Thomas Kirby

The good news is that the battery will last quite a bit longer. A 2.4 volt .5 amp bulb is still going to be pretty bright, too.

That's not even close to a surprise. Both poles have icecaps the size of Texas. Is there supposed to be a magic dividing line on a planet that has 300 kilometer per hour winds?

I get the feeling sometimes that if straights knew how to be proud of themselves, as human beings even if they are straight or whatever, we wouldn't be having the problems with them that we do. By "we" I mean every class that is discriminated with, whether we are gay, handicapped, geeks, or whatever.

Not only could I do it, I could also physically drag his bad self out into an open area and strip him down to make sure that he was or was not carrying a bomb. I would simply assume that if had not set off the bomb by the time I grabbed him, he either had no bomb or it wasn't working. Live with it, Aardvark. That officer needs to go to jail and so do the people who ordered him to do what he did.

I'm going to quietly sneak away now.

I'm not in for a round of splitting hairs. So it's a proton and an electron and some small change.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert. However, neutrons are exactly that, a proton and an electron fused together, sometimes with some spare change. It says so in the third paragraph of Phi's wikipedia reference, where it says that a free neutron after 866 seconds decays to form a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino. Beta decay is when a neutron in the nucleus of an atom releases an electron and becomes a proton. The atomic number goes up while the atomic mass goes down a tiny fraction.

I'm not joking. I believe in the possibility. I am waiting to see the accomplishment of that possibility. I will not believe that it has been accomplished until I see a working model and have reviewed the work. A good test would be if a given working model could power a one hundred watt light bulb for several days from a small battery. It has to be unambiguous. Fancy manipulation of equations does not impress me. Another thing that would impress me would be an engine that could keep running for a long period of time with no energy input. Actually, I would also be pretty impressed with an engine that could run on ambient thermal energy even though it does have an energy input. I feel the same way about gasoline and steam engines, nuclear power, mass-energy equivalence, and so on. Since I have seen convincing demonstrations and a considerable amount of supporting material I can believe these things. I would always believe in these possibilities if they were at all reasonable. I have the actual demonstrations so I can believe that they have been accomplished.

Jdurg: I see. Of course, if you lose the ability to bring the gas into contact with the solution, the amount you have in a small volume doesn't do you much good. If you bubble it, you need small bubbles for a favorable ratio of surface area to volume. Anyone who has a little space can use a tank that contains a few thousand pounds of solution. A filter that contains a lot of water-based crystals of a metallic hydroxide will also bring a lot of surface area in contact with the gas. My favorite way to build something like that would be to crystallize the material, like the crystals you can get in some preparations from the store, and work it into some kind of paper or cloth filter something like a furnace filter or a water filter, and not even try to form it into something super high tech. Actually, just dip the filters in the chemical. To recharge them, wash them in clean water and dip them again. It might even work well in a wet environment if the fibers that the chemical is embedded in are absorbent, able to wick any dissolved chemical back up where it belongs. I like the idea of spraying plain water through the gas and warming that water in another place to force it to release the CO2. Cold soda holds a lot more fizz than soda that is at room temperature. I can't take personal credit for this idea. Also, this situation sounds about perfect for a Stirling engine and a linear alternator. Just burn the gas to heat water to power the Stirling engine to charge the batteries. This might also be a good time to think about the use of LED grow lights. They are extremely easy to build. You don't need as much ultraviolet as you might think, and some cheap LEDs emit enough to be usable, plus ultraviolet LEDS don't cost a lot either. There are actually three sets of wavelengths across the visible spectrum that chlorophyll uses. This has got to be a huge improvement over the use of fluorescents or halogens. No high voltage is needed. No lamp ballasts are needed. They generate extremely little RF noise. They generate very little heat. If you use a 12 volt source you can wire them in series in sets of three or four depending on your voltage drop. LEDs are much sturdier than any incandescent or fluorescent lamps. They last much longer, and do a slow fade instead of suddenly burning out. They start when cold without damaging themselves. They are very small and lightweight. Fixtures are already on the market but it's just as easy to make panels of them yourself.

We've got people all over the world who think that homosexuality is worse than this horrible barbaric violence that they use against homosexuals and people of other races and religions. Why doesn't someone try to find out what is wrong with THEIR brains?

The actual origin of the "Shout fire in a crowded theatre" quote, which people use as legal precedent to attempt to weaken arguments for greater protection of the right to freedom of speech. From the context it would appear that Justice Holmes supported punishing people for shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre that actually was on fire: Even such a forgiving simile as the one I just used is not appropriate. This is more like justifying the punishment of someone who notices the fire hazards that actually exist. As a public service he publishes articles and posts notices about these hazards. He also hopes that the theatre management might remedy some of these hazards. Illegal to write up opinions that the conscription act was unconstitutional? No wonder we are so screwed up.

That doesn't seem quite as effective as converting it to biomass using hemp and then piling the hemp on the ground, creating an artificial peat bog as a carbon sink.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert, just an enthusiastic amateur. I hope I'm not speaking out of turn, and I realize that you know chemistry better than I do, Jdurg. I have a couple of questions, though. Why does the sodium hydroxide have to be concentrated? I would think, and this may just be me, and I may be all wet, but maybe a more watery solution would be more suitable for the formation of small bubbles with a larger ratio of surface area to volume. Increase the viscosity of the solution, you get large bubbles for that "blurp-blurp" swampgas effect. For a source of lye and potash, wood ash can be had for free. That's a price that's hard to beat. CO2 would never settle to the bottom significantly within a holding tank, not ever. Convection currents in the gas would keep it mixed. Water will condense out and gather at the bottom of the storage tank. It needs to be drained somehow. A simple plastic sheet can help separate out a lot of the water in the gas, like a solar still. Water condenses on the sheet which is arranged to drip it back into the lye solution. Just cover the tank with the solution in it with sturdy transparent plastic, not particular about how transparent, and put a weight in the center. I would love to see someone invent a way to automatically clear water from the storage tank for the gas, but it's probably already on Google somewhere. Water traps can also be placed on the line between the tank and the heater. As always, it is good to do a Google search for these things. There is a lot of info out there. Search for the terms "biogas" and "water trap." One thing I've already picked up is that iron shavings can be used to take hydrogen sulfide out of the mix, which seems like a good idea. They also talk about the use of sprays of just plain water to remove carbon dioxide. This means you don't have to buy, handle, or dispose of any chemicals at all to remove CO2. This is actually getting to be pretty well established technology and there is a lot of prior art out on the web. The best, I would think, would be those that do a job like scrubbing CO2, H2O, H2S, and other undesirables without using any consumables other than water and very little energy. Second best are consumables that are cheap and easy to obtain, do not have to be changed often, and are not hazards to the environment when disposed of.

Someone else in this thread stated that the police didn't announce themselves to the man. The rest I got from the Yahoo article that I put up a link to. Plainclothes police subdued the man and then shot him to death at point blank range. They decided that he had no connection to the bombings after they had executed him in this manner. How does it occur to you to label all of this as my fantasy when I got it from a news article on Yahoo? I can't see altering the rules of engagement. A suicide bomber is going to hold off detonating his bomb because he was tackled in the wrong place? The idea insults my intelligence. When the mission is compromised, he would go for killing as many infidels as he could where he could, and not hold back because he could only get ten of them. My take on it is, and I am repeating myself, if he didn't detonate a bomb while they were chasing him, he either couldn't detonate it or he didn't have one. There is no ding-dong safety issue there. There is no usable bomb if it didn't go off before the officer tackled him. Am I going to have to go to London and do their heavy thinking for them? It would be slightly more effective to have snipers posted at every train station ready to shoot in the head any bombing suspect pointed out to him by a bobby on the ground. If they ever actually do it, a good citizen, not a coward like me, would make a game of finding said snipers and destroying them. A fact is that the police do go around carrying weapons while out of uniform. Is there anyone here who is unclear on what the term "plainclothes" means?

So now not only do we have a lot of DU flying around, we have a gigantic pain in the ass for the technicians. Does anyone bother to measure the gamma ray flux around these things, by the way? Anyway, tracking that crap takes a lot of hours and money that is difficult to get back. I'd rather see that time and money go into aircraft safety. You can bet whatever you have in your bank account that the monitoring requirements are going to be placed ahead of other aircraft maintenance requirements because that's just how the government feels about such things as uranium. Clue: Just don't screw with the stuff in the first place. Evade the requirements by not messing with the material in the first place. Figure out how to use bismuth or tungsten. You'll make back the money anyway because you don't have people having to screw around with the uranium. You get rid of a hidden cost. The necessity for government monitoring of this stuff just makes the situation even worse. I was already sick of government poking its nose into everything. This also underlines the fact that the government does consider this stuff to be a hazardous material. If they knew for sure that it was safe, they would let me haul a few tons of it home to play with. I'm paranoid. I'd love to have it to use to shield me from microwave bombardment, X-rays, and millimeter radar, even if a hundred tons of it might be a pretty good emitter of gamma rays itself. I done been told it's safe, haven't I? The idea of putting this stuff in an X-ray apron is just plain lame. Stainless steel shot would work just as well. If it just has to be dense, I could get us some bismuth, the same metal that goes into our favorite pink stomach medicine. Whatever way I go, the apron can only weigh so much. Mass is what shields us from X-rays, so mass it is. The biggest benefit a bunch of DU has is that it is refined metal. You can work it like any other metal within limits. When you don't have to refine it down from ore, you save yourself a lot of time and money. If you have a company with a permit to use the stuff in ton quantities, one day you can report a lot of it "stolen." So what happens when you dissolve a bunch of this in nitric acid and electroplate it onto aluminum foil or sheet? This of course presumes that the nitric acid is completely used up before you start electroplating to the foil. If that works you don't even have to work the uranium. Argonne National Laboratory has succeeded in using uranium as the cathode in a water solution. Others report success electroplating uranium onto other metals. DU weights, according to the NRC, are not monitored, have been sent to scrap yards, and they rely on a legal prohibition but not monitoring to prevent people from tampering with them. A very relevant passage in this document is this: The current exemption does not expressly prohibit transfers to any persons, including scrap yards or recyclers. This means that the current NRC exemption from licensing of possession of DU does not, as it says, prohibit an airline from simply selling it to anyone they please. It certainly doesn't prevent someone from simply stealing some. U-238 is also good for fusion-fission-fusion bombs because even if capture is low, there are enough neutrons to go around. This is a use that has actually been tested. While I'm at it, even as much as I dislike the proliferation of nuclear materials, I wish we had put some real nuclear powered spacecraft up by 1970. Right now it seems so half-ass. If we're going to get irradiated anyway, why not do something real with it? Getting off the planet and mastering our own solar system is something we already need to do badly. Also, the crack about radiation and cockroaches meant that things will get really bad before anyone does anything about it. Even when we realize that the toughest little mites are moving out of the way or dying, I think it's going to be hard to break the mental apathy.

Ice Phoenix, I don't know exactly what you want. It might be easier to buy zinc sulphide mail order or online if you want to use it for it's fluorescing properties. It reacts under UV light with a faint green glow, other ionizing radiation and neutrons, and electricity. It's used for green screen oscilloscopes like mine. If you just want to experience making the stuff, I can help you there, too. A bench grinder is a noisy piece of machinery that attaches to a workbench or other fairly sturdy table at a convenient height, about waist high. It is mostly a fractional horsepower electric motor and typically has a grinding wheel on either side of it, or a grinding wheel on one side and a wire wheel on the other. Trying to produce powdered metal from that is tricky. At speed it burns most metals to ash, even iron, and material from the wheel gets into the mix. Zinc is soft enough to rub with a file and get a fairly clean powder from. I think that the best way to make small amounts of powder, and this won't work with every metal, is to build an electrolytic cell. Make a solution of zinc sulfate and run electricity through it, pure DC. It is better if the anode is a fair sized chunk of zinc. Then the zinc is transferred through the solution from anode to cathode without changing the composition of the zinc sulfate. Electroplating is an art, and it's hard to avoid the metal simply becoming a powder when it deposits out. A powder is what you want, so that's OK. One problem is that this is a very fine powder. The finer your powder is, the more sensitive it is. An ounce is an awful lot of flash powder. It's about five hundred fire-crackers worth, if you call fifty milligrams a fire-cracker. Once they get going, zinc and sulfur react quickly and release a lot of energy. I would mix it only in small amounts, use all sorts of protection, especially for hands, eyes, and lungs, which doesn't leave much out. For a surface to react this on that won't contaminate the mix, steel probably won't work, glass maybe, pyrex (a sort of tempered glass) or glazed ceramic, pretty good. Sturdy dishes and plates of glazed ceramic that are pretty cheap can be found at my local Wal-Mart. They're as cheap as squares of ceramic tile and have raised rims that can prevent material from scattering. You really can't heat the mixture through thick ceramic or glass. Direct flame might work if you can turn it down enough to keep it from blowing away the powder. A wooden match held just above the mix, using tongs, might be the best thing to touch it off with. If you have direct sunlight where you live, you can heat it with a magnifying glass. Some radiant heaters are hot enough.

So, Jdurg, you think that there is adequate monitoring of the U-238 that is used in forklifts and as ballast for boats and aircraft? My God, even knowing that U-238 is incorporated into aircraft, not only making them well-balanced, but also making them into the world's largest tank penetrator rounds... When did I ever say it was easy? Why would it have to be easy? I'm not paid enough to try to sneak a few tons of DU into a cave and hammer or otherwise work it into thin sheets. I don't have the money to build a bunch of Farnsworth fusors to irradiate it to convert a portion of it into Pu-239, nor would I try this with more than a milligram or so, and a milligram may be more than I want. However, someone with a lot of time on his hands and some funding could find a way to get this breeder reactor going. Thin sheets of uranium, aluminum pressed right up against it, stack it with some form of carbon in thin sheets, and pile it up higher and higher. Put it inside a large enough mass of the stuff, and a neutron will either be captured or split a nucleus and continue the reaction. I would rather deal with this possibility now on my own terms than wait for the government to make the mess out of it that it usually does. It's a little too simple: Don't spread the stuff around. It should have all been kept under guard forever. It never should have been used in bullets, tank armor, or anything. It should never have been allowed to be spread around the world in ton quantities. We talk big about how we need these technologically superior rounds but much of the equipment we sent into Iraq couldn't even be driven on sand and why did we even have a ground war when we are supposedly so technologically superior anyway?

Aardvark: The criterion here is if the police officer thinks the man might be carrying a bomb. In our only example of the use of this policy, an innocent man was shot dead on suspicion. He was shot to death by a plainclothes officer who apparently did not announce that he was police. The fleeing man most likely believed that he was being approached by a gang who was going to rob and kill him, or by terrorists who were going to kill him. What would I think if a terrorist had an opportunity to blow up the station because someone failed to shoot a suspect in the head? I would think that we had to do things our way, not their way. Their way is murdering innocent people.

I'm a total believer in the possibility of perpetual motion machines. Why don't you build a working model?

And I just had to say this, because it just occurred to me. I wonder how long it will be before someone notices that a given area contaminated by DU HAS A CONSPICUOUS LACK OF COCKROACHES?

Uh, yeah, but aren't suicide bombers pretty exclusively Islamic? Don't infidel police officers count as hard targets for the fagans who send those poor boys out? I cannot possibly accept as right the idea that a bombing suspect should be shot in the head to try to save lives. The first one they did it to, they have already admitted to be innocent of any involvement in bombing. He ran away from plainclothes officers who may well have been pretty scruffy looking to "blend in" in an area where there may be gangs. Well, any strange city could have gangs near a subway terminal if it isn't the highest rent district. His running away was justifiable. Shooting on suspicion is not. It does go to prove that Islam can make dogmeat of Christian civilization pretty easily. They can psyche us to the max and we just can't let go of it, some of us are willing to kill those who want us to behave sanely, and we're more screwed than a team of mixed-gender underage prostitutes at a Republican convention. With wellies on. It is our fault that we are this easy to do it to because we don't want to be any better than that. We even think it's a capital crime to be better than that. Myself, I'm willing to try being the person or persons who behave more sanely than that, but a lot of my friends might kill me or lock me up for it. And just for abeefaria: You haven't the slightest clue what real men would do about a thing like this. I am very well going to stand in your way. What you said in the post above mine is just downright creepy. Don't let concerns like innocence get in our "way", or concerns that the person who is running away may well believe that some kind of terrorist death squad is after him, like they used to do in their home country. Shoot them all, God will sort them out and justify us. That sounds so sick.

If the terrorist was already prepared to die by detonating a bomb that he was carrying, he wasn't going to hold off just because the police nabbed him before he reached his destination.

No, psychopathy led them to believe that they had only those choices. That, and stupidity. Anyone who was carrying a bomb and could trigger it would have triggered it while they were chasing him. And I am perfectly willing to "risk the possible deaths" to keep from committing murder myself, which is what the police did in this case. They just plain committed murder, and in a pretty bad way.

Once the suspect was in the tube station, there was no other course to follow? If he did not set off a bomb just before the police took him down, that is because he either had no bomb to set off or the bomb wasn't working. Either way, it was definitely safe to not shoot to kill a man who they had already restrained. At a time when we most need our thinking abilities, those who are in power seem to have used the crisis as an excuse to abandon these abilities, as have a significant portion of the population. If one of my neighbors decided that I looked like the current type of demon who is in the news tonight and decided to blow me away because of that, it wouldn't be the first or last time humans have done this. Because we have used our brains just a little bit, a lot of the English-speaking world lives in a sort of island of stability that has at least a modicum of real civilization to it. Part of what makes this work is the somewhat lessoned influence of superstition and hatred. From what I've seen the last few years, a lot of us hunger for the good old days when it was acceptable to set old ladies and young women on fire for being a little different. A lot of us are addicted to the drumbeats of war. A lot of us approve of the idea of the police blowing through a lot of innocent lives just in case any of them might be a bomber, which some of us seem to literally be saying. If it looks like a bomber, kill it. For some of us, this kind of life is not acceptable and is not worth living, whatever excuse people give for acting like this. My message is: Grow the hell up, people. This isn't playing cops and robbers with rubber darts. People get hurt and die when we get stupid, and in a lot greater numbers than the terrorists ever managed. Iraq didn't do 9/11, they hate the guts of the people who did. The U.S. got stupid and murdered tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis using 9/11 as a call to war, and those alleged weapons of mass destruction which George Bush II knew didn't exist, and I think a lot of us, even me, feel an urge to start lobbing atom bombs all over the Middle East, and I can't completely count on even myself not to get stupid and start writing the President asking him to please incinerate Iran and Syria before they do bad things to us. I keep hoping that people will wake up and start to straighten out, even if I think we're dogmeat because of things like the shooting in London. Even if it seems rather immoral, selfish, and somehow against God, I'd kind of like a few decades or even centuries of us not killing each other a while, government not being corrupt, people having jobs and stuff, and for the psychopaths who seem to run the world to get some help.

The police who shot the Brazilian, according to this article , were plainclothes. Today, not only does a man not have the right to run away from police without being murdered, neither does he have the right to run away from what may look to him like a gang of thugs. I completely sympathize with him. I come from a small town in Kansas and I used to have to run from a gang of thugs all the time. He couldn't know that he was facing a shoot-to-kill policy. This doesn't even sound like anything he could have done would have stopped him from being killed. If he had not run, I think they would still have held him down and gunned him to death. Just to make it a little worse, Brazil is famous in very recent history for sending death squads into people's homes. The ones who issued the orders and the policemen who actually performed the shootings should face the worst kinds of murder charges in this case. I don't care about the alleged extenuating circumstances in this case. In this case the police are the ones who should have known better. They need to be taught better.