Flashman

Not I, I started a savings account with the ambition of becoming merely eccentric.

IMO, the problem is that capitalism is a headless monster, it does eventually learn from it's mistakes, but who wants to sit by and watch while it discovers burning up the planet or killing a couple of billion people isn't good business practice? So you have to keep it on a leash and give it a good yank when it's about to mindlessly trample something.

Just wondering, do you have a link to the webpage of that guy who's using the volvo parts to make alternators? I haven't been able to re-find it after seeing it a while ago. It sounds like your vertical axis rotor is like something I keep wanting to try, I figure that the walls of my house kind of act like a collector for stray breezes and a savonius rotor at a corner may be more effective than having a free standing one. I was hoping to get something like 500W out of something about 12' high by 2' diameter though.

In the language of the superintelligent being Station from Bill and Ted's bogus journey, that means ummm ... a thing that gets used when two women love each other very much... though you may have missed a slight inflection and meant "station" which is a genus of molluscs.

A wise man once told me... "Station marclar smurfing marclar smurfs"

Like this.. http://www.webcams.travel/google-earth/ this http://www.butterfat.net/goocam/ this http://www.cammap.net/ or this? http://www.pleasantweather.com/wx3/cam_map.php

Ah, yes that way works temporarily as long as it has hydrogen bubbles still attached to the electrode. If you knock the electrode while reconfiguring the wires or something, or have an electrode shape that the bubbles don't like to cling to, or kick the bench it's on or something, you'll have issues.

good point

The hydrogen rises to the surface of the electrolyte, there needs to be some means of reintroducing it at the electrode.

It's to do with the gravitation differential. The earth does not block the moons gravity, therefore on the opposite side of the earth to where the moon is, the moon "under your feet" is adding to the earth's gravity at that point. This makes an area of higher gravity, and water runs "down" the gravitational gradient to seek equilibrium. Then on the moon side, it's not so much that the moon is pulling the water, it's that the gravitational center of the earth moon system is displaced toward that side, making the area below the moon, the "lowest" point wrt to the center of gravity of the system, and again the water runs down the gravity gradient towards it. At least that's how I understand it.

This smells like homework, what are your thoughts?

What??? That violates the PEZ exclusion principle that states that PEZ may only be obtained during the months of May, June, July and August.

And you could run up walls like a gecko.

I don't really have a good plan yet, it's likely that it will be a dual or multiple stream process with more than one reaction vessel. Might even need some funky engineering like a centrifugal vortex gas separator to get H2 rich gas out of the output stream to use in a thermal depolymerisation reaction to break up tars, which might also be able to provide a methane rich stream for conversion to methanol.

My favorite prospect for "liquid wood" gasoline replacement is a blend of methanol and turpentines. Though you can probably further process pyrolysis oil into lighter fractions by cracking it. Sometime I'm going to look into making a wood fueled gas convertor that works as a turpene and methanol distiller at the same time. So what happens is, you can start the car at the same time as you fire the converter on stored liquid fuel, drive 15 mins, then switch to converter gas output, drive on convertor gas output, and meanwhile it's distilling off methanol and turpenes for the next start. It would be nice if you could implement electronic control and fuel handling such that it's pretty much transparent in use. You can theoretically get this working on any organic materials, grass clippings, rags, old tires, etc.

The first push would be against the astronaut's inertia, but since his mass is large relative to the mass of the spring, the velocity imparted to him from the reaction of imparting a wave into the slinky would be very small.

I slapped the internet around a bit with a google bat and this fell out... http://www.sparkbangbuzz.com/crt/crt6.htm

Gold was overvalued IMO should be around 550-600/oz. Anyone that knew that has been unloading gold like it was going out of fashion and picking up bargain basement blue chip stocks.

Wait up, I didn't think a solution could be centrifuged, only a suspension. Some alloys are solid solution and monocrystalline, those wouldn't be able to be centrifuged to any effect. Others are merely homogeneous mixtures, those type could be centrifuged.... but if any components of those form a solid solution, then those parts wouldn't separate.

I think we're still evolving, though not naturally and not in ways that are particularly desirable. There's quite a risk for instance that birth without caesarian section might become impossible for a large proportion of women.

If you're thinking, "in the vacuum of space there's no mechanical medium for waves to propagate" then unthink it, because the slinky is the medium. Oh... Not that there are not certain practical difficulties/inconveniences involved. The slinky is a very weak spring, so if the astronaut is attempting to string it between himself in freefall and the spacecraft he'll slowly get pulled towards the spacecraft. So it would be hard to be absolutely at rest wrt to the spacecraft while pulsing it. However it's so weak that probably a flick of a finger against the hull would send the astronaut quite a way out before the tension pulled him back again.

It probably just looks that way. Since the forums where the topic tends to crop up are probably frequented by the upper 30% anyway. Then only a relative fraction of those people might respond with a high score. I'd figure that if there was a compulsory IQ test to register here, the forum average would be around 110. However the internet in general probably doesn't appeal to the lower half much, since it demands reading comprehension skills to get much out of. This might be a historical thing, 15 years ago, most people who used the internet were in higher education and had an account through their institution.

Soot burns at a temperature of about 1100*C, peak flame temperature of gasoline and diesel is in the 1800-2000*C range, but Nitrogen oxides start forming around 1600*C. Soot could form if the temperature is damped enough, but is more usually the result of incomplete combustion due to insufficient oxygen. So if you can keep peak flame temperatures in the 1500*C range, you can burn the soot and avoid the NOx. I think that at high temperatures, the nitrogen will grab up the oxygen faster than any stray carbon can. It might be something to do with the flame front speed of carbon. Though it's fast enough that large, low RPM industrial diesels can be made to run on coal dust. Getting water/steam involved gets complicated, various cracking reactions can occur at temperatures of 850*C on any unburned hydrocarbons, free carbon can be converted to "water gas" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_gas ... However everything is very short lived and will re-react in milliseconds.

Phew 146, not met that format before, and thought I'd bomb Anyway, in tests with a general knowledge component you can improve scores for sure. I did those old Eyesenck tests in a Pelican paperback a few years back and got 148, but they were US centric I didn't know what states were neighbours etc, so could have scored better. That one I just did I couldn't remember whether Muhammed Ali had parkinsons or something else, which was a general knowledge question, so just a few random facts here and there make a lot of difference.

ET's space flivver blew a rad?