Re: [Vo]:Thermacore paper on web
2009/1/27 Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com: Michel Jullian wrote: Have you tried Google Desktop? It did not work well for me. Initially I thought it didn't work well for me either, it crashed the machine, but as I guessed correctly that was due to it trying to access parts of my disk which were corrupted. After repairing the disk it indexed it in a few days and since then (April 2008) it has been working like a charm. Being able to Google one's own disk as easily as the internet feels paradoxically quite extraordinary. Particularly useful when it contains a vast collection of text mode or OCR'd pdf papers unavailable on the web! Michel
Re: [Vo]:Calculation of permittivity and permeability in charged gases
Some will remain on the gas if the wall is an insulator I guess... bottled charged gas, what a concept :) 2009/1/29 mix...@bigpond.com: ... The problem with net charge on a gas, is that it has to be in some form of container, and I suspect the charge will end up on the wall of the container rather than on the gas. ...
Re: [Vo]:TO: Jed; MAYBE Pickens is NOT so wrong about SO-CALLED HYBRID trucks
Excerpts: decreased emissions by roughly 32% and fuel consumption by up to 37% as compared to conventionally-powered trucks in Coca-Cola's current fleet. Coca-Cola also reported lower maintenance costs on the hybrid-powered trucks. ... Eaton's hybrid system for city delivery applications uses a parallel, pre-transmission design with Eaton's Fuller UltraShift automated transmission. Primary components are the Hybrid Drive Unit (HDU), which combines a clutch, a 44 kW/420 Nm motor/generator and automatically controlled manual transmission; the motor inverter/controller; the DC/DC converter; and a 2 kWh li-ion battery pack from Hitachi. 37% fuel consumption reduction with only 2kWh storage, most impressive if it's not a typo! 2009/1/28 mix...@bigpond.com: In reply to Jed Rothwell's message of Tue, 27 Jan 2009 14:45:08 -0500: Hi, See http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/02/coca-cola-order.html
Re: [Vo]:Real Hybrids are Cool!
Interesting post, although all the shouting (caps) makes it quite an ordeal to read. Natural gas= methane would be great indeed, especially if it was made from biomass, which could be grown massively and cheaply on the Sargasso Sea (cf Eye Of The Gyre discussion a few months back) Michel 2009/1/27 Harbach Jak ja.harc...@hotmail.com: Jed: If those heavier trucks are indeed going hybrid fuel-electric that would indeed be excellent. What I'm thinking though is that 30% less-consumption upgrade is the simple addition of 'California' type modifications that Detroit mostly has not bothered to apply to larger heavy-hauling trucks here-to-fore. I know that Picken's simple upgrade solution for the immediate stage of converting ALL HEAVY TRUCKS immediately to a tried true established NATURAL GAS CARBURATION SYSTEM in ONE STROKE goes quite a bit beyond even the 30% less-consumption that has been claimed. I've driven this system on a day to day basis via an established regional NATURAL GAS-STATION grid and it worked as quick, easy, safe as the current standard commercial gasoline pumping service-station system that we are familiar with. MY OAKIE GRANDFATHER was one of the first engineers to BUILD THAT INITIAL GRID gasoline SERVICE-STATIONS for SINCLAIR/ATLANTIC RICHFIELD and his field office was in EL PASO, TEXAS. He would have told us that it would BE A BREEZE to upgrade the current Service-Station system to NATURAL-GAS virtually overnight! IN ONE SHORT INFRASTRUCTURE STROKE we would be ENERGY INDEPENDENT though that would be 'not quite green' it would BE A BOLD FIRST STEP in that direction. And that is pretty much what the Pickens Agenda forwards. These old guys that MANAGED TO GET THE GAS out've MOTHER EARTH are a PRETTY TOUGH PRAGMATIC LOT. And that these old guys REALLY HAVE THE VISION to develope a GREEN GRID FOR REAL where the RUBBER MEETS THE ROAD is a GOOD THING methinks! AND EVEN BETTER PER PICKENS if those trucks went NATURAL-GAS/ELECTRIC true hybrids then that '30%' would more likely be DOUBLED and the SHEIKS would not have their HOOKS in our collective arses. But I'm CURIOUS AS YOU to get a 'peek' under the hood; in that I'M FROM MISSOURI! BEST WISHES!~;-) Jake Hotmail(R) goes where you go. On a PC, on the Web, on your phone. See how.
[VO]:Chicken Little The Sky is Falling
Give the fuzzy headed a little money and they will use it to promote more money.. until, on occasion,.. they create a forum so huge that the world gets caught up in it. Demonstrates how a random Al Gore with a money making agenda can masquerade as a greenie screaming the sky is falling and panic all the fools in town. With a 800 billion stimulus package loaded with pork working thru congress, a piece of the sky just crashed thru the roof of the Dime Box Saloon, busted all the whiskey bottles and scattered all the cards on the poker table. Now we don't know who won and who was cheating, besides having to sober up. There is a bright side.. Bar B Que chicken will be on the free lunch today. Richard http://www.weforum.org/en/media/Latest%20Press%20Releases/GreenReportPR
[Vo]:Pickens wrong about trucks
Robin van Spaandonk wrote: IMO the problem isn't that people have a death wish, but rather that they have so little imagination that they don't understand/believe what's going to happen, until it does, and even if they do believe it, they think it will happen to someone else, not to them. Some are so stupid, they don't even understand it when it's happening to them. A few individuals do have vision (many on this list), but they have the devil's own job trying to convince the rest. This is the downside of Democracy - rule by the sheeple. Hi All, You will enjoy the below enclosure. Jack Smith -- http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec08/psolman_10-21.html ``As the financial sector shifts, so does the reach of the jolt to economic structures around the world. Economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his mentor, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, speak with Paul Solman about chain reactions and predicting the financial crisis ... PAUL SOLMAN, NewsHour Economics Correspondent: We sat down with one of the world's hottest investment advisers these days, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, ... and the man he calls his mentor, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, pioneer of fractal geometry and chaos theory ... NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: I don't know if we're entering the most difficult period since -- not since the Great Depression, since the American Revolution ... PAUL SOLMAN: Professor Mandelbrot, can that possibly be true? BENOIT MANDELBROT, Mathematician: It's very serious. PAUL SOLMAN: More serious than the Great Depression, possibly? BENOIT MANDELBROT: Possibly. I hope not. PAUL SOLMAN: Mandelbrot's key insight came in the '60s with a study of cotton price surges and plunges, suggesting the world moves in fits and starts, especially the human world. Decades later, after the stock market crash of 1987, Taleb came to the same conclusion. He appeared on the NewsHour two years ago to help explain the death of a hedge fund before the current crisis. He dubbed the event a black swan, impossible, Europeans had always thought, because they'd never seen one. NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: We saw a lot of white swans. Every white swan was confirming that, you know, hey, all swans were white. PAUL SOLMAN: Taleb's book, published in April 2007, was called The Black Swan because, in 1697, Dutch explorers discovered Australia and black swans. NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: And, sure enough, they saw that black version and said, Hey, one single observation, OK, can destroy thousands of years of confirmation. So, likewise in the markets, all you need is one single bad month to destroy years of track record. PAUL SOLMAN: In the book, Taleb wrote, The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crises less likely. But when they happen, they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. True, we now have fewer failures, but, when they occur, I shiver at the thought. NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: The banking system, the way we have it, is a monstrous giant built on feet of clay. And if that topples, we're gone. Never in the history of the world have we faced so much complexity combined with so much incompetence and [mis]understanding of its properties. PAUL SOLMAN: But there's been complexity before. There has been overextension of credit before. We've had crashes in American history many times before. We're a resilient system. Won't we pull out of it? NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: Let me tell you why it's not like before. Look at what's happening. The world is getting so fragile that a small shortage of oil -- small -- can lead to the price going from $25 to $150 ... NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: ... We live in a world that is way too complicated for our traditional economic structure. It's not as resilient as it used to be. We don't have slack. It's over-optimized. PAUL SOLMAN: What do you mean by over-optimized? NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: ... It's vastly more optimal to have one large bank than 10 small banks. It's more efficient. PAUL SOLMAN: Well, we've certainly seen the consolidation of the industry. NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: Exactly. And that consolidation is what's putting us at risk, because we are -- when one bank, large bank makes a mistake, OK, it's 10 times worse than a small bank making a mistake. PAUL SOLMAN: ... The butterfly somewhere disturbs a little bit of air and, halfway across the world, a tornado hits or something, right? Is that what we're talking about here? BENOIT MANDELBROT: Certainly very similar. The word turbulence is one which actually is common to physics and to social scientists, to economics. Everything which involves turbulence is enormously more complicated, not just a little bit more complicated, not just one year more schooling, just enormously more complicated. PAUL SOLMAN: Turbulence is why, because it's badly understood, weather forecasters can't necessarily get it right. BENOIT MANDELBROT: Precisely. In fact, the basic --
[Vo]:LENR vids
No doubt Steve has mentioned this in his newsletter, but in case any Vo's have missed the reference Steve Krivit has put 15 or so videos related to LENR on YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/user/StevenKrivit
Re: [Vo]:Pickens wrong about trucks
On Jan 29, 2009, at 5:27 PM, mix...@bigpond.com wrote: In reply to Horace Heffner's message of Thu, 29 Jan 2009 13:38:49 -0900: Hi, [snip] The reason Si is such a great element for energy transportation and storage is, if you look at energy production on a global basis, there is so much of it cheaply available in desert areas, where the solar energy to refine it is located. And it has a double whammy - money is to be made on both the energy and the byproduct. This is a fairly quickly implementable scheme for power utilities, and the economics certainly *were* there if they aren't now, and should be there again soon. Availability would be an important bonus, however according to the Wiki page on silanes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silane), silane is toxic, and also pyrophoric. The latter would probably prevent its use as an automotive fuel, since any accident leading to a tank rupture would instantly result in a fire (not sure about the heavier silanes). [snip] Similar dangers exist for compressed natural gas (CNG). In fact, quick ignition of natural gas in the case of an accident might prevent large explosions. CNG is compressed to 3000 PSI, thus the energy released by a broken tank can turn the tank into a high energy projectile, so that too is of concern. I certainly must agree that I wouldn't want to be filling up a car tank with silane gas, due to the fact any leaks would tend to explode (pop) or catch fire! 8^) My point in mentioning silane and tetrasilane was mainly to point out there is a variety of silicon based fuels or feed stocks that are analogs to carbon based fuels. By enviromentally friendly I meant in terms of carbon use and CO2 generation. The actual proposal I referenced was to ship pure solid silicon, possibly coated or encapsulated to avoid reaction with air or water. See (again): http://tinyurl.com/cuaryk However, silane is manufactured and shipped for use in a variety of industrial processes. It is a gas at STP so has the advantage it can be shipped by pipeline. I wouldn't see silane gas as a good prospect for powering motor vehicles, but it might have application for large scale power. Silane has application in making thin silicon coatings, which has application in solar cell manufacturing. [Btw, also check out Fig. 6 on page 7 of the above reference for an interesting perspective on energy density vs safety of various fuels.] Silane is not very toxic. It is mainly an irritant. See the MSDS: http://www.vngas.com/pdf/g97.pdf The handling toxicity risk seems comparable to gasoline or MTBE: http://msds.chem.ox.ac.uk/OC/octane.html http://msds.chem.ox.ac.uk/BU/tert-butyl_methyl_ether.html In global trades, solid silicon provides an alternative to shipping anhydrous ammonia, which can be extremely hazardous. Silicon does have a problem in that in the event of a shipwreck it can form ammonia when exposed to water and air. For long term damage to the environment this is not as bad as oil, but it would be pretty hazardous to the crew I would think, but not as hazardous as liquid anhydrous ammonia. Adequate encapsulation should prevent the major risks of exposure to water and air for the silicon. It seems to me a feasible scheme to run power plants with solid Si. An alternative means of solar energy storage and transport is to directly create anhydrous ammonia. This takes less energy than making hydrogen, creates a liquid product for transport, and the ammonia is valuable for fertilizer production, and other chemical feed stock uses, as well as for energy production. Anhydrous ammonia is currently shipped by barge, truck and ship, despite the obvious safety concerns. I would think encapsulated solid silicon would be a big step up in safety, as would some silicon compounds. Unless some very good means of storing hydrogen is found, silicon and silicon compounds appear to provide a means to convert world energy production to renewable means, i.e. solar and wind, using existing technology now. No great scientific discoveries required. Makes me wish it were my idea. 8^) OTOH, it is just another idea out there waiting for the right opportunity, and may never have its day. Best regards, Horace Heffner http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
[Vo]:Iron Fertilization To Capture Carbon Dioxide Dealt A Blow
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090128183744.htm http://tinyurl.com/adzyce Best regards, Horace Heffner http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
Re: [Vo]:Thermacore paper on web
On Jan 30, 2009, at 1:07 AM, Michel Jullian wrote: 2009/1/27 Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com: Michel Jullian wrote: Have you tried Google Desktop? It did not work well for me. Initially I thought it didn't work well for me either, it crashed the machine, but as I guessed correctly that was due to it trying to access parts of my disk which were corrupted. After repairing the disk it indexed it in a few days and since then (April 2008) it has been working like a charm. Being able to Google one's own disk as easily as the internet feels paradoxically quite extraordinary. Particularly useful when it contains a vast collection of text mode or OCR'd pdf papers unavailable on the web! Michel It might be a good idea to chack what rights you gave to Google regarding the data, possibly even when you signed up for gmail. Best regards, Horace Heffner http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
Re: [Vo]:LENR vids
At 07:31 AM 1/30/2009, you wrote: No doubt Steve has mentioned this in his newsletter, but in case any Vo's have missed the reference Steve Krivit has put 15 or so videos related to LENR on YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/user/StevenKrivit Hi Jones, Actually, I hadn't mentioned it in the magazine yet. You beat me to it... :) I'm just beginning to build the online collection. Initially I was primarily posting videos to Google Video. They have two advantages: 1) larger default viewing window 2) No 10-minute length limit on videos. But I am now beginning to favor Youtube despite their 10-minute limitation. Why? Like you pointed out, it is simple to point to one contributor's group of videos. I don't know if there is a way to do that on Google Video. I have tried to put new energy institute into all my Google videos, so this search will show the 74 that I have up there right now: http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=new+energy+instituteemb=0aq=faq=f#q=%22new%20energy%20institute%22emb=0 Youtube's PLAYLIST feature is awesome. Far superior to any GUI that Google Video has. http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=StevenKrivitview=playlists If you click on the name of an individual playlist, you get a fantastic, clear and helpful display. http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=361DD93749F8A9D2 It's extra work to chop longer videos down to 10 minute segments but I think there's a usability gain, in that it makes it easier for viewers to watch a long piece one segment at a time. Steve
Re: [Vo]:TO: Jed; MAYBE Pickens is NOT so wrong about SO-CALLED HYBRID trucks
Can this possibly be correct? Are you sure this describes a system for 18-wheelers, rather than something closer to small to medium box trucks? Michel Jullian wrote: Excerpts: Eaton's hybrid system for city delivery applications uses a parallel, pre-transmission design with Eaton's Fuller UltraShift automated transmission. Primary components are the Hybrid Drive Unit (HDU), which combines a clutch, a 44 kW/420 Nm motor/generator... 44 kW is 59 HP, assuming perfect efficiency. For a truck engine in a large truck, we're normally looking at something like 400 or 500 HP, maybe more for a turbo diesel -- in other words, the power plant is usually around 10 times the value quoted there. A 44 kW engine would be appropriate for a car, but not for a semi. The torque isn't so awful -- if I got it right, 420 Nm converts to about 300 ft-lb, which is only down by a factor of a few from what I'd expect to see. This would all seem to imply that the ICE is doing the lion's share of the work during acceleration, and is probably doing a large part of the work during cruising as well. Since a braking system is typically more powerful than the drive system (measuring power with the sign flipped here), and current-generation charging systems typically can't push energy into the batteries all that much faster than the engine can pull it out, this also suggests that regen brakes on these trucks aren't going to be recapturing more than a small fraction of the energy. How can this rig possibly be sufficient to make any kind of dent in the mileage?
Re: [Vo]:Thermacore paper on web
Regarding Google Desktop, it operates strictly locally, Google doesn't see the data. Gmail is a different story, in theory the data are not seen by humans but that's only theory. Of course the same goes for any email provider. Michel 2009/1/30 Horace Heffner hheff...@mtaonline.net: On Jan 30, 2009, at 1:07 AM, Michel Jullian wrote: 2009/1/27 Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com: Michel Jullian wrote: Have you tried Google Desktop? It did not work well for me. Initially I thought it didn't work well for me either, it crashed the machine, but as I guessed correctly that was due to it trying to access parts of my disk which were corrupted. After repairing the disk it indexed it in a few days and since then (April 2008) it has been working like a charm. Being able to Google one's own disk as easily as the internet feels paradoxically quite extraordinary. Particularly useful when it contains a vast collection of text mode or OCR'd pdf papers unavailable on the web! Michel It might be a good idea to chack what rights you gave to Google regarding the data, possibly even when you signed up for gmail. Best regards, Horace Heffner http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
