gcol

Nice discussion. There have been more than a few threads on this general topic. Some have become surprisingly heated. If this one continues, and remains reasonable and does not become derailed into personal hobbyhorse dead-end sidings, I shall follow it with interest. Plase continue.

Riddle me these, Batman: How many politicians can walk through a sewer and come out teflon clean and smelling of roses? How many politicians can walk through a sewer unobserved? How many voters will care? That is an easy one, Robin: However many can afford the cleaning bill, only one at a time, and only those that did not vote for him.

How awful. He could simply have bought the opposition off, Illinois fashion. Much more democratic.

That question could have been asked every year since man first paused while butchering an animal and thought "hey, I wonder how that works? Then came up with an idea that satisfied the moment, then that later begged another question, and so on. Its true value may be in nothing more or less than the exercising of the imagination. Or perhaps science is beyond value, it just is.

Try Googling hugh piggott and or scoraig. He developed the idea, it is now the most popular homebrew wind alternator system. But it needs higher rpm than you get with a savonius, and the lower axial loads on a savonius don't really need something that beefy. Need larger diam. rotors to get higher rim speed. With 2' dia, blades, why not 2' dia rotor? plenty of room. allows for more magnets than a normal person can afford! On traditional horizontal axis mills they like to keep alternator dia. down to reduce wind drag. There are some really really good discusion boards out there on this stuff. Try "windstuff now" and "otherpower". Reluctant to say more, am fast approaching the limits of newbie idiocy. Don't want to give you wrong info. Good luck.

Go the whole way... wear a tinfoil hat, sit in the sweetspot of a pyramid, learn how to meditate and get your heartbeat down 10 per sec, live on organic water etc. Might work a bit, but what a life. A regular 70-80 years with pleasurable amounts of booze, fags and women is much more appealing to me.

That figure of $200 is pure wishful thinking.The cost of neodymiums and magnet wire alone can gobble that up in a mill to produce anything but hobby amounts of power. The blades are hand-carved, the alternator homebuilt usually based on a Volvo wheel/brake hub assembly, coils handwound. You have not included tower, storage batteries, (deep-cycle, expensive,) rectifiers, voltage controllers, etc. Now add in all the unpaid man-hours as well. Do some business studies having regard to normal cost and profit figures, add in the costs of the installation team and if even a very modest 200w outfit comes in, retail, at less than $2500 I would be surprised. The gulf between dreams and reality.

I think that home brewers also realise that the ethanol tolerance of a specific yeast can be slowly increased by slowly adding more sugar once the initial tolerance level has been reached. This indicates to me that alcohol tolerance is increased by training and gradual increments......any drunk can confirm that!!! Look to the humble yeast and learn his ways, oh ye mighty.

Yours sounds as if it might be something of a hybrid between savonius and Darrieus or even a centrifugal blower in reverse. The general concensus of the red-neck mountain dwelling off-gridders, through experience, seems to be that the horizontal axis traditional windmill type generally gets the most energy from a given moving air mass. The blades will always move faster than the wind because of their aerodynamic properties, but the savonius can not rotate faster than the wind. Because rpm =volts, the traditional mill also has an advantage there.

Homebrewed wind power is a wonderful illustration of the chasms between theory, practice, bangs per buck and wishful thinking. My present one, and largest, is an 8'x1' Savonius type (vertical axis) mounted on a draughty corner of my house. In a medium breeze, I get about 10w from it from my "standard" generator which is a dc motor used in reverse. The Savonius now working steadily and reliably, I am having much fun building and configuring small permanent magnet alternators and comparing their output.

Yes, commercial wind turbines are very expensive on a cost per watt basis, and that is just for the turbine. The battery storage and control circuitry is a whole extra money-pit. Unless you live on a really large plot in an area of medium to high windspeed away from whingeing neighbors or are off-grid so that anything is better than nothing, then they barely get out of the "street-cred" or "green cred" area. For a couple of years I have been lashing up various experimental configurations (always with the main aim of minimum cost and mechanical complexity). In a nutshell I can definitely say that with windpower, size is definitelyeverything, and if capital expenditure is an obstacle, then DIY is the way to go but no guarantee of success without much hard work and many setbacks along the way.

Completely agree with "bob", which my post #12 sought to emphasise.

That is surely just the human condition. In general we are sad, unworthy, selfish and violent. We either have to accept it and get on with it, or sit around in sackcloth and ashes, wailing and waiting for Armageddon. Or perhaps St. Obama will save you all? Dream on.

Indeed. Does not intelligence as measured by standard methods change with age? You might also consider the special abilities of SAVANTS and AUTISTICS.

Yes indeed. I tried to extrapolate that idea to the banking industry, but the banking industry has in fact ditched its old fashioned ideals/purpose, and become dependant upon new instruments which have not stood the test of time. So for banking, out with the new and back to the old, and for the auto industry out with the old and into the new. Opposite ideals. The investment costs for the auto industry would be horrendous however, and will not be available until the financial world sorts itself out. Catch 22?

I suggest the format of the question depends upon how much you already know. Is it a question requiring a refining answer, or implying complete ignorance. Perhaps the question is one of a series. Each question begetting another. Perhaps to phrase a question exactly requires knowledge of the answer, and therefore an exactly phrased question can only be rhetorical.

If I were to see it as simply friction, ( and drag) between moving water and fixed containment vessel, why would I be wrong? Oh, wait, a little reading indicates that friction plays little or no part in bernoulli's scheme. Hmmm.... Does it apply to only a narrow set of conditions?

Mulling it over, some "idiot" scenarios came to mind, all assuming the bigbang theory is correct. 1. There was one, and one only bb, and it gave birth to every single last dribble of energy in our universe. It seems reasonable that the bb, as the longest journey begins with a single step, began with the emission of a single photon which has been travelling at the cosmic speed limit ever since. Unimpeded. This implies that our universe is finite in volume at any one moment, but is capable of infinite expansion and thus volume as long as the primal photon continues unimpeded. 2. The present bb was preceded by a big crunch that did not sweep up all the previous debris. Thus it seems statistically likely that the primal photon was stoppd before it reached the limits of the debris of the preceeding bb. 3. If there has been a cycle of bbs/big crunches, and each left some debris, then each resulting known universe is smaller than the previous one, both in volume and matter. Sort of "nested" universes. So my answer at the moment would be, Which of the cycle of universes are you asking about? (going further down this improbable road, I find myself wondering whether with each bb the cosmic speed limiter is slowing down. All relative of course, from the frame of reference of one universe compared to another. Nothing to do with this thread, just rambling).

I am probably taking it out of context, but time is such a slippery eel, isn't it. The phrase ....."forget the notion of time altogether....." leads me to wonder whether time as we are taught it is in fact an analogy whose usefulness can be in doubt. Analogies are wonderful things to aid everyday understanding, yet failing to recognise when their veracity ends can be an obstacle to deeper understanding.

If you are looking for an argument over the various definitions of chaos, I am too tired. Might make an interesting thread, though. Why not start one?

Fear not, I was buying time. I hope my subsequent post full of questions hinted at my doubts. As a side-note, this thread and "Is relativity really necessary? Have helped me overcome my awkward squad aversion to the imposition of a cosmic (at least in our cosmos) speed limit. The phrase cosmic speed limiter comes easily to mind. Things would surely be too chaotic without it, and science does not like too much chaos.

Pioneer: I am digesting that post. I think we are possibly on the same wavelength. Do we have to explain mass being energy? Not if we think of mass being potential energy, and energy being potential mass, perhaps. At any one moment either one or the other, but never both at once. Energy moving from higher energy to lower energy? How about phrasing it as moving from an area of higher to lower potential? The resolution of space-time strain caused by unequal potentials? That seems to be a desirable mechanism. (Enter stage left the panoply of strain-resolving charge carriers). As for the accelerating universe, and we are considering the possibility that mass slows time, then how do we know that time is invariant? If our standard model is based on invariant time, and in fact it is not, how would we know.

Does he perhaps mean that if our notion of time depends upon the observation of movement, and unrestrained movement (within an unbounded environment) creates its own ever expanding and energy diluted space, and philosophically we don't like the idea of total entropy, we need gravity to restrain the expansion. Thus gravity could be said to restrain time as long as we measure time by movement. If energy, through entropy becomes mass, and mass begets gravity, I can imagine a closed-loop servo mechanism at work here. Apologies to Bombus if he did not mean something similar, and to anyone who is offended by my laymans terms.

If relativity, like God (I was not the first in this thread to mention it) did not exist, man would surely find it convenient to invent it, and indeed he has done both. Where would maths be with nothing finite, no limits, merely an infinity of infinities? why, we would even find it convenient to invent extra dimensions to tidy things up a bit. .....oh dear done that too. It seems to work so far, in the universe we know, as far as we know. I would love to live long enough to hear someone say "Well, it was ok while it lasted, but now we know it is old hat. Say thank you Mr. Einstein but it is time to move on"

A couple of random thoughts: 1. I am not completely clear as to the difference between pseudoscience and speculation, except perhaps that pseudoscience can be hilarious (once correctly identified). 2. Since Religion was booted out, the forum has been sanitised to a degree that has diminished its imagination-provoking qualities. Pseudoscience appears to be the next target on the hit list. What will be next? I think politics should, logically go too. It is not only not science, it is barely pseudologic. 3. The continuation of this road may lead to the point where the answer to any question raised could be simply to refer the inquirer to the most relevant standard text, and if there is none such, then the question must obviously be in the realm of pseudoscience. My opening remarks in the case for the defense, milud.