npts2020

Pangloss; Google national health care rankings. It doesn't matter who's figures you use but you will find the U.S. at or near the bottom of the industrialized world in the following; infant mortality, childhood mortality, maternal mortality, longevity, healthy life expectancy, mortality from preventable diseases. As I stated previously, I think these things are far more important than how fast my knee gets operated on after tearing a ligament. Jackson33; You can assert all you like that the private sector can make health care universal and for a lower cost than the government but I do not have such faith in the capitalist tendencies of the "free market". It is totally your right to believe that people are not entitled to any health care whatsoever if they can't afford it but that is not my view and we will just have to disagree on that point. Even if the government completely took over the health care system, people would still be able to buy insurance or purchase services in the open market on their own if they felt the coverage was inadequate.

TomBooth; Nice animation. Unfortunately the two things that will keep it from working in real life are; 1) you will require more energy than you can extract to raise your displacer piston. 2) if you are heating your exhaust from the turbogenerator, it will create a backflow from losing your vacuum as it heats up causing the turbine to stop. If you actually build one of these machines, you will see the truth of this, the laws of thermodynamics are very stubborn, I dare say even more stubborn than you are. If you can improve efficiency of an engine through this, it will still be worthwhile to build it but I am skeptical of even that. One thing I am absolutely certain of, is that it will not work the way you describe.

If you are going to say that abut Mohandas Gandhi I would like to see some references of proof. Or are you going to claim he wasn't a political figure? IMO Palin is simply the Republican attempt to co-opt the "tea party movement". She has already stated that she doesn't want to be part of forming another party. The biggest problem, I think, is how much media attention she gets. What other vice presidential (or presidential for that matter) has ever gotten this much coverage from a supposedly "liberal" media?

Pangloss; We do great at taking care of things that have become acute problems but rather poorly at preventing them to begin with. This is reflected in the relatively low levels of longevity and healthy life expectancy and high levels of infant, childhood, and maternal mortality. I suppose you can say "worst" is just my opinion but it is because I put more weight on the latter than the former. Jackson33; What happens when the privatized social security and medicare go out of business? Do we just tell all those people, tough luck you should have invested your retirement in a more robust corporation? If not, the government will be paying for it anyway so why allow someone to skim money off the top when those costs could be put toward keeping the cost of health care down? As it stands now we pay nearly twice as much for our mostly privatized health care as the most expensive government run system in the world. Is our health care twice as good?

Thanks for the correction. I was not considering the alphas and betas produced since they don't make it outside of the core into the water coolant. They do produce considerably more heat overall.

Tom Booth; I am a little surprised that you can't see why this won't work. Exactly!!! You will find that whatever means you are using to move your "displacer" requires more energy than can be extracted from the system.

It depends what you mean by "significant". Think about a bicycle pump and how it gets warm while pumping a tire. An electric air pump can give temperatures high enough to give you a nasty burn if you touch the outlet of the pump. I think it is possible you could recover some of the energy for use but it would be such a small amount of whatever you were using to produce it to begin with that it probably isn't worth having the added equipment necessary for it. I would have to do more math than I am willing to slog through to figure out an exact number but am guessing that you could only recover a couple of magnitudes of order less than 1% of the original energy expended.

Jackson33; I don't see how you can say that privatizing Medicare and Social Security will make anything better. Our health care system is mostly privatized as it is and provides some of the worst care at by far the most cost. Lack of ability to deal with "legacy" i.e. retirement costs is supposedly one of the biggest reasons GM and other companies are having financial woes. How has the private sector done any better job than the government in dealing with either one of these things?

I believe the OP is referring to a particular type of genetically modified eggplant.

AFAIK it is possible to use the full EM spectrum to produce electricity but there are ranges, particularly on the low end of the spectrum, where it is probably not practical to do so. Not all gamma radiation is high energy. For instance, visible light is not generally considered to be high energy. The reactors currently in widespread use do not primarily use gamma radiation, even though there is a lot of it, for heating water (which is where the energy is extracted from to make electricity), it is neutron radiation. The thermal reactors used for electrical generation work by heating water to make steam, which is put through a turbine, which turns a generator to make the electricity.

It should be pointed out as well that ~$350 million is the total amount of Greenpeace expenditures worldwide and that spending on their climate change program is only a small fraction of that.

Light does not have temperature, it has energy. Only substances with atoms have temperature. Light can impart some or all of its energy to a substance to increase the temperature of the substance. (c is not temperature)

Start applying for scholarship money. First place I would look is Pell grants.

I will leave it up to you about how to use sheets of crumpled paper but when you drop the egg, make sure you drop it with the narrow end pointing down. Also, the fresher the egg, the tougher the shell will be.

Owell, they removed the video from your link.

Talk about government control of the economy $3.7 trillion is about 1/4 of total expected GDP!!!

TomBooth; I well understand how turbines and refrigerators (even gas ones) work. The problem I have with what you are describing is that once a gas passes through a turbine, it is in a lower state of energy, cooler and less pressure. The pressure part is what will keep this from working. After going through the turbine any other gases will want to flow to the exhaust side of the turbine until it builds up pressure that is higher than somewhere it is able to flow. While a check valve would keep exhaust from flowing backwards into the turbine, you are building up pressure there, which will cause the turbine to stop turning. It might be an interesting and informative exercise to build a prototype but I would not be investing my lifes savings in this venture.

TomBooth; Why wouldn't this engine work even better in a furnace? You have even greater potential temperature differential than at atmospheric values. The other thing I am not understanding is why your heat sink will not become the same as ambient after while and no longer give you the differential required to make it run? This is not a trivial matter for operation of any power generator and is usually done by pumping great volumes of water, air or some other coolant through the sink. You may claim all you like that there is some magical differential in temperature and pressure but there has to be a mechanism to create and maintain it. What you are describing does not do it.

TomBooth; A turbine and an air tool both work from expanding a gas (air in this case) across a set of blades. A pressurized tank or pump provides the differential, causing cooling at the point of expansion i.e. frost on the air tool. In your turbine I am not understanding where you are getting a vacuum to draw warm (or any temperature) air through your turbine blades. If you are not familiar with thermodynamics, it would be well worth your while to learn about the subject before investing a lot of time and energy in what you are proposing. I think when you look closely, you will find that whatever is used to create the pressure differential to draw air through your turbine will use more energy than the turbine generates. In other words, you need a power source of some kind to run it because you don't get out what you put in. I do think that if you can even come up with a more efficient motor it would still be worthwhile, but I will believe it when I see it.

You certainly can measure things like that (the highlighted part). It is just inconvenient and not as accurate to do so.

The argument I like best is that reduced taxes lead to more revenue. Does that mean if we reduce taxes to zero we will have infinite revenue?

In addition to having more limited opportunities, I would think a fairly high percentage of the drop-outs did so at an age where they had no realistic chance of getting good employment because they were under 18. Idle youth=more crime, in most cases.

The two best things I have heard about it are that it will hook up to almost any kind of wifi network and has a 10 hour battery life under heavy use.

Why haven't they set up a non-profit foundation for donations to support ArXiv? It seems to me if they had a voluntary donation box to check to donate $1, $10, or $100 when you got to the homepage it would help them greatly. Even if only one in a thousand visitors donated $10 they would recoup over 80% of their budget.

Let me qualify this first by saying that I am not a mathematician but it seems to me that a point is the smallest part of a surface and not a surface in and of itself.