npts2020

They are using natural gas to power the ones at google and e-bay but may be doing it more efficiently than a coal fired plant. The problem is that they are pretty expensive and it looks like those companies are going to be 6-10 years at recovering their investment the way it stands now. IMO it is better than most of the technology we are now using but not by a great amount and no better than most sustainable sources.

Be happy they rate gems that way, otherwise, a decent manufactured diamond would cost even more than it does.

How about a water filled container? Figure out a drainage rate in drops per minute and count the number of drops, you should be able to adjust the rate to whatever rate you desire. More drops will be harder to count but more accurate if done right. As long as your reservoir is much greater than the amount of water you use the drainage will have negligible effects on accuracy.

TomBooth; It is not really correct to equate Coefficient of Performance with Efficiency. However, I see what you are getting at about a heat pump or drinking birdy (which still requires a heat sink and source to work). The problem is that they both operate at such a narrow range of relatively low temperatures that extracting work in this manner is always a pretty inefficient enterprise. I say build a model. If a small scale machine works, it can always be scaled up. Even a slightly more efficient motor would be a worthwhile thing to have invented but I am very skeptical about being able to do it using the method described.

Since the military is such a waste of money, does that mean we should privatize it? Would the government then just bid on the contractor it felt was best for providing the services required?

Sometimes they are even used for optics that require high clarity lenses. It is because they don't have impurities to give them color, that they are considered to be inferior gem quality, IIRC.

A spring with a ratchet mechanism is how most wind-up watches and many clocks work. You could probably even find an alarm clock to get one out of for only a few bucks or less.

TomBooth; Increasing temperature/pressure differential is input. Whether it is more or less is not what is relevant. What is relevant is that you account for that input in your equations. This is what will cause you to get less energy out than you put in, like any other engine. I did not watch the video for lack of patience (vids generally, not just that one) but the last reference is using solar energy as the input I have just described, look at the picture and description. It is much different from what we have been discussing.

What is NASA going to do then?

If your own senses, experience, and reasoning ability are inadequate proof I would suggest that you are in the wrong forum since nobody elses senses, experience and reasoning ability is likely to satisfy you. Why is it you think there is any great secret on the other side of the sun anyway? Every time I have ever been there it looks almost identical to any other place in Earth's orbit.

I agree that in most western countries any competent engineer usually has not trouble finding employment. However, most of the terrorist sort seem to come from third world countries where there might not even be any employment in their field. I don't know what immigration policies are elsewhere but it is fairly difficult to get a work visa or citizenship to come to America.

1)Possibly, but to extract useful work will require far more input. 2)This will stop eventually from the ice melting for the same reason as removing the candle in the first one. I would have taken a very long time to come up with the equations Mr. Skeptic gave you but it would be well worth your while to at least understand how they are derived and what they are measuring. The only thing you have to be careful of is including all of the variables.

TomBooth; Once you remove the candle from the Stirling compressor in your link, it will stop working. The same will happen in any compressor once the mechanism of whatever pressure/temperature differential you have is removed. You can have a gadzillion atmospheres of pressure differential to begin with but as soon as you take away whatever it is that you used to get that high differential to begin with, you begin losing that pressure and eventually the machine will stop.

Very interesting, ajb, thanks. It is surprising to me that this has not been done before.

I wonder how they arrived at the conclusion since every time waterboarding has ever come up in a legal situation prior to the Bush administration, it has been considered torture.

Like Jackson33 highlighted, not the current one. Having said that, I will assert that you are far more likely to change government than capitalism and feel comfortable that nobody can prove me wrong.

Way to go, Pangloss. The first of many, I hope.

I thought for something to be science, it had to be falsifiable? What kind of experiment would prove/disprove creationism?

Your legs cannot possibly supply enough force to overcome Earth's gravity, hence you fall back to the ground. Objects in orbit are moving orders of magnitude faster than the human body can go on its own. There are mathematical formulas for determining what speed an object needs to travel to maintain a constant orbital distance and the planets are very close to that speed with relation to the sun. Much faster and the planet flies away from the sun, much slower and it gets sucked into the sun. In either case it will travel in a spiral until something stops it from doing so (like crashing into the sun).

In my (probably wrong) opinion, time is a completely artificial construct, like mathematics. It is merely a description of a phenomenon i.e. change, and not really a property of anything like mass or charge. Distance (size) is a physical property of something and this is why it can't be equated with time. Just my two cents.

offmason; The problem with using a spring is that it contains no potential energy until you expend energy to wind/compress it. Once you do that you will get all of the energy you put in back out minus friction, inelasticity, etc. It is the same for any system, just sometimes not as easy to visualize.

With all of the responses above I feel kind of like I am piling on but would like to comment anyway. The reason I would entrust a government (definitely not our current one) to make decisions for me is the same reason I would see a doctor about my health or a car manufacturer (via a dealer) to obtain transport. I would expect either of those entities to know more about what I am going to them for than I know about the subject myself and what I don't know or understand I can ask enough questions to cure my ignorance. An openly democratic government would work much the same way.

National Biscuit Company biscuits of course!

How about Artificial Intelligence Psychoanalysis?

One thing the article does mention is, that engineers who become terrorists are generally unemployed by the time they resort to it. It would be an interesting study to dissect the psychology and see what similar traits exist in both that are not as commonplace in other professions.