were told about, are they?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose-Einstein_condensate   More details http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/2242

Well, you may not think these  arguments have been simple as I promised, but I think I can summarize them simply... I do not exist because...

- My perception of myself is based on a remote sensing scam.   My brain interprets sensations that come in from remote sensors via electrical impulses and does not actually experience any of the things that it perceives.  That does not prove that I do not exist, but it opens the possibility that I might not exist.

- Any Microscope shows that my body is not any thing like I think it is!  It is a battle field of microscopic beings, worms, mites, foreign cells, and many other things and even the part that I think of as "me" is constantly refreshed, even including my bones within 3 years!  After I die, liquids and gases are released as the soft stuff rots until only a tiny collection of minerals is left behind.

-- The Cosmos is a soup of particles called stars with vast intervening empty space... ah... except the 2 Hydrogen nuclei per cm**3... Then, zoom down to the super-microscopic world of atoms and we find the same thing... tiny specs of "matter" with comparatively vast volumes of emptiness between them... basically, the chair you are sitting on is nothing but empty space with some specs held together by electrical force.  Go ahead... jump up and down on it...

-- Finally, that solar system picture of the atoms was false too!  Not only are the atomic components made from other, smaller entities, but those entities do not behave like particles at all!  They flip in and out of existence and can not even be located!  How can they make something that does exist?

Like me for example, I do not exist.  At least not in the way that I perceive myself to exist...  not in the sense that I am sitting here on my non-existent chair, typing with a non-existent keyboard a non-existent message... oh bother...

The only thing that finally relieved my tension, felt from childhood, of realizing that I did not exist was finally figuring out that I did exist!  I exist in exactly the way that the creator created me to exist, and how He designed me to perceive my existence.  I think I said it simply in an earlier post... I am a figment of His imagination, not mine.  Sorry Rene... He thinks, therefore I am.

Ac 17:28 - for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, `For we also are His children.'  (NAS - CrossWalk online Bible)

2000 kWh/y with a 30' vertical turbine!

Greentheo... we just got bested!  Forget the Stalkerator!  These guys can generate around 2000 kWh/year with a 30' vertical wind turbine.  The article does not say what kind of windy knob you have to live on to do that, but the Mariah site says you only need an average wind speed of 12 mph!  The sample home they showed seemed to be in a reasonable location.  http://www.popsci.com/bown/2008/gallery/mariah-power-windspire-photo-gallery  With a 30' height, small footprint, and quiet operation, they can get past a lot of neighborhood restrictions... probably not in my current location though...  (only 8.8 dba in 50mph wind!)   I could not find a price.  They had a "nice" cost-saving calculator on the site, but alas, one of the fields you had to put in was the cost of the unit... duh...

I first learned about vertical turbines years ago when I read about Darrieus turbines which were invented in 1931 by French engineer Georges_Jean_Marie_Darrieus. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darrieus_wind_turbine)  The Mariah unit seems to be a close cousin, or maybe a nephew!

Greentheo and I have been blogging about several energy producing and saving ideas and have noted several examples of homes that only needed 1000 kWh/y.  With this turbine you could splurge and watch cartoons on Saturday morning! OK Greentheo, I am ready to go build my papercrete elliptical dome in the boonies with my own little power source!  I hope the wind is blowing on those cold Colorado nights!

Mars fuel to go please...

I have read quite a bit about the water ice found on Mars.  I have read a lot about the prospects of life on Mars, but not much about something that immediately struck me when I heard it... Fuel to go!

As I have blogged about elsewhere, a big problem with distant space travel is carrying enough reaction mass to propel the craft.  It takes an incredible amount of O2 and H2 to get our big payloads off this planet, so we must keep the amount of fuel we carry to a minimum.  On the other hand there is a big difference between carrying fuel and carrying energy.  A lot of energy can be carried by using nuclear sources, but what can you do with that energy if there is nothing on board to use the energy to throw out the back - ya know?

Enter ICE.  Yep, good old ice.  You can get several kinds of ice on Mars including water ice and "dry" ice (CO2).  So, one of the really important aspects of finding ice on Mars is that we do not need to schlep our reaction mass up there for the return flight!  All we need to do is take the energy!  Actually, we could even capture some of the energy while we were on Mars by using solar panels.

How could we use the ice?  Well I know of a couple of ways.  One would be to  melt the ice, then use hydrolysis to split the water into H2 and O2 (or Brown's gas).  That could go into standard rocket engines to blast off and return.  Other folks are working on ways to use high energy fission products to heat gas for use in rockets.  In that case, all you have to do is start the fission, then throw in either kind of ice and ZOOM!

I suppose reaction mass is not as sexy as finding life, but I think it could get us boots on the ground a lot faster if we did not have to lift fuel for the return flight.  What do you think?

Mars colony mining ice.  http://www.redcolony.com/art.php?id=0401070

americium-242m high energy fission products for space travel:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/01/010103073253.htm

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.

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...   : )?

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

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???

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

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.

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

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...

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...

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