[Vo]:Neutrinos, FTL, and scientific textus receptus
--- On Fri, 9/23/11, Horace Heffner hheff...@mtaonline.net wrote: This measurement conflicts with early arrival time data for neutrinos from supernova. The New Scientist article quotes Marc Sher of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, It's not reasonable. ... If neutrinos were that much faster than light, they would have arrived [from the supernova] five years sooner, which is crazy, says Sher. They didn't. AFAIK, Sher wouldn't know this. Kamiokande I came online in 1983, Kamiokande II in 85. SN1987A obviously happened in 1987, so how he gets 5 years as being impossible makes no sense to me. If no neutrino detector existed 5 years prior, then he doesn't know. This also assumes that the neutrinos produced in SN1987A would have traveled at exactly the same speed greater than C as those produced at CERN. That's a big assumption. A supernova obviously has a /slightly/ greater power output than a human-made collider. For all anyone knows, the things could have been traveling at, oh, let's say 1.1C. If so, given SN1987A's distance of 168,000ly, the neutrino surge would have hit about 15,000 years ago. Someone should consult the Cro-Magnon Journal of Applied Sciences for a note of this event. Assuming (why not?) that neutrinos produced under different conditions may travel at different speeds, possibly exceeding C, there is no way to say that unexplained detection events at the neutrino observatories are not the result of supernovae. With no real directional capability of the observatories, there is no clear way to correlate known supernova remnants with neutrino events. Sher is assuming a hell of a lot too much. He's sounding a lot like the folks that observed Venus, saw nothing, and assumed that there must be dinosaurs. Or at least an ocean of seltzer. Now, the article goes on to say that maybe the neutrinos did some funny travel through another dimension, and arrived at the destination sooner by taking a shortcut. So, no, they never really traveled faster than light. This is quite possibly one of the stupidest things I've ever read. If you crack open Taylor and Wheeler, do a few space-time diagrams, you will find that it DOES NOT MATTER whether the thing took a shortcut through the dimension of somebody else's problem via bistromathics; from our point of view, the thing traveled at a global speed defined by V = D / t, and since the arrival at position D = x (with the origin being defined as D = 0) took place at time t x / c, it still went faster than light as far as special relativity is concerned. Period. Owing to relativity of simultaneity, you will then have reference frames which will see the arrival (or 'appearance' if we use Sher's idea of skipping the distance) of the neutrinos at position x as having happened before they were generated in the first place. Causality violation. And if you want to switch reference frames in some inventive ways, you can get a nice paradox going on with the neutrinos arriving back at the destination before they ever were formed. This isn't an answer by postulating another dimension, it's just poking at a large bulldog who happens to be named Occam. Maybe, just to be nice, Sher assumes the neutrinos travelled perpendicular to the circular circuit. But you don't need another dimension to do that. You do, however, need a way to appease the gods of momentum conservation. One of the things I find real funny about this whole you can't go FTL, it violates physics and grah-rawr-hiss-spit-blah-roflcopter is that in the scientific literature, you will find plenty of papers published giving potential ways (theoretical, of course!) of constructing time machines. But the minute you talk about having a spaceship move faster than the speed of light, well, you're in big trouble, because you can't do that. It would cause time travel! Which you... just... published a... ...paper on... yeah. Why I chose the term textus receptus in the subject line is sort of convoluted, but bear with me. The textus receptus or received text is said by probably a majority of modern Christian believers to be the inerrant word of God. The proof of this is that the textus receptus says so, therefore it is so, because it says so. Ad tedium, ad infinatum, ad nauseam. Which is more or less what modern physical theory is, when you get down to the more esoteric stuff. It is this way, because it is this way. It's remarks like Sher's that underscore the point. Like an apologetic, they will go to any length to avoid something that is uncomfortable to look in the eye, even to the point of /going right to what they wanted to avoid but naming it something else/. You see the same thing in regards to so-called LENR. You can't do it, no way, the textus receptus says no. But if it happens, well, ignore it as long as you can, and if you can't any more, just call it something else and say a few Hail Alberts, and sin no more my son. Higgs
Re: [Vo]:Neutrinos, FTL, and scientific textus receptus
--- On Sat, 9/24/11, Horace Heffner hheff...@mtaonline.net wrote: In the CERN OPERA results, neutrinos arrived about 2.48x10^-5 the travel time sooner than expected. For a 168,000 ly trip the expected photon arrival delay time Dt should be Dt = (2.48x10^-5)*(168,000 yr) = 1521 days = 4.17 years Right. But either way, Sher's claim that (it's) crazy doesn't really hold up. Kamiokande wouldn't have seen anything anyways if they had arrived that much sooner. The facilities weren't up and running, or just barely. It would be interesting if they DID have some preliminary data to see if there was a spike around that timeframe. The CERN result did not show any dependence on neutrino energy in the range checked. If neutrino energy is not a factor then the size of the burst only has to do with the number of neutrinos arriving, not the difference in time from neutrino arrival to light arrival due to distance. I don't know if neutrino energy by itself has anything to do with their speed. I don't see any reason why they couldn't have different speeds due to different initial conditions. That is to say, technically, the oscilloscope sitting across the room from me has more energy (on a per mass basis) than an individual alpha particle being emitted from the Am-241 source in my smoke detector. But the alpha is moving far, far faster. Put another way, how much of the neutrino's energy is expressed as kinetic energy? How/what is required/done to make the neutrino move at a given speed? I do recall reading, years ago, in Cramer's Alternative View column about an experiment purporting to measure the rest mass of the electron neutrino as being the square root of a negative number. I.E., tachyonic. I don't know what came of it. At the very least, it's something to think about. Another variation of the hypothesis exists if sound can travel on strings at superluminal speeds. The interaction then involves a neutrino-virtual-photon string merging on the arrival side and similar string separation on the departure side. If the string vibration propagation speed is not instant, but significantly larger than c, the same result occurs - an early arrival of the neutrino. In the case of the OPERA experiment this merely means the 18.1 meter cumulative tunneling distance I calculated would be replaced by a longer cumulative distance during which neutrinos effectively travel at the speed of sound in the strings. The neutrinos then are momentarily converted from a separate string into a vibration, a pulse, traveling on a momentarily merged string. Regardless of the mechanism, does it still provide the same result, arrival of information at the destination at t D / c? If so, it is still FTL, and could conceivably be used for the transfer of data. Don't get me wrong, figuring out HOW it works is bloody interesting, but the big thing at the moment is, it seems to me, can it transfer information faster than light in free space. If so, it is nothing short of wonderful. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Neutrinos, FTL, and scientific textus receptus
--- On Sat, 9/24/11, Stephen A. Lawrence sa...@pobox.com wrote: From: Stephen A. Lawrence sa...@pobox.com I believe I alluded to something like this earlier. In reading back over previous emails, yes, you're right. In a universe which adheres in general to the SR model, you can, none the less, allow instantaneous information transfer in a single, distinguished universal rest frame without leading to any causality violations. Well, as far as I can tell (and remember from the countless space-time diagrams I sketched out) it is of equal, isotropic velocity in that rest frame. From other frames' perspectives, the speed (of some superluminal motion) is different in differing directions. The difference between conventional special relativity and theories including an absolute rest frame, seems to me, to be that effectively, in the absolutist framework, time is universal, or put another way, propagated instantaneously. In SR, time is apparent propagated at c. Relativity of simultaneity and all that. I can see how an /apparent/ causality violation could happen; if a body exceeds c, it outruns its own light signal, and a suitably positioned observer could detect photons emitted from the body at the destination before photons from its departure position reached it. It would LOOK like the thing moved acausally, but it is just a trick of the light in this case. But whereas in one case it is just an illusion, in the other case, it is assumed to be something real. It's when you allow the instantaneous transmitter to move at an arbitrary velocity, and send information to an arbitrary receiver in the same inertial frame as the transmitter, with arrival time being instantaneous in the (arbitrarily selected) rest frame of the transmitter, that you run into trouble. Yes. There should be, for superluminal velocities, an anisotropy in different directions of propagation velocity. It would seem, if I am thinking this correctly, that if we have thing that can travel at v c, that we can build an 'ether compass', to borrow an outdated term, to determine our velocity with respect to an absolute rest frame, and determine the direction in which we are moving against it. Unless something weird happens see my upcoming response to Jouni's post. Note well: Time travel is just fine (entails no contradictions) as long as the destination is outside the backward light cone of the starting point. It's getting the destination into the backward cone of the starting point which requires the frame hopping. This becomes clear if you try to draw the contradiction on a space time diagram. You can move from certain positions which are outside the backward light cone of an event to inside it, if we allow single-frame FTL travel, but to move from the event to a position outside either of its cones from which you can still get to a point inside its backward cone, you need to frame-hop. Right. Which is why I said, if you do some frame switching, you can cause real problems within the scope of conventional special relativity if FTL is allowed. (I hope this made at least a little sense...) It did. Many thanks! If an assumed absolute frame is present, Which, BTW, is the case according to at least some modern theories of cosmology. Which theories in particular? Robertson-Walker is one I've heard about in the past. If I even remembered the name right. Don't remember much to be honest. Any model in which you can see yourself if you look far enough out into space has an implicit absolute frame in it. As I recall, there was a major search, using Hubble, for just such a situation a while back (no luck, tho, the universe may still be open for all that experiment showed). That gives me something to think about. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Neutrinos, FTL, and scientific textus receptus
--- On Sat, 9/24/11, Jouni Valkonen jounivalko...@gmail.com wrote: Jouni, I am not certain I follow quite what you're suggesting. Are you suggesting that, possibly, the absolute frame of reference may have differing velocities based on the velocity of the local object? I.E, some planet, Earth or Venus, whatever? I may be completely misreading what you're getting at. Makes me think of a few things, though. Back to the wormhole = time machine thing thrown about for years; if space is taken as an absolute frame of reference, what happens if you move a piece of space WRT uncurved, free space at some velocity? Is it still part of the absolute frame? I'm not sure how to explain what I'm thinking... assume you have a wormhole a la Morris and Thorne... one end is stationary, the other end you move around at some speed close to c, and try to make a time machine out of it. If the space making up the wormhole is considered to be an absolute frame, does that mean that the moved end does not experience time dilation? Meaning that there is an absolute entry and exit time for something traversing the wormhole? I started thinking about this some years back when reading over an old webpage called 'Falling into a Black Hole.' One of the things that struck me was the idea that the 'escape velocity' of a black hole could be considered to be the infall velocity of space into the hole. V(infall) = c at the event horizon, and exceeds c within. A natural question to ask is, then, if space defines an absolute frame of reference, is the frame of V(infall) = 0 (free, uncurved space) the same as that of some part of space close to or within the hole where V(infall) 0? I wish there was some better way to explain what I am visualizing. It probably makes no sense. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Neutrinos, FTL, and scientific textus receptus
--- On Sat, 9/24/11, Stephen A. Lawrence sa...@pobox.com wrote: Yeah. Bien sur. The whole issue isn't that some religious law might be broken; it's that you can get contradictions if we allow stuff like this to go on without careful controls on it, and short cuts, improbability physics, and bistromath make no difference to that conclusion. I agree, I wasn't really intending to go that far as to beat religion and science into a pulp, just pointing out a few similarities as I saw them. BTW, I will say I am glad you responded to this. Good to have someone who knows more of relativity than I to throw some change (2 cents is no longer such, due to inflation) at this. And, frankly, I, and lots of other people (I'm sure!), feel pretty strongly that Nature doesn't allow contradictions. Paradoxes may be allowed in the math of the model, but they're never in the real world. Ergo, if FTL travel is possible, there are surely some restrictions buried in the fine print. Count me as one of those lots of other people. No paradoxes. I'd figure the fine print is, FTL is going to take place at different speeds in different directions, depending on the frame. A thought occurs to me; back in the day, as some of my friends say, I did a few thought experiments on the idea of a reactionless propulsion system. If something like it existed, (a Campbell energy-to-momentum converter, however the hell it works), the only way I can see to conserve energy would be to have it have an efficiency depending on velocity relative to an absolute frame. If that is so, such an engine could be, it seems, used as a sort of universal compass. Measuring the efficiency in different directions would be, then, quite telling. --Kyle --Kyle
[Vo]:TEST
Test...
Re: [Vo]:Census Community Survay..what is the remedy if I fail to produce?
--- On Sat, 2/20/10, Stephen A. Lawrence sa...@pobox.com wrote: From: Stephen A. Lawrence sa...@pobox.com Subject: Re: [Vo]:Census Community Survay..what is the remedy if I fail to produce? To: vortex-l@eskimo.com First, I'm pretty sure that it's a misdemeanor at worst, and there isn't any jail time, there probably isn't any fine, and you won't get a criminal record as a result of failing to respond to the census. Theoretically, $100 fine for refusing to respond, $500 for lying knowingly. No jail time, unless you try to skew the results knowingly for nefarious purposes. But I doubt that's ever been prosecuted either, or else most of the American government would probably have spent time behind bars, no matter which end of the political spectrum they came from. There are some good questions on the Census, which are important to answer for representative appointment, allocation of resources, etc. You should answer these, in my opinion. But, that said, some of the questions they ask are just wrong. One I'd have fun with is the question, what race are you. When I took it, they didn't have a listing for Injun so I had to choose native american or white. Technically I could go either way. I don't remember which one I put down (been a few years), but I know I determined it scientifically by way of throwing a coin into the air. If asked now, I'd ask why our postracial president wants to know. Maybe give the census taker the evil eye and ask, Are you a /racist/? That always scares people. I did get the census taker laughing when asked if I worked. I said yes, I do my patriotic duty and work hard to help pay for millions on welfare. When asked if I was on food stamps, I said no, I pay for my my luxury foods (when I can afford them) with my own earned cash. I don't steal from the taxpayer to buy beer with an EBT card. Yes, you can get away with that in NY. Above all, my advice on this is, don't sweat it. Maybe have a little fun, in the spirit of the great George Carlin with these people. And if you're polite about it, and make it clear that you are NOT angry or being disrespectful to the census taker, you might just get a hearty laugh out of them. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:TEST
--- On Sun, 2/21/10, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: From: Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Vo]:TEST To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Date: Sunday, February 21, 2010, 10:34 AM Another test. I have not been able to post messages. - Jed Came through OK here, Jed. I've been having the same problem, it began working again spontaneously yesterday. A few days ago, I attempted to post a message. It was rejected with the following message: - The following addresses had permanent fatal errors - |flist vortex-l (reason: Cannot open input) (expanded from: vortex-l@eskimo.com) Not sure if you're having the same problem. It happens fairly often on my end, but maybe it is just a Yahoo thing. --Kyle
[Vo]:Just for fun...
V, With some spare time over the weekend, and little to do (a rarity), I decided to make a crystal-less crystal radio. Inspired by Nyle Steiner's work (google him, he is a god among amateur scientists), I conducted a couple hour's worth of experimenting with using flames as a detection method for RF. No kidding, it works! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMQEiRWoiJw Is it practical? No. Was it fun? Oh yes. Unanswered questions: why are American kids not doing this sort of thing? Why are they relying on their iPhones to do everything? There's an app for that... guh... --Kyle, longing for the days of Heathkit and the OLD Radio Shack...
Re: [Vo]:I recovered
Frank, I'm late in replying, as I usually am, what with how my life generally is... Don't give up. I may not say much these days, but I read your messages. Keep at your work. --Kyle
RE: [Vo]:Just for fun...
--- On Wed, 5/19/10, OrionWorks - Steven Vincent Johnson orionwo...@charter.net wrote: All good points, Kyle. The only individual I can think of that is trying to reverse this trend is Dean Kamen, inventor of Segway. Segway is also not practical but it's still an impressive product that has found a niche market. And who knows... Kamen's got a hell of a lot more money than I do... United Neko is after all, a multi-dollar corporation. So far, our best funding source has been the Sofa Cushion Federal Credit Union (member FDIC, an equal housing lender). But more seriously. I went around town telling people about this thing, and some other stuff I've done/seen. I've seen the polls out there that say American laypersons are scientifically inept, or don't care about anything to do with science, etc. I don't know /who/ is being polled, but they were not like that in Biloxi, Mississippi, and they aren't in Wheatfield, New York. They eat the stuff up when told about it. A black kid at work today was milling about the shop as I worked on his car. He struck up a conversation with me. Most people would expect, from his race and style of dress, that he'd be more interested in rap than anything else. Wrong. I told him about the flame radio. He was there for a long time past what was required to work on his vehicle, simply because he wanted to know /how something so simple can pick up radio waves./ We discussed all sorts of things, including the cancellation of the plans to return to the Moon. Turns out he wanted to see men walk there again. The discussion he and I had made my day. There are people, young people included, out there who are willing to grab on to this stuff. But how are we to get them motivated? --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Just for fun...
--- On Wed, 5/19/10, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMQEiRWoiJw Is it practical? No. Was it fun? Oh yes. Better page: http://www.sparkbangbuzz.com/flame-amp/flameamp.htm I know Nyle's pages are better than mine, that's why I linked to him from my own page. And he was the inspiration for what I did. ...I tried? It seemed interesting at the time, I guess. I'm sure some are. I made a crystal radio that was powered from loose RF floating around, I must have been about 12 or so. I was more interested in stuff that went bang. I don't recall how I happened upon a flash explosive that was aluminum powder, sulfur, and potassium permanganate as the oxidizer. Cool stuff. Back home, when I was a kid, I was into model rockets. But it seemed boring making something from a kit. So I set about making my own rockets and engines. For fuel, I had a few different things. The most common was common sugar and potassium nitrate, melted together in a 40/60 ratio, then cast into PVC pipe lengths, which were then capped and provided with a nozzle cast from Durham's water putty. A teenager at that time, I had this ragtag collection of assorted hangers-on from, of all places, the local Baptist church. These guys, and sometimes girls if we were lucky, would come over and help manufacture rocket engines. We had this test stand, if you can justify calling it that, which was a highly technological device consisting of a piece of 3 steel pipe set vertically into concrete in the middle of the yard. We'd drop an engine in, lit, and run for cover. Sometimes they worked. Sometimes.. I guess one of the worst incidents was an experimental engine composed of potassium nitrate, magnesium dust (!) and a binder of polyurethane. The geyser of fire and oily, acrid smoke that issued from that test stand was ungodly. If I remember right, it was me and Jerry who were there when it happened. When you see fire flow like a liquid... time to make an exit, stage right. Anyway, I'm an American kid, still, I'm just older Ditto. Well, I can understand, but I don't really miss that. Heathkits were cheap, main point for me at the time, I built quite a few, but assembly costs are now so low that a Heathkit to do what I can easily buy fully assembled and tested, etc., would be much more expensive. Yes, assembled is cheaper now. Sometimes, late at night, I wonder if that's really better. Where's it made? In the USA? Or by someone slaving in a third world nation, with no chance of anything better? My dad told me stories of taking the tubes from his old TV down to the drug store and testing them. He'd replace the bad one, and back to The Honeymooners it was. Now, you just go to Wal Mart and buy a new TV. In some ways, this is good... an electronics cannibal such as myself finds garbage day to be a great boon to my assets of stuff. On the other hand, I think we're instilling a sense of nonappreciation for what has been made. Screw it, it's cheap, I don't care if I break it, I'll buy another one. Put another way, nothing is made with sockets any more. It's all hard-soldered. There are no VCR repair shops any more. Nothing is repaired, just discarded and replaced. What is the environmental impact of this? I'm selling the material, $27.80 per 9x12 cm. sheet. Be the first on your block Interesting stuff. If I had the money and time, I wouldn't mind doing a few CF experiments here. --Kyle
RE: [Vo]:Just for fun...
--- On Wed, 5/19/10, Jones Beene jone...@pacbell.net wrote: From: Jones Beene jone...@pacbell.net Subject: RE: [Vo]:Just for fun... To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Date: Wednesday, May 19, 2010, 10:22 AM In the (non-ecclesiastical) category of 'nothing new under the sun' Here is an article that many vortician 'flamers' will surely like. I have a vague memory of trying something similar, many years ago without success. I read that article the same day I did the flame-diode experiment! Fascinating stuff, using plasma to do all sorts of interesting things. Now, one wonders Use my flame diode, with a Nyle Steiner flame-triode amplifier... then send that to a flame speaker... Power the whole thing with a mammoth set of thermocouples immersed in a bonfire? --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:More about Mallove murder
--- On Thu, 5/27/10, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Unspeakable . . . I can't bring myself to read this. See: Witness: Mallove asked for help before he died I read it, unfortunately. This is awful. I cannot imagine the mindset of a person who would not do as he asked. Help me. I was reminded of the story of Kitty Genovese, which my sociology professor taught me of many years ago. I was horrified by it. I feel the same way about this. I hope that if LENR/CF works out, that, perhaps against all odds, Mallove might see it from whatever place his is now, and be pleased. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Just for fun...
--- On Fri, 5/21/10, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: Sorry for the long delay in replying, it was a... rough week. I used that same substance, different mixture. More sugar, I think, and I used it for smoke bombs, it burned slowly with copious white smoke, basically harmless. Except a friend of mine was melting down the stuff on his stove and pulled a spoon out of the hot mixture, which apparently caused a thread of it to fall down into the gas flame and the whole thing blew up in his face. No eyebrows, but not a lot of permanent damage. One freaked-out mother when the house filled with the smoke, fire department, the whole messs Heh, the way I always did it was with a hot-plate outside, on the picnic table, and I used a double boiler to heat the stuff. One thing I found out, after reading some website I don't recall the name of now, was that substances other than sugar could be used with the KNO3 as a fuel. Sorbitol, of all things, worked very well. The local alternative foods store sold the stuff by the pound. I found it melted down easier, and was less hygroscopic. You didn't use a fuse? I made fuses with matcheads next to each other wrapped up with masking tape. They always worked. We didn't use fuses per se; the earliest method we used was small lengths of plastic straws filled with pyrodex (a blackpowder substitute) which we ball-milled down to a fine powder. The ends of the straw section were sealed with epoxy, with the pyrodex powder inside. A length of nichrome wire was passed through this, and soldered to copper leads, which ran to a switch box and battery some few hundred feet away. Later on, we found a better way to ignite the engines, more rapidly. Epoxy was mixed with fine magnesium dust, wetting it, and then potassium nitrate was added to make a paste. This was cast into small sections (1/4 diameter, say, 2 long), with nichrome filaments embedded inside. When heated from a current passed through the nichrome, the plastic stuff would ignite and burn with a brilliant white light, and ignite the engines very effectively. Anyone know how I could get or borrow a fast neutron source? The level could be tiny. Commercial sources are normally way out of range of what I could afford, AFAIK. Farnsworth fusor? I suppose you could do something like the radioactive boy scout did. But let me state for the record that I ain't responsible for if anyone actually does this, nor if they grow a few extra limbs from the effects of it. :) And as to your discussion of the disappearing art of making Persian carpet... it is an ironic thing that as technology progresses, those things that led to what we now have, seem to vanish by its own hand. There must be another way. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Somewhat OFF TOPIC Merchants of Doubt
--- On Fri, 7/16/10, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Jed, and all: Another I'd add to the list is, we assume they would use radio waves or optical (laser) communication (ala COSETI). Some other medium may exist, which we either cannot use effectively at the moment (neutrinos) or which we don't know about at all. If faster than light communication is possible, they wouldn't worry with something as slow as radio. Perhaps there is a window of time in the development of intelligent, communicative civilizations in which they are only broadcasting radio waves for a brief time before something else is used. Or they may not broadcast deliberately at all. We know of one civilization that very, very rarely does: humanity. 1. Recent studies have shown that transmissions from earth are probably too weak and scrambled to be decoded after a few light years. I don't know the basis, but that's what I have read. It is a myth that people on other planets could hear our radio and TV broadcasts, or signals from our space probes. So unless the alien civilization is deliberately broadcasting for an interstellar audience we will not pick it up. TV and commercial radio broadcasts would reach out a light year or so before being 'lost.' They would have to, barring some better technology, send a probe on a flyby of the solar system to eavesdrop. On the other hand, military and planetary radar -can- reach out a great distance. Should an intelligent civilization be predisposed (read: curious and perhaps aggressively expansionistic), they could look for telltale signs of this sort of thing going on in the local group of stars. Someone a dozen or so light-years away could have arrays of radio telescopes looking at all nearby stars which could conceivably support life and a civilization, listening nonstop for the first hint of something going on. If they are advanced enough to do this, one would think their signals-processing technology would be that much better. A few picked up radar sweeps might intrigue them. Whether or not that would be good is arguable. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Somewhat OFF TOPIC Merchants of Doubt
--- On Sat, 7/17/10, mix...@bigpond.com mix...@bigpond.com wrote: At a distance of 1 light year, a dish with a radius of 100 m would pick up grand total of 3E-22 W from a 10 MW transmitter on Earth. I don't think there are any 10 MW transmitters, and even if there were, a signal that small would be completely and utterly lost in the background noise. From this page, http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part6/section-12.html it is suggested a UHF carrier could be detected at a range of 0.3 ly. If that is true, a passing probe, eavesdropping on nearby solar-type stars could get an idea that there's something near the Sun. I read a paper some time ago, by Jill Tarter I think, that suggested that radar broadcasts (Arecibo transmissions, ICBM early warning radar) could be detected out to a distance of some light-years. The fact that no intelligible broadcast could be detected from a distance of more than ~1/3 light-year is interesting; there could be something as close as Alpha Centauri, and we might never know about it. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Somewhat OFF TOPIC Merchants of Doubt
--- On Sat, 7/17/10, mix...@bigpond.com mix...@bigpond.com wrote: To put this in perspective, in order to pick up 1 micro-Watt in total from our 10 MW transmitter, the dish would have to have a radius of 6 million km. BTW the *closest* star to Sol is 4 ly away, not one. 1uW is a lot of power, at least to a radio receiver. I'm pretty sure my homebrew regen set will beat this. My flame radio would probably detect it as well, even as badly received as that project was. If Wikipedia is to be believed, and several other places, including NASA themselves confirm it, the Galileo probe's 20W transmitter produced a signal which, upon reaching the DSN dish, had a power of about 1x10^-21W. The dynamics are far different from broadcast TV, of course, but the situation isn't so terribly bad for listening. Really, I wouldn't expect to find intelligent life around Alpha Centauri. The dynamics of the system are somewhat of a mess. I think we need to look a little further away. Beta CVn is probably one of the most interesting, and not too far away by cosmic standards. Zeta Tucanae, 18 Scorpii could be candidates. I don't know if any of these were recently determined to be spectroscopic binaries. Of course this could be narrowing things too much. M-type stars are the most common, and if we assume a life system using ammonia or some other cryofluid as a thalassogen, things are more interesting. Going a little more off topic, Stephen Gillett's book World Building gives some alternative possible biosystems. He's a little too pessimistic as far as technology goes. For instance, the world he calls Clorox has an atmosphere loaded with free chlorine gas. The suggestion that a lack of fire, and rapid corrosion of steel (the steel would rapidly corrode, and you couldn't smelt it in the first place) would stymie technological development seems sort of short sighted given intelligence. Intelligence finds a way, I believe. Hell, simply coating the transformer steel in rubber or plastic (maybe on a chlorine world they have PVC trees) would stop the corrosion. The challenges presented to the inhabitants of that world might actually spur development and innovation. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Somewhat OFF TOPIC Merchants of Doubt
--- On Sun, 7/18/10, mix...@bigpond.com mix...@bigpond.com wrote: I seem to recall that measurements on some supernova indicated that the neutrino burst and the x-rays arrived at the same time. IOW neutrinos don't travel faster than light. (Only tachyons do that ;^) On the one hand... In my defense, I was just suggesting neutrinos as an alternative, mainly that they could penetrate just about anything without being significantly attenuated. I didn't mean to sound as if I was suggesting that they go FTL. On the other hand... the electron-neutrino does some silly things. http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw54.html Yeah, it's old. It's still possible. Forward had some things to say about the electron neutrino as well. On the tail... there's a funny kink in the cosmic ray spectrum. http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9904290 http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0009040 Might be that this will all come to nothing. But if the particle zookeepers can keep screaming that the Higgs is the messiah, I reckon I can have some fun too. ;- --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Somewhat OFF TOPIC Merchants of Doubt
--- On Mon, 7/19/10, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Hmmm . . . What about up-links to geosynchronous TV and telcom satellites. Or, if a civilization expands beyond one planet (but not interstellar), what about interplanetary communications? I don't have any data on hand about those systems, but it'd be interesting to look into. The satellite broadcasts themselves are going to be aimed down here, so those originating in space (minus something which might bounce off the atmosphere) wouldn't likely factor in. Whatever we send up to them, might be a different matter. The Voyager probes with 22W transmitters can reach here from 40 AU. I wonder how much further the Earth transmissions TO them can reach out to? I think the best prospect would be to eavesdrop on an interstellar civilization. Might be, but given that our communications technologies are becoming more compressed and efficient, we might not know what we're listening to. For instance, I recently constructed a vacuum tube radio from scratch. Coils let it cover everything from LW to SW. There are plenty of data transmissions on the SW bands which are barely understandable. In the higher frequencies, where even neater tricks can be done, the situation gets more interesting. If we eavesdrop, the best me might get is a brief flash of 'some noise' which looks tantalizingly like an artificial broadcast, but never repeats. There have been hundreds of these, the most famous being the '77 WOW signal that the Big Ear picked up. I think it would be fascinating if it turned out that the '77 signal was something artificial, maybe a burst transmission of planetary data that a probe had gathered. Maybe it was their version of Neil Armstrong, setting foot on a new world. (I still can't get over the fact that they bulldozed the Big Ear to make a golf course. Apologies to Bluto Blutarsky, but... They took the scope! The whole f*g scope!!!) ... And again, this all assumes 'they' are using radio. The fact that no intelligible broadcast could be detected from a distance of more than ~1/3 light-year is interesting; there could be something as close as Alpha Centauri, and we might never know about it. Goodness! That's sobering. That's assuming they have approximately the same technology as we do. It puts CETI in perspective; we have not checked much yet. - Jed I'm working out some simple, 'crunchy' calculations on how they might fare with a bigger receiver aperture. It does make one think. The galaxy has 400 billion suns, and we can't even detect technology around the nearest one, even if it is there. In some ways, it seems a little scary. In other ways, it's sort of comforting to be able to go outside, look up, and know that there are still plenty of places for the stellar cartographers to write, Here be dragons. What can I say, I love the unknown. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Somewhat OFF TOPIC Merchants of Doubt
V, From http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part6/section-12.html I did some calculations (assumes I did the arithmetic right) for a dish with an aperture of 10,000 meters. Such a structure could be conceivably constructed in space, using either one massive construct, or arrays of smaller ones linked together. I don't know if there would be a detriment in using multiple ones or not, so lets just assume our aliens are using a single, huge dish with an efficiency of 50%, as per the paper, and we'll leave the SNR at 25 as well. FM radio reaches out to about 0.008 ly. No one's listening to Canned Heat or Johnny Cash. UHF picture reaches 0.001 ly. I Love Lucy and Welcome Back Kotter are out. UHF carrier reaches 10.06 ly. Oh sh Assuming technology has progressed farther than our own (not an unlikely assumption if our aliens have the space program necessary to build a 10km diameter radiotelescope in deep space), someone could easily be listening to us from Tau Ceti. They might not know what we're saying, or who we are, but they could get the hint that there is a technological civilization somewhere around that dim yellow star in their sky. If they are curious enough, maybe they would come by and see us some time. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Somewhat OFF TOPIC Merchants of Doubt
--- On Tue, 7/20/10, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: If it was an interstellar communication and it happened to impinge on earth, it would have stayed pointed in our direction for a long time. Ditto for a deliberate signal to attract our attention and announce the existence of another intelligent species. If it was deliberate, yes. If not, if it was something else, or a spurious transmission for reasons unknown, it might not remain on us for long. The beam width would be a factor, motion of the beam emitter (rotation of the planet surface, etc.), and so on. The WOW signal duration was reckoned to be something like 2 to 2.5 minutes. Possibly more, if the observation was almost coincident with termination time. For a very directional broadcast to something other than our world (meaning, we only saw it by accident) that might be enough time for us to lose it. Thinking about this SETI issue some more . . . (not CETI!) . . . I assume we are only talking about signals within our galaxy. The Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 ly accross and 1,000 ly thick, with 200 to 300 billion stars (depending on the source). Based on the failure of SETI so far, I think it is safe to conclude that in our galaxy there are not millions of contemporaneous civilizations vying for our attention. That is to say: Well, it's hard to call a failure; as I said before, META and the others have detected things which aren't explained. As Sagan pointed out, the fact that most of these incidents were in the plane of the galaxy is interesting. I'd agree there aren't millions of technological civilizations vying for our attention; that doesn't mean there aren't ~ 1 million civilizations out there. Maybe they aren't vying for our attention. Maybe they don't even know we're here yet. Not long ago, there were no radio transmitters. Even within the last few hours of the cosmic calendar, we were scurrying around throwing spears at one another, and no one knew what steel was. As the late Douglas Adams points out, space is big. It's been suggested that self-replicating probes could have spread throughout the galaxy by now, so we should see 'them' if they are here. This assumes many things. 1. They chose to do this. 2. It's really that easy to send self-replicators out there. 3. They want us to know they exist. 4. In the millions of years necessary to scout out the whole galaxy, 'they' haven't evolved into something far beyond our understanding. Maybe they don't want to talk to the local anthill. All this assumes that travel takes place at less than C. Let's consider what might happen if travel faster than C is possible. Things change pretty seriously, and I'd posit that, paradoxically, the ability to go faster than light might *slow* expansion across the galaxy. For instance, if FTL travel is possible, and 'they' are doing it, it makes sustaining (for want of a better term) an interstellar empire more feasible. Instead of autonomous colonies out among the stars, spreading exponentially, they might have far greater contact with home, and thus concentration on building up and exploiting the resources of the local interstellar neighborhood might be of great interest. Missions to other stars could be manned instead of computer controlled. The ability to learn more could be increased, slowing the rate of expansion. On the other hand, as far as we know, maybe someone close by has already learned of us, and is on their way even as I type this. 1. Contemporaneous means existing long enough to reach us; a signal broadcast for thousands of years, within the last 100,000 years. That is really not such a long time. I assume that stable, intelligent civilizations usually last longer than that. Stable non-intelligent species do. fL in Drake's equation might extend to more than just self-destruction. The possibility also exists that someone or something out there might not like the idea of competing, potentially threatening civilizations arising and progressing. If at least some advanced civilizations do go around stamping out others preemptively, then the survivors (and probably the killers, for obvious reasons) would have a good reason to be quiet. It's sobering to think of a sort of interstellar natural selection, where the ones who scream into the void are noticed by something, and promptly taken care of. We could send this kind of hello galaxy! signal even now, only 100 years after discovering radio. Naturally it would cost a great deal of money and it is not likely we would do it. But I assume that a civilization that discovered radio centuries or thousands of years ago would be so advanced, the cost of setting up a broadcast would trivial. It might be something a small group of private individuals could afford. Possible, but if they are that far ahead of us, what if they have something better than radio? Do they want to signal the primitives, or talk to someone who has
RE: [Vo]:Richard C Macaulay
--- On Tue, 1/18/11, Jones Beene jone...@pacbell.net wrote: ... a true character ... but I'm not so sure the Dime Box was fictitious ? The romantic in me likes to think it was real. Maybe not in this plane of reality, whatever it is, but *somewhere*. I liked R.C. We talked quite a bit off-list about many things. All sorts of topics, scientific or otherwise. When he stopped responding, I had hoped it was just due to being busy or perhaps only a transient illness. R.C., wherever you are, take care my friend. And give 'em hell the next time two guys play an ace of diamonds at the same time. And save me a stool at the bar, life's only a few days and full of trouble. I'll walk in the door one day, in the course of time. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:The Big Picture
--- On Sat, 1/29/11, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: From: Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Vo]:The Big Picture To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Date: Saturday, January 29, 2011, 4:57 PM This is an unknown nuclear reaction for crying out loud! A NUCLEAR REACTION. It is not a Gumby toy or potato battery. I have seen many cold fusion labs, and I have often noted a cavalier attitude toward nuclear safety, industrial standards and common sense. It bothers me a great deal. A serious accident would not only hurt innocent people, it might set back the development of cold fusion for years. It might even end the development of cold fusion, given the irrational fear that people have of novelty and the unknown. Jed, Ionizing radiation is a hazard for sure, in many fields of experimental research. Producing even X-rays is ridiculously easy for the home experimenter. All you need is a source of HV DC, say 30kV+, and a vacuum tube with a cold cathode. In other words, a 'sign' type incandescent bulb available from Home Depot hardware. Cathode is the filament (tie it to HV-), put a piece of foil over the end of the bulb, and tie it to HV+. You now have a cold cathode X-ray tube. Put a current through the filament to get thermionic emission, and things get worse from there. I have had a Geiger counter screaming from a setup like this. I have found a decent shield for this, while still allowing me to observe visually what is going on, is the faceplate from a TV picture tube. Neutrons are worse, but they can be dealt with, just like the X-rays. Yes, everyone is scared of radiation, and I suppose it is for a good reason. It is dangerous. But driving a car is just as dangerous. Perhaps moreso. The problem as I see it is, people have been fed things like The China Syndrome for years, and they're terrified of radiation. Compounded by the fact that there is a sad lack of scientific knowledge among the lay-people in this nation, at least, the situation gets worse. People need to understand that radiation is just like fire; used improperly (stick your hand where it don't belong) and it will hurt you very badly. Use it properly, and it is your friend. What people ought to understand, if (a BIG if) Rossi's machine really does work, is that the radiation emission from it (whatever it is), is probably going to be far less dangerous than the radionucleides emitted from burning coal. A 500 REM flux from a reactor can be avoided by walking a distance away from it. Thanks be to the inverse square law. Long lived radionucleides (relatively, at least), are going to pose a greater threat. They don't give a damn about distance. The neutron emission from a fusion cell is much more intense, but the emission of radionucleides from fossil fuel burning will ignore distance, and follow you home. I guess all I have to say is, all the problems of worrying about convincing the public that the thing (whatever it is) is safe, lie ultimately in educating them in science. I've rambled enough I guess. Apologies for the wasted bandwidth. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Let Rossi Be Rossi?
On 11/13/2011 1:15 PM, Vorl Bek wrote: I have had it with Mary Yugo. I think Mary Yugo is a good addition to this list. Mary Yugo's skepticism is better than excusing Rossi's odd behaviour on the grounds that he must be an eccentric genius. I have no idea if Rossi is a scammer or if he really has something. There's evidence to point both ways. He's certainly... unique. I'd like to be real, but he's gone out of his way to muddy the waters. Now the Pro-Rossi side is going to scream He has nothing to prove to anyone! Yeah, save it, heard it before. I'm going to agree with Vorl Bek and Peter Gluck. Mary is a good addition to the list, she's asking good questions, and has a sense of humor I like. The bacardi comment made me laugh, thanks Mary. Alan, she was kidding around, Google comedy and sarcasm. If you can't poke a little fun at all this mess, well, you're being entirely too serious. Vorl, Peter, the following is not directed at you, so if I say you in what I type below, I am only being general... I'll go on record saying that if anyone here is acting like a fully convicted creationist, it's the pro-Rossi side, at least here on Vortex. The man may be scamming, or he may not be. He may have the find of the century. It'd be great if he did. But just to believe that he isn't doing this... sounds like faith? Things are starting to sound so evangelical it's getting disturbing. But what can I say, I don't have a taste for faith and those sort of things these days, being one-hair-shy-of-an-agnostic. Show me da proof, mah boy. But...but... Rossi has nothing to prove to you!!! Nope, he doesn't, but he's made himself plenty public, made God knows how many claims, and there's money changing hands. How many people worldwide are spending money to replicate this? In the off chance he is lying (or more likely self deluding, if [IF] this isn't the real deal), valuable research time and money is being lost by unaffiliated parties. And while we're at it, you pro-Rossi folk want to talk about a dry run? Well, let's talk about a dry run. The following is an excerpt from a post I almost made, but clicked cancel. I'm sure plenty of you will be glad I didn't post the whole thing, but Warnock or not, here it is: Begin 1. Boiler companies may not (may not is stressed... a new design MAY) do any sort of dry runs, but this is using a technology that is hundreds of years old, and is known to work and reasonably well understood. There are no bullshit isotopes of copper that are somehow stable in an oil furnace. That said, I have talked to an older fellow who once worked with Dunkirk Radiator, and in the design process it is not unheard of to run the thing with line water pressure WITHOUT firing the thing up. How is this different than Rossi's thing? Very simply: Conventional boiler (type 2 diesel oil as example): -Chemical reaction - heats water -No electric heaters contributing to effect -No need to use inert fuel (nitrogen, etc) to see where the anomalous heat is coming from, because there is NO alternate heat source (no electric heater inside) Rossi's boiler (for want of a better term): -Nuclear reaction (unverified) - heats water -Electric heaters involved, contributes to effect by some amount -DEFINITE need to use inert fuel to make certain no nuclear reaction is taking place to see what the difference is between running on pure electric support power, and what the magnitude of the effect is. This is not a debatable point, and is how science is done. PERIOD. If you want to take Rossi's statement on face value, remember the N-rays. And that isn't science, so maybe you'd better go to church instead. 1a. Why would you NOT do this to convince anyone? 1b. Rossi doesn't want to convince anyone, but he wants to sell. Why not do both when it is cheap to do so? What have you lost, a little time? You supporters make it sound like the guy has no time to even hit the latrine. 1c. He has nothing to prove to anyone. Granted, fine. But going around making claims is inviting skepticism and criticism. You may be able to get away with it if you're not involving cash, but if you are, well, you'd better get used to it. 1d. If this experiment wasn't the pet favorite topic of the pro-Rossi Vortexians, no one would be doing the 1c above. It would be put up or shut up. End So that's my opinion, and I stick to it. If you like it, great. If not, well, I have other opinions. Sorry Groucho, I honestly do respect your principles. And just one more thing... if anyone here wants to throw the no sneering rule at Mary, or anyone else for that matter, then you better damn well do as Eric Clapton said: Before you accuse me, take a look at yourself. Read your own posts, and remove the spanish galleon from thine own eye before picking at sawdust. I will say this, and I am convinced of it; if this didn't have to do with cold fusion, if Rossi was claiming antigravity or something else, things would
Re: [Vo]:MIT light diode on Si allows photonic computers -- many streams of wavelengths at once -- female scientist: Michael: Rich 2011.11.23
--- On Wed, 11/23/11, Horace Heffner hheff...@mtaonline.net wrote: Most interesting! Garnet is desirable because it inherently transmits light differently in one direction than in another: It has a different index of refraction — the bending of light as it enters the material — depending on the direction of the beam. Hmm. As far as I knew, garnet was one of the few isotropic gems. It isn't birefringent AFAIK, and I'd guess my wife isn't about to let me go near her jewelry cabinet to find out! What am I missing? --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Lenard tube... Rossi style
V, Whatever side of the aisle you fall on with regards to Rossi, you got to admit, given his slap-it-together plumbing style, a Lenard ray tube built from a booze bottle, kitchen foil, and hardware store crap is right up their alley. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FYVBsGCUVg Gotta admit, Clagwell's is much prettier, but the above has, I'm told, a certain Sanford and Son charm to it. Warning: if the bottle you use contains an alcoholic beverage, the experiment is a FAILURE unless you consume said contents previously, simply on general principle. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:The Garbage Collection of a Fool's Imagination
There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact it's all dark.
Re: [Vo]:A huge Rossi (bad) thing to be revealed soon. (Daniele Passerini)
--- On Sat, 1/28/12, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: By the way, I'm disappointed by all the Mary Yugo bashing. I did not find MY's skepticism to be severe or particularly extreme, compared to plenty I've seen. Well, as a semi-interested outsider who'd love a cheap (essentially fuel-less) heater for my home, the way things look to me on this is simply, rule #2 is thrown around here generously, but no one seems to read the parts about derision and ad-hominem being banned, and go back to the science. Maybe I missed something, but speculation that a company that makes calorimetry equipment would sabotage that equipment when selling it to a cold fusion researcher, merely because a skeptic works there, is libelous and utterly out of place. It isn't libelous unless it's questioning Ampenergo or Defkalion. :) Rather, that speculation is more of a sign of imbalanced thinking than anything I saw from Mary Yugo. Funny how that works, isn't it? She is banned, and now generates even more discussion based on who she is, and what she is suspected of doing or whatever that case may be. Keep going, gentlemen, maybe you'll create a martyr for someone. None of the rest of this is directed at you, Abd. You are all so bloody wrapped around the axle about this you've gone off into a wonderland of speculation and digging into places you have no business AS PER THE RULES OF THE FORUM. Funny also that the bleeding hearts aren't throwing a fit about accusations of assumed gender identity and/or speculations about crossdressing. Hell, maybe Mary Yugo is actually M*A*S*H's Maxwell Klinger after all. Maybe Rossi is the savior of man with his reactor, but spends his nights getting off to Hawaiian hula dancers traipsing atop blocks of borated paraffin. Who knows? It does NOT matter to the science one bit. The long and the short of it is, and plenty of you are apparently not courageous enough to admit it, you get off on keeping this going. If you've got the guts, admit it. If not, get back to the science like you whined about for months, and leave this damn subject to rest in peace. I fully expect to get banned for this. And to tell you the truth, I don't give a damn. --Kyle
RE: [Vo]:A huge Rossi (bad) thing to be revealed soon. (Daniele Passerini)
--- On Sat, 1/28/12, Mark Iverson-ZeroPoint zeropo...@charter.net wrote: As the one who 'rode her ass' a number of times, I have said that her (his) technical criticisms were WELCOME... but to lay off the focus on the personalities. Good idea. Discussing the science and analysis of the tests is what we should be talking about. Except that you and others are now doing exactly what you say she was banned for. Focusing on the personal nature/personalities. Why don't you do as you suggested before, drop this garbage, and let us get back to the real heart of the matter, the technology (whatever it is) itself? But it's a much different taste when the tables are turned, isn't it? You (not just you personally, Mark, a bunch of you) really didn't like what Mary had to say, and it pissed you off so much you just can't drop it. You have to dig it back up and keep going with it. The desire for the last word, the last insult, is just too much. And who can blame you? No one. You're only human, after all, and just as fallible as any of the skeptics you so despise. Meanwhile, the rest of us are all hoping, or praying, whatever the case may be, for a truly revolutionary thing that gives us essentially free (or at least far cheaper) heat during the winter, or clean water. She ignored all suggestions and continued with the barrage of postings... She (he) deserved to be banned, and this forum is much better off and more functional without her (his) presence. Yes, by my count things have drastically improved. In the last 24 hours, only a little greater than 50% of postings to Vortex-L have had to do with Mary's identity and motivations. Yes, indeed, this is grand progress. Good work, gentlemen, pat yourselves on the back. Three posts of the many in this thread have to do with the original topic. The rest have to do with the Mary legacy. Think about that. And maybe, just maybe, drop this garbage, and let's get back to the fun stuff that Vortex used to be about. --Kyle
Re: OFF TOPIC Iraqi aluminum tube story finis
1. well, since theres been testifiying in front of congress and leaks and unaltered originals sent to media, yeah, actually, we do know for sure. I'm just saying there is a lot more to this whole situation than meets the eye, on both sides. 2. the us is a signatory to the un. the us has agreed to the uns controll in issues that are not about defense. in fact, the whole reason we went into iraq was becuase of them supposedly not doing WHAT THE UN ORDERED. so, we went to war, ignoring un dictates, becuase of un dictates. sure, that makes sense. Let me get this straight: you are saying that the UN has control over all US issues except those of defense? I hope I read that wrong. Personally, I am all for the US 'disobeying' the UN, if this is the case. The US belongs to us, the citizens of the US. Not to the rest of the world. As far as what the UN ordered, I do not really care, I do not take orders from the UN. 3. not touching.. ;) 4. it would send a greatmessage to potential allies though. Such as? Let's all be pushovers together? 5. so, your the kind of person, if someone cuts you off in traffic, you go and cut someone else off, and blame it on teh guy that cut you off? Where in the hell did you get THAT from what I wrote? No I don't do things like that, why would I? It would be pointless and stupid. Traffic actions have nothing to do with baseless attacks against a civilian populus whatsoever. Saddam and iraq had NOTHING to do with 9/11. NOTHING to do with Al Quaeda. Maybe so, maybe not. I would be hard pressed to trust anything said or 'discovered' from over there. Regardless, the man was absolutely terrible, and it is a good thing he has been taken out of power. Osama bin laden HATES Saddam, becuase he ran iraq as a non secular state. Al Quaeda had been known to bomb targets in Iraq because of that. The statement my enemies' enemy is my friend is not true most of the time, particularly when dealing with nations like Iraq and present company. who complains that the troops and equipment that were sent to afghanistan, where those who attacked us actually ARE, were pulled out and sent to iraq. ohh, wait. i do. thats right. You do? How about close friends who I have not seen for over a year, who have been nearly killed (maybe some have been), whose families have worried daily about them, and who upon return now face being sent back? These guys, the ones who are now able to communicate with me again, have told me stories from 'over there', and many of these stories are rather grim. We all tend to agree, it should have been handled more swiftly. It is also interesting that, from what they have told me, the average Iraqi they have talked to seems quite glad to be rid of Saddam. Oh, but I forgot...these guys aren't the media, so they aren't to be trusted. They are just the ones who have been mortared, bombed and shot at for a year. 6. iraq didnt butcher its own people. its human rights records against protests suck, but the mass graves are those kurds who we told to revolt, and that wed help them, and then we abandoned them. Well, the US was wrong for not helping like we promised to. I am not saying the US is always right. Alot of the time it is wrong, and has done some incredibly stupid and irrational things. it was a civil war, and any country has the right to defend its integrity in a civil war. By killing its own people in droves? Saddam is a mass murderer, to deny this and to deny that it is good that he is no longer in power is insanity. As to UN sanctions preventing aid, and stupid laws in the US (there are many), I agree, these things are ridiculous, and should be stopped. In any case, it would not be so bad to have allowed help to those in need...if the ruling body of the people being given aid suddenly seized the imports and began to use them for weapons production of some kind, then you get rid of said ruling body. snip input on the Universal Service Act Interesting points. Unfortunately, this thing has the potential to be taken off the proverbial deep end, if implemented. 8. nope, its real. but misstated and fearmongered on line Someone should notify Symantec...its the newest online fear-virus, courtesy of the US congress. ;) lets all sing now! kumbaya my non denominational lord and/or insert faith or lack thereof here, kumabaya! Interesting way to put thingsthis particular way of speaking has become popular nowadays, it seems, particularly with the younger generations, including my own (which I will politely decline affiliation with). Personally, I am strong enough to not be offended when someone prays to Buddha in my presence, or says May Allah bless you, or whatever the case may be. Our modern society is too obsessed with making sure that they don't offend someone with what they say. Are we now a society of babies with our poor little feelings to get hurt by what the bad man said?
Re: OFF TOPIC Iraqi aluminum tube story finis
Dear Vortexians, I am quite sorry I ever got into this thing, and if I have wasted bandwidth, I do apologize. This will likely be my last message on this subject. snip Iraq did not attack us, etc. period. The addition of the word 'period' makes it that much clearer then? No, Iraq did not attack us. We attacked them. I am not denying this. I am merely questioning whether it was right or wrong. and since weve killed more people in iraq so far than saddam has in the past decade, yeah, id argue over whether or not its better to have him gone. he was a dictator. he was not that bad a one, and there are many worse. I might be able to agree with this above paragraph if I had consumed a rather large quantity of Jack Daniels, but I fear I would succumb to alcohol poisoning first, if you catch my drift. Not that bad? Pardon my asterisks, but give me a f***ing break. And the dead as well. saddam disarmed. he complied with regulations. the rule of law was being followed in iraq. Are you willing to bet your life on that? I am not. as for cold blooded mass murderer, and so was abraham lincoln by your logic. after all, a hell of a lot more americans died in teh civil war than have died in iraq under saddam. and they wouldnt have died had lincoln just let them seceed. My logic is obviously misunderstood in any case. My feelings on the civil war are not going to be addressed here. If they were, someone would invariably wonder where I am from, and that will get stirred into the mix. It goes without saying that more Americans died in the civil war than in Iraq under SaddamI was not referring to American deaths under Saddam, I was referring to Iraqi deaths under Saddam. Apples and oranges, so the saying goes. In the event that Saddam had finally managed to build or aquire nuclear weapons, who can say what the American deaths might have been? teh precense of mind to not be offended? where do you get off? why would you be offended? others are free to worship as they please. thats whats so great about this country. Uh...get off? I was not particularly offended...I was remarking that too many people get offended by hearing someone say something about his or her god that is not politically correct, or using the term black as opposed to african-american...the US is too hung up on speaking 'politely' and 'correctly'. Yet I am called a racist if I do not like some kid driving past my home at 3am blasting ghetto music loaded with cursing. I truly begin to wonder what IS so great about this country nowadays. Maybe that seems a little contradictory to what I've written above and in previous posts...I suppose it is in a way, but when dealing with humanity there is always contradiction. Take this as you will, I never meant to offend you or anyone else, I was merely speaking my mind. Maybe others here feel as I do, maybe not. I am personally tired of the topic, and I am sorry I got into it. Have a nice day, --Kyle P.S., the have a nice day was not sarcastic. ___ Do you Yahoo!? Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today! http://vote.yahoo.com
Re: EPR and causality
--- Robin van Spaandonk [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: SNIP In short, causality isn't really violated, it only appears that way to an observer relying on EM signal transmission for his/her information. [snip] This could be argued from a certain point of view in the one way FTL sense. But if we allow round trip FTL signals, we find that according to the relativity of simultaneity and thus the equivalence of all inertial reference frames, as given by SR and later GR, that we can allow events to happen which not only appear to go backwards in time, but really do in measureable ways. Such as, frame A, not moving, can send an FTL signal to frame B, moving at some high fraction of c. Frame B will, according to his view of things (which according to relativity is just as valid as A's) receive the message before it is sent from A. Now, if he sends an FTL signal in reply fast enough (this is nowhere near infinity, just for clarification), frame A will see this signal arrive before A ever sends the first signal. So what if A decides then not to send the signal? A reply from nowhere, literally. These are serious consequences of mixing FTL and relativity theory as it is currently held to be true. However, there is a nice solution to this, it involves modifying the transformation equations so that simultaneity is not relative, but absolute. Therefore, there is an underlying ordering of cause and effect, and no time travel paradoxes occur...the FTL signal just gets there very fast, but never before it is sent. Note that this is perfectly acceptable and compatible with observed relativistic effects, such as Lorentz contraction and Larmor retardation (commonly called time dilation). The only necessary changes involves the distance-related term in the t' transform, thus removing the time 'desynchronization' from our results. The work of Tangherlini and Selleri demonstrates this nicely. --Kyle __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
Re: Superluminal cavity resonances was RE: Fast-food for thought
Physicists in Switzerland have confirmed that information cannot be transmitted faster than the speed of light. Hmmmthe writers of the quoted article have made an error in the above statement. It would be more correct to say that it is confirmed that within the experimental proceedures used, information WAS not transmitted faster than the speed of light, not the catch-all phrase that this one experiment proves that information cannot be sent FTL, period. Nicolas Gisin and colleagues at the University of Geneva have shown that the group velocity of a laser pulse in an optical fibre can travel faster than the speed of light but that the signal velocity - the speed at which information travels - cannot This group/phase/information/signal/front/blah velocity stuff is getting old. Most of the experiments I have seen fall into either: A. The signal was distorted severely by its passage through the medium in which FTL is supposed to take place, thus making it appear FTL. Usually the signal is neither brief (compared to the dimensions of the transmission path) nor sharp (usually a spread or gaussian distribution) B. It is just phase/group/whatever velocity which moves super-c. Well, if it *is* moving super-c, and not just some distortion, it is important to think about this, regardless of whether or not we can use it at the present time to transmit something. C. They don't know what is going on for sure. The last category is of course the most interesting. Just my thoughts on this. --Kyle __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 250MB free storage. Do more. Manage less. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250
Re: Corrections! was Re: Superluminal...
Harry Veeder wrote: Synchronisation is done beforehand. e.g. Synchronise two clocks at the sender's location. Then move one of the clocks to the receiver's location. Problems arise here, due to relativistic effects. If you move one of the clocks, its time will be different than that of the unmoved clock, due to its having moved at some velocity to get to its new location. It won't be off by much, but it will be enough to cause problems for ultraprecise measurements. --Kyle __ Do you Yahoo!? All your favorites on one personal page Try My Yahoo! http://my.yahoo.com
Re: Corrections! was Re: Superluminal...
--- Standing Bear [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello Listers I would like to say that IMHO any photons actually measured at greater that 'c' would be enough to shake the foundations of the Einstein religion to its very foundations. And I do mean .ANY photons! My thoughts on this would be that if some photon moves from point A to point B at a speed greater than C, then it doesn't really matter if the bulk of photons take longer to get there...if it moves FTL, then the problem is simply getting whatever is measuring to trigger off of the photons which arrive first, and reply using the same system, with a receiver at the opposite end measuring for the first, FTL photons as well. Then two way FTL communications should be possible, Feynman's path quantum mechanics notwithstanding. Personally, I find the whole business of a photon taking every available path to the target as being a little ridiculous. If I aim a laser pointer at the wall, it is obvious which way the photons are going. They are not going to go to the far reaches of the universe, then travel back in time by just the right amount to get to the spot on the wall and make it 'average out' to c. If you can't measure these, but must just assume that they are their because some probability mathematics says so, then I question why everyone is so against something which, although it cannot be measured directly by currently known means, is a lot more sensible than most of QM, the idea of an absolute frame of reference. Read about advanced/retarded waves for some more 'good stuff'. As I understand it, the problem arose from some infinities showing up in the math of photons being emitted from a source, had to do with the recoil effect on the emitter. So, to solve this, it was proposed that two waves are involved, not just one, a retarded wave which moves from emitter to absorber, and an 'advanced' wave which moves from absorber to emitter, but in time-reversed manner. When I first heard this, my first thought was, well, lets just say it would give this email close to an R rating. Now it is interesting that the whole issue of causality is under severe threat by these theories, and everyone feels its ok. But whenever someone brings up FTL communication, which according to relativity should threaten causality, everyone balks. Why? As near as I can tell, it is because true FTL communication would allow us to determine if causality-violating things actually do take place, which further could imply that the unobservable elements of QM become observable, and thus face potential refutation. If you get real, useful FTL, you risk losing a good chunk of both relativistic theory and QM. --Kyle __ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - Get yours free! http://my.yahoo.com
Superluminal and relativity
Hello all, The recent discussions of FTL signalling and its repercussions is interesting to me, and is something which has troubled my mind for many years. After studying special relativity, particularly the implications of relativity of simultaneity and the rejection of absolute separation of past and future for spatially displaced observers, and how all this relates to objects moving with speeds greater than c, I feel some new thought on this is needed. By now we all know about the 'twin paradox' and Dingle's questioning of the validity of special relativity on grounds that equivalence of all frames of reference should make both twins be younger and older at the same time when they meet up later on, and the subsequent explanation provided by conventional physics as to why one is truly younger and one is truly older. The issue gets a little more complex if we change the setting a bit. Consider a particle which is created without experiencing acceleration. Say, a precursor particle exists, and undergoes decay into daughter particles, one of which is moving at nearly c upon creation, it did not accelerate there. As far as this particle is concerned, it did not feel any acceleration whatsoever, it is merely there. It also does not know that it is moving at a highly relativistic speed. Let us call this particle A. Now A is moving along at 0.99c with respect to an observer, call it O. O was moving at the same speed as the precursor particle which created A. We can't say that O's frame is at rest, due to relativity. But we can illuminate things a bit with careful use of 'with repect to', abbreviated WRT. Let us say that A emits a particle B which moves at -0.99c WRT A, as seen by O. Let us restrict ourselves to a 1+1 universe with only X and T coordinates. In these conditions, B is now moving at the same speed as O...it has come to a 'stop'. B turns around, and moves back to A at speed slighly greater than 0.99c WRT O, to overtake and meet back up with A. A will see, due to the relativistic solution to the twin paradox, that B is younger than himself...or will he? If everyone meets up in the end to compare notes, things might not look right. According to O, left behind at the precursor point, A suddenly appeared and was moving at 0.99c, and thusly aging much slower than O due to clock retardation. A then emitted B, which slowed to rest WRT O, and thus began aging faster than A. B then accelerated back up to overtake and merge with A again. B should be older than A, according to O, unless the time spend at a speed greater than A's to overtake cancels the effect out. Does it? I don't know, it would probably take a good bit of spacetime-diagramming to know precisely. It would have to have B aging so slowly during the overtake that A would age enough to be truly older than B upon rearrival. A on the other hand, sees B move away from himself, and thus age much slower. B then turns around, and accelerates to overtake and merge with A. A should always see B to age less than himself, and on the overtake, B should be seen to age MUCH less. So what happens? Do things during the critical overtake arrange themselves such that according to both O and A, B is younger than A? Or do O and A disagree? You begin to get a picture of how complex the issues are. What happens if we have a 1+1 spacetime with a topology such that the X direction loops back upon itself? Meaning, go in the X (or -X) direction long enough, and you end up back where you started. If you do this, you never have to have any overtake to let A and B meet back up, it just happens because of the way spacetime is topologically conditioned. I am not talking of a gravitational 'warp' of some kind, just a closed universe. Some will likely argue that GR is required to understand this...I don't know. It would seem that A could continue on its merry way, only to eventually meet back up with B. Since B was seen from A to move away at relativistic speed, A should see B is younger than himself. However, according to O, B slowed down, and thus A should be the younger one, for he was moving much faster than B was. Who is right? Well, I suppose you could argue that since the topology loops back on itself that according to A, B changed direction, and so did O. But they would always be moving relativistically WRT A, and thus should appear younger. B (or O) will see that A changed direction. Thus, A should be youngest according to both, since A was always moving at relativistic speed. In the conventional twin paradox, we have one twin who can be argued to have taken the TRULY longer path through spacetime, and thus be TRULY younger. But in this case of looped topology, you can't really say that. The whole thing is symmetric from either point of view. Anyone have any thoughts on this? How is this solved? CAN it be solved? One way would be to define some frame of reference (not necessarily A's or B's or O's) to be absolute, and then the symmetry is automatically broken.
Re: Toroid experiments
--- John Berry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But if real, how do you explain the laser beam being bent? According to what I read, that is inconclusive at this point. Further, a gravitational field ale to bend a light beam is approaching the surface gravity on a neutron star, thus you won't need delicate balances to measure it! I'm not saying it isn't real either...just that it is not conclusive yet. --Kyle __ Do you Yahoo!? Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today! http://my.yahoo.com
RE: Toroid experiments, New Tests
--- Keith Nagel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: As you say, I wouldn't expect the permeability of the rod to matter much, given the geometry, but a permeable rod would tend to be drawn in and stay in the center counter to what is seen. Also notice upon observing the photos on Jean-Louis' experiment page on this, and the old ATG page, the steel rod is ejected from the small toroid side in one case, and the large toroid side in the other case. This sounds very much like a basic 'coil gun' effect. The different sizes of the two toroids will probably set up a field gradient, and cause the ejection of the rods as opposed to the pulling in effect. It would be harder to get a balance with the two different sizes. I did some tests tonight, not long ago. Wound a larger toroid, about an inch diameter, and a smaller one, about 1/2 inch diameter. 22AWG magnet wire used, pulsed with 50VDC from a 22,000uF capacitor (size of a soup can..older but still got its ginger). This will flip over small screws which are balanced on one end, will appear to 'jerk' slighly if supported by its lead wires. The jerking effect corresponds well to the introduction of a nearby permanent magnet. Reverse the magnet or the polarity to the coils, and the motion reverses. I held this thing in my hand as well when pulsing it, from either the 22,000uF cap or by make and break contact with a 12V car battery. You can feel the windings 'jumping'. Straightforward magnetic induction effects as near as I can see. Also, this effect works if you just use the large toroidit will move around metal pieces a bit on its own. As to there being said to be no field in the center of the toroids, this is not true. There is a magnetic field there, the toroid itself is a 1 turn solenoidal coil, with the windings just wrapped 'funny'. These will, upon connecting DC to them, attempt to align themselves with the Earth's magnetic field (or the field of a nearby permanent magnet). As far as the laser thing goes, it could be either due to the toroids flexing a bit, and the edges of windings which come into the outer fringes of the beam 'lens' it, or heating of the air in the center causing changes in its optical properties. (Ever seen 'heat shimmer' over a hot road?) No easy way of telling without reproducing it. Would be interesting to try the same laser experiment with a regular solenoidal type coil. I'm not an optics guy, so I don't have much to add here. One other thing, if you use two toroids which are wound exactly the same, they will tend to attract to one another. If you use two toroids which are wound so as to give the same direction of B field in the ferrite, but one is wound counterclockwise around the periphery, and the other is wound clockwise, they will tend to repel one another. This seems to prove the 1-turn solenoid hypothesis: in the first case, the internal B fields are the same way, and the current is flowing in the same directions around the periphery, so unlike magnetic poles are set up on the sides of the toroids which are facing each other, and they attract...in the second case, the internal B fields are going the same way alright, but the periphery currents are flowing in opposite directions, thus setting up like poles on the toroid sides facing each other, and making them repel. Simple magnetism at its finest. Also, you ( Kyle ) posted earlier on the FTL thread. Sadly, I've been mad busy on my new software product to keep on that thread, but I found it rather amusing that you in fact have already done one of the FTL experiments as described by Nimtz, namely the double prism microwave experiment you described to me earlier in the year. Heheheyes, amazing what can be done with a few pounds of paraffin wax, an old cardboard box, duct tape, a heat gun and a hacksaw. And the generous help of the college telecommunications department who provided the microwave transmitter/receiver equipment. Thanks for the URL, I will check it out! I was not able to try and measure the speed of signals through this device to any accurate degree, but it would be interesting to try in the future. If it doesn't do FTL, at least you can make some candles out of the wax. ;) --Kyle __ Do you Yahoo!? Send a seasonal email greeting and help others. Do good. http://celebrity.mail.yahoo.com
Re: Vehicles need to be insulated
Hi all, Interesting discussion, particularly where it comes to deal with engine sizes, etc. My occupation is that of an auto mechanic. It is only by night that I become the mad scientist. ;) I work primarily on european manufactured cars. They are fuel efficient, have all the high technology luxuries, can be located by satellite if you get broken down on the side of the road, they have intelligent ECU's (the computer) inside them to control emissions levels, fuel consumption, and can learn to 'adapt' to the driver. So, what car would I choose to drive, personally, if I could? BMW 740i? Mercedes-Benz CLK? How about a Volkswagen GTI 1.8L turbocharged? None of the above. I would like my 86 Chevrolet Monte Carlo back. It cannot be driven, because of the insane laws in New York state. The engine in it is not the original one, so it does not pass inspection. Even though the smog-sniffer says it is kosher (see below). What did I like about it? 1. Big, heavy car. Made of steel. Full frame. I get into a wreck with a Saturn, I'll probably be ok. The guy in the mostly styrene-plastic Saturn will be in trouble. I have seen this happen before many times, small plastic, superlight car hits an old American made full-frame car. Guess which was the least damaged? 2. No anti-lock brakes. Can't drive in the snow without ABS? Turn in your liscense now, you have no business driving. I live in Buffalo NY, the weather is terrible. I prefer non-ABS brakes, because I can control them better. ABS in mechanic's jargon is usually taken to mean another bullshit system as opposed to antilock braking system :) 3. 8-cylinder small block. Cheap as dirt, reliable as hell, easy to maintain. The 'little guy' like me can afford to fix it himself. Originally the car had a 4.3L V6, fuel injected. I got rid of that, the computer went berzerk, screwed the timing up, etc. Got a 5.0L V8 for next to nothing, rebuilt it, put all Edelbrock parts on it, including carburetor (sorry, fuel injection need not apply here). After some careful tuning, without the emissions control systems, it produced exhaust gases which were only barely above the legal limits. Add two high-flow catalytic converters to the dual exhaust, and it would pass with flying colors. No EGR, PCV, AIR, ECU, bleah. No damned computer. It got close to 18mpg with proper timing setup and jetting for the carburetor, and at little or no loss of power. Put it to the floor, and the back tires would spin and smoke. 4. Can out-accelerate most modern passenger and 'compact' cars. This saved my life a few times when idiots attempted to run stop signs, etc. I hit passing gear and was gone before the trouble had a chance to happen. Sorry kids, putting a cold air intake and a resonator muffler on a Honda or Mitsubishi does NOT make it faster. ;) 5. Rear wheel drive. Personal preference, I like how it feels. And a turbo hydramatic 350 transmission (NOT metric, all SAE) will last a long long time. Front wheel drive transmissions (particularly the 4T60-E) are dreadfully short lived. You also cannot drop a front-wheel transmission by yourself. You can drop a rear wheel transmission alone, I did it and I am not a big or strong guy. You can also have the TH350 rebuilt for about $300. 4T60-E, like was in my old Buick? About $1000-$1500 to rebuild. And the TH350 is vacuum modulated (adjustable modulator!!!) with no electronic garbage in it. 6. Ball joint for my old Chevy: $20. Ball joint for Mercedes-Benz CLK: $300. I am not kidding, this was the price for the part alone. Guy needed all four on this thing, so he was very screwed. Then add labor... 7. You cannot work on newer/euro cars yourself. If you are poor, you are SOL. I did mine all by myself. Simple, easy. And a very attractive body style of a car that does not look like the melted-plastic/organic bug look of all modern cars. 8. I have not done this personally, but one older gentleman I know pointed this out: newer cars are just too small to have sex in. Your mileage may vary, of course. Closing remarks: What is with this change oil soon light? Too dumb to remember to change your oil? Maybe you should consider public transportation. Brake wear-sensors? Get a flashlight and look at your brake pads...this is not rocket science. On-board navigation? Kids, use a map. Or ask directions. And as for those people who try to make Hondas/Mitsubishis/Nissans/etc. into performance cars...why try? Its like trying to make a gourmet corn-dog. As far as using a lot of gasoline goes...well, hyrids are no answer. They are underpowered, impossible to work on, and the average guy cannot hope to afford one. Or, if he is a little better off financially, he can live his life paying for the ugly plastic contraption. Of course, if I couldn't have my Monte Carlo back, I'd gladly take an old GTO or 'Cuda in its place. Happy motoring, and if you are in the cold like me, try to stay warm. --Kyle __ Do you Yahoo!?
Re: BioDiesel:was vehicles
--- RC Macaulay [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: He predicted the coming generations would be so accustomed to change that change would become a habit. I can see some good coming from this, and also quite a bit of bad. There is enough crap being floated around by my generation today. Of course a lot of it is more of the same. Gee, just thinking the phrase more of the same brings back memories of the Bush/Kerry debateswill the mental damage ever heal? I noticed when I tried to replace an electronic a/c thermostat and couldn't find the standard electro mechanical Honeywell round baby that has been standard for years. And which lasts much longer than that electronic wonder as well. :) Kyle Mc. mentioned older autos. Looking over the new stuff with the computers, I wonder if the Cubans could convert a new fuel injected computerized model back to the carb with distributor, points and coil. You can do this with some engines, others no. If it has a port for a distributor you can make it work with points or HEI. As far as fuel injection to carburetor goes, you can readily convert TBI (throttle body injection) back into carbureted with a minumum of hassle. If it is multi-port, you will almost certainly need a new intake manifold. But anything is possible with a good mind and set of tools. Mostly, this applies to Chevy small/big blocks...easy and cheap to work on. If a carburetor starts to act up, you clean it or get a rebuild kit. If a fuel injector or the computer that drives it (or any of the myriad sensors which control it) gets crunchy, you'd better have some serious cash on hand. Especially if its foreign. Distributor points are cheap as dirt, and cap/rotors as well. Ignition module for my HEI dist ran about $30. Ignition coil about $20. Got DIS? Distributorless Ignition System, that is. Module costs a few hundred, if its not built into the coil pack. Coil pack costs a few hundred. On Volvo's each of the three coils costs a couple hundred (!). And if the module and coil pack is all one unit...you see where this is going. Hmmm. Maybe I better not scrap my old 1948 chev 1/2 ton pickup w/ 6 cylinders. That would definitely be a keeper, IMHO. Interesting thought I have regarding technology. We may be in approaching a technilogical future shock where segments of the industrial base cannot accelerate to the speed required to keep pace with change in the level of technology of the other segments. What will need to give ? Well, this has also got to take into account the cost of whatever new has come along where it concerns the consumer. If someone comes up with a technology that makes a nonpolluting, super-fuel efficient car available with cutting edge technology but it costs $500,000 a unit, obviously not many people are going to even be able to buy it. --Kyle __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
Vanity of vanities....
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity Truer words were never spoken, it seems to me as of late. Indeed it seems to me that we live in a world of nothing but hatred and negativity, where no one believes in anything greater than what has gone before and that we are on a continuing Archimedian spiral into the deepest alcoves of desperation. And from my point of view, ultimately, to utter destruction. Maybe this will sound farcical or ridiculous, but it is true, and I feel it with my entire being and soul, nevertheless here it is: I love humanity to no end, and wish I could somehow do whatever was necessary to make the world the great place I was told in my childhood that it eventually could become. I love the world so bad it hurts, and as it is said, there is a fine line between both love and hate, and genius and insanity. The first two Ive known well. The genius part, well, I dont know, but I have to wonder if I am losing my mind slowly because of all this happening around me. Someone once said that if you believe you are going crazy, you arent. I dont know if that is true. So heres a few things to think about; call them a few of my personal demons. 1. Oil Crash. I dont know if this is real or not. There is so much lying and deception out there, so many people with their own motives that who knows if this is a real problem or not. This includes global warming. If global warming is indeed real, and a threat, then we should do something about it now. And if some put-upon rich people and business moguls get hurt in the process, well, that as they say is life. Development of alternative energy sources which actually WORK needs to be done immediately. If it be cold fusion, space-based solar energy, thermonuclear fusion, or whatever, then let it begin now. Not tomorrow, not when it is affordable and good for the economy, but NOW! If this is NOT real, if the peak oil problem is a fiction, and there is no catastrophe in sight, then of course we should still pursue alternatives with vigor. It would give the nation, and indeed, the world something to due rather than sit around in relative boredom. I believe boredom breeds warfare and unrest. People need obstacles to tackle and things to do, otherwise we wither and become depressed, and ultimately begin to hate each other. If it turns out that global warming is not anywhere near the severity as is proclaimed, then we need to have a serious look at the EPA and its various machinations. And make it a harsh look while we are at it. If it turns out that the oil crisis (real or not) is an engineered method for those in government set to profit from it to increase profits, and for the businessmen behind it to get richer while the rest of us suffer for it, then I am at a loss to suggest a solution. This is a crime that surpasses individual, state or even national level. It is a crime against the human race. For that crime, the punishment, whatever it be, should be fierce and indeed so terribly frightening that no one will ever dare to repeat it again. Maybe that sounds harsh, but how else can it ever be prevented again? 2. Cars. I dont drive an SUV, in fact I dont like them at all, because they have a nice tendency to lose control here in Buffalo, NY, during the snowy season, and careen all over the road. I drive a 1990 Buick Regal, which gets about 20mpg. Not great, but I cant afford a Prius, nor do I want one. They are grotesquely ugly things, made of plastic which is sure not going to win a collision with a larger vehicle, and are extremely expensive to purchase and maintain. No, hybrids are no option for us little guys. And a European car? Forget it, I will never own one. If a ball joint goes out in my car, I can get one for ~$15. In a Mercedes-Benz? ~$250-300 apiece. I kid you not, I am a mechanic who works on European cars all day long. I have seen it, and it is outrageous. Jed, $4000 for a valve job on a Volvo is pretty cheap. Try frying the motor in a late-model Audi. Easy to do, as well: you just dont change the timing belt every 50,000 miles, and the belt will snap, ramming the valves into the tops of the pistons, shredding the motor. Many kilobucks later, you are back on the road. Oh, and how much does it cost to replace the timing belt every 50k? Upwards of $1,200 where I work, which is cheap as I understand it. You have to remove the entire front bumper and clip assembly, radiator, discharge the AC condenser, etc., to get to the timing cover. You literally have to disassemble the entire front end of the car!!! All because some bespectacled idiot who probably never got his hands greasy in his life decided to design a modern engine. I rebuilt the 305 small block in my 1986 Chevrolet Monte Carlo for less than $1,000, and that includes the NEW carburetor, NEW headers, NEW intake manifold, NEW HEI distributor, wires, cap, rotor, plugs, oil, motor mounts, frame pads, chrome air cleaner, chrome valve covers, camshaft, lifters, piston rings (I got
Re: OT: If I were Pope.
Vortexians, OK, this is getting a little crazy-go-nuts. 1. Margaret Sanger was responsible for some good, yes. She was also crazy. Not the kind of person I would want to spend much time with. Very pro-eugenics. If you support that, then congratulations, go build yourself a private Gattaca. Leave me the hell out of it. 2. I am not pro-abortion for a few reasons. A: It does nothing to encourage people to stop the numerous meet and f**k flings. B: I wouldn't know if I was destroying someone who might be something very important one day. C: I do not have to be pro-abortion just because you say so. So many people have tried to force me to be pro-abortion that I am now totally against it mainly in defiance of those who would control my thinking. 3. A religious person really really must have made you mad once, Jed? It is fine by me if you are anti-religion, do what you want to. But if you want to try and say you and the anti-religionists are better than anyone who has a religion, or worse force your views on them via legislature, well, kindly knock the hell off. You know, if we are supposed to be so pro-women-liberation in other countries, so pro-freedom, so pro-lets-all-get-along-as-equals, so pro-insert theme of day here then why the HELL is it ok and dandy to hate religion? If you think I am overreacting, then re-read your posts. They were pretty damned irritating to me at least, and I am sure others. Not for your opinion, that is fine. Do what you want. But do not ever try to force it on anyone else. By legislation or otherwise. This statement (the last part anyways) is not directly aimed at anyone. 4. Contraception? Sure, why not. I have no problem with this. But please, if anyone out there wants to force the use of them on people who do NOT want to use them, kindly take a hike. This statement is not directly aimed at anyone. 5. Are you guys actually reading this? I don't get many replies 6. You know, the Pope just died. He meant alot to many people. (I am not catholic, by the way, but I damn sure respect them and am not going to say they are 400 years behind!) If this form of lack of respect for the dearly departed is implicit in your atheistic-utopia vision, then count me completely out. 7. If this continued anti-religious bias is to be embraced and accepted, then do not EVER ask me to show compassion towards some special interest group of to feel sorry for Muslims who might have been discriminated against in the days to follow September 11th. Why should one group be discriminated against and not another? 8. DISCLAIMER!!! This is aimed at no one in particular! (so don't take it as being aimed at you, Jed). If there is someone who feels that the need for population control is so severe that we need to force people to go against their religious and/or moral views and be forced to employ contraceptives or abortion, then here is an alternative. If there is someone who really wants to force that kind of control on other people, then kindly do the following: get yourself a gun, and shoot yourself now. You will have accomplished what you set out to do: you have reduced the worlds population by 1, and I guarantee you that the cost of some contraceptives or an abortion is much more than the cost of the gunpowder it took you to blow yourself to hell. There are more, but for the moment I am too pissed off to handle them clearly. I am sorry if the tone is extremely abrasive, I am very angry. And before you judge me personally, keep this in mind. You don't know me in real life, you don't know what I have been through, you don't know who I really am. And just so people know, I am not exactly what you would call a religious man. You could call me a Christian, I do believe in God, but I have my own views on things, and lets leave it at that...if you judged me based on seeing that word then you are not worth my time. But I am also standing up in defense of the Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, whoever. Jed, you believe science and religion cannot coexist. This isn't a belief, you are stating something as fact. You are wrong in one case, at least. They coexist just fine in the reality of my mind, if they cannot work together for you in your reality, then that is fine. Don't presume that just because you can't make it work, no one else can. Sorry if this offended anyone. But maybe it is time those people who quietly keep getting offended themselves say something. Regards, --Kyle __ Yahoo! Messenger Show us what our next emoticon should look like. Join the fun. http://www.advision.webevents.yahoo.com/emoticontest
Re: Prius hybrids selling at a premium
--- Stephen A. Lawrence [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Fabulous! I've been saying for years (mostly to my long-suffering family) that the biggest thing wrong with the way our petroleum policy is run in this country is that there should be a federal gasoline tax which keeps the price per gallon in the $3 to $5 range, at a minimum. This is the stupidest thing I have heard in a while. Force the gas prices to be that high? How much do you make a year? Have any idea how this will affect the masses out there who make very little a year (while working their asses off for what they get) and barely get by now? If they cannot get to work, they will have no money. If they have no money to spend and do not do a job, that money no longer works with the economy and that job is gone. This is a real good plan to screw things up worse than they already are. If you want to pay that, then go ahead. Not to mention that most people cannot afford a Prius in any case. They are not cheap. What the federal government should do if they really want to cut the consumption of fossil fuels is to put in place a program to produce cheap small hybrids. A Prius does not qualify for cheap. Yes, you might have to leave out a few bullshit luxuries. Sorry folks, you have to get off your duff and crank the windows down and forget the power locks too. No fancy Bose sound systems either. Just a bare-bones cheap hybrid car. If you want to spend the money and upgrade to a better one with the frills, be my guest. But make it a requirement that something be available for those of us who cannot afford all that crap. Truly a people's car. If I had or could afford a Prius, I would probably get one to save money and know I am doing something good for the environment. I would also destroy the plastic body on it, make my own that doesn't look dog-ugly, and register it as a custom vehicle. But since I cannot afford such things, I will continue to drive V-6's and V-8's which are much more economically feasible to maintain in my income range. --Kyle __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
Re: Prius hybrids selling at a premium
--- Stephen A. Lawrence [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: snip glamourous description of Europe Then move there. My employers are German. They came here because it is increasingly hard to make a decent living there. I see them 5 days a week and they tell me all about it, whether I want to hear it or not. We do not have to have the same costs as Europe just because they do. This is a different country. --Kyle __ Yahoo! Mail Mobile Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Check email on your mobile phone. http://mobile.yahoo.com/learn/mail
Re: Gas Tax
--- Stephen R. Lawrence [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Maybe higher transport costs will change all this, but at the moment I don't quite see the mechanism. From: Stephen R. Lawrence, 8 Supanee Court, French's Road, Cambridge, England, CB4 3LB. Tel/Fax +44 1223 564373 Ah, so you already live there. My mistake, I did not get to this message before replying to the earlier one. Sohow much do you make again? I'll bet more than me (and most of the people over here who the gas prices are hurting or will hurt.) I think Jed is more or less correct in his view, that if the prices are forced that high, drop the tax burden on the working class and raise it for the upper class. --Kyle __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site! http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/
Re: Prius hybrids selling at a premium
--- Terry Blanton [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: $27k to $32k depending on location and political preference. :-) http://tinyurl.com/63t3m Bleah. I don't make enough to even begin to afford that. Most people out there drive used cars because they cannot afford a new one. Much less something like this. I'm wondering what the road salt is going to do to electrical windings in hybrid/electric vehicles driven here in Buffalo NY over time. --Kyle __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site! http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/
[Vo]:Earth Hour...yeah....
Howdy, Unfortunately, as my good friend John Schnurer is no longer of this world, he can't do this with me, so I'll have to do his share of it. He loved mischeif, even towards the end when his Parkinson's made it almost impossible for him to type (and sometimes communicate at all) effectively, so I'm sure he'd have gotten a kick out of this latest Evil Plan (tm) of mine. The local dumbass greeners (save the world! Kill a human!) have informed me I am to participate in something called Earth Hour. Not watching TV nor listening to talk radio, I didn't know what this was. I googled it, and my retinas almost shit a Christmas tree when I saw how /dreadful/ the white-text-on-black looked on my LCD monitor (low power...). From 8 to 9 pm tonight, I is 'sposed' to turn off all unnecessary electricity to show good faith in doing something to save the planet. Excuse me a moment while I grab my Pepto-Bismol... ...Ahh, much better. Where were we? Oh yes. The Hour of Doom. Now, being someone who wants to use a .44 Automag on any vehicle that displays an assload of 'awareness ribbons', seeing as they are quite hypocritical in most cases (I'll make some exceptions for the truly good out there), I have to ask myself a few things. Is this gonna do jack shit? Nope. Bet not. Is Al Gore the Boring going to stop using more electicity in a single month than I use in a year? I bet not. Does he have his mansion at 58 F in the winter? Bet not. Oh, but he uses GREEN energy sources. Bullshit, this is just pushing the cards around. Mark my words: the carbon credit/carbonocracy is going to be as bad or worse than the petrocracy we have right now. Back to me...well, now, what do I do to do my part to bring peace on Earth to all mankind? (the preceding sentence was supposed to look terrible) 1. Heat is OFF during times I'm at work. I superinsulated the attic, and I can tolerate 40-45F for a couple hours while it warms back up. I use about 25-30% less natural gas per month of winter by doing this. 2. I use almost exclusively fluorescent lighting in my place, and encourage the landlady to do the same. She has heeded my words, and we use a lot less power. I also go around turning stuff off when it is not used. I hate leaving a light burning for no reason. The only incandescents I use are for applications where one must do so: hard-duty worklights that are used in the cold, bench tools that require smaller bulbs for which no LED substitute exists. (I ADORE LEDs. Why aren't there screw-in LED devices? Are there??? Tell me!) 3. I don't use A/C. Who the hell needs it in western NY? I don't...of course, the superinsulation helps keep the heat out, so, there's a start. 4. No TV for me, except the occasional movie with my wife. I like the old transistor radio myself, but I like chasing numbers stations down, and dislike talk radio, so...yeah... 5. Flat-panel LCD monitor. 'Nuff said, uses very little. 6. A few other things from time to time, but these are low-duty things. 7. I maintain my car carefully, and keep the air levels up in the tires. As such, I maximize gas mileage, and with a little careful planning, get the most out of a Saturday morning of 'making my rounds.' Electric bill this month: $37, rounded up. Gas bill this month: $79, rounded up. Gasoline used: 1 tanks-worth, or 15 U.S. gallons, or about $50 worth. This was actually a BAD week for gasoline for me, as I had to go many more places than usual, for reasons that are no environmentalist's f**king business. Did I mention the heat source for my place is a 99% efficient ventless heater? It also humidifies the air, so, it helps my sinus problems a good deal. I use glassware and ceramicware, I don't like paper plates or styrofoam cups. I try to use everything I can, and waste as little as I can. Tonight, however, from 8 to 9 pm, I'm going to take a vacation from that, and prove *my* point to these worthless scumbags who scream that 'someone should do something!' but then say 'Not me!!!' when the cannon of change is pointed at them. Tonight, I will operate during that hour, the following: 2x four-foot fluorescent light fixtures, dual bulbs, 40W each. 2x 500W halogen floodlights. 1x Tektronix 465B oscilloscope. 1x Tektronix 475 oscilloscope. (actually gonna use this...) 1x Hartley oscillator (with the above 'scope) 1x 100W incandescent light. 1x Drill press...I'm just gonna let her idle... 1x 6 bench grinder. Same as above, let her spin... 1x soldering iron, set to MAX, or 40W. 1x shortwave radio. 1x Television + DVD player + amplifier and speakers...maybe I'll watch Dances With Wolves, ain't seen that in a while...or some anime? Maybe listen to Johnny Cash? 1x Computer. 1x Oscillating fan. Too cold for it, but hey, maybe I'll run it outside. ***BONUS!*** 1x 1HP 3450rpm motor, connected to nothing, for NO GOOD REASON. 1x charcoal BBQ grill, for NO GOOD REASON. Idle my Buick Regal for one hour. It's actually good for the motor to run it out a while. Give me the opportunity
Re: [Vo]:Earth Hour...yeah....
--- OrionWorks [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm impressed! Knock yourself out tonight! Heh, thanks Steven. I /probably/ was being mostly sarcastic in my evil plan statement of action, as I'll probably be making Hartley oscillators all night, as well as chasing down the rumors I hear from a friend that there are a few nice, old 1940's style 365pF air-variable capacitors just hanging around an old dump, gathering dust. Unclaimed, I might add. If weather permits, we're gonna go fetch 'em. Thing is, I am, despite appearances, very concerned about the environment, particularly destruction of rain forests. That's something that bothers me badly. But I can't stand the way the issue has been so politicized. People are making money off this, when they should be spending money to fix it. But I try to conserve as much as I possibly can, whilst not destroying my quality of life. It's been saving me a hell of a lot of money, too, but that's not why I do it. If I absolutely KNEW for a dead certain fact that it would be used to build EFFECTIVE solar collectors, or wind farms, or what have you, I'd bite the bullet and pay an extra $1 per gallon, starting right now. But I have no proof this will happen. I live in New York, the land of taxes that pay for the lazy to do no work, or for hookers for the Governor, and so on. I trust no taxes here. I'm opposed to more taxes on gasoline, because I know it will not be used to solve the problem. One thing I don't get is why solar costs so much more than nuclear or coal fired. There's almost no moving parts, and much less to break down, it seems to me. There's got to be some politics in this somewhere, but I don't know exactly where. As much as we disagree on things, I'm wondering if Jed can shed some light on this. Where _really_ is the cost discrepancy coming from? If we build the damned things in the desert, where there's plenty of Sun, what's the deal? If it is efficiency, hell, you just build more for less cost per unit. Big deal. The fuel is free...what gives? I'm a heck of a fan of solar heat for houses...but it seems like no one likes that idea any more. Pity, it can work wonders. Even up here, people have made thermal cisterns to store up heat over the summer, and they heat their homes in the winter with the hot water. In the end, it seems to boil down to one thing: the more you tax, the more it's wasted on 'special interest groups,' which nowadays can mean ANYTHING. As for me, once was a Republican. Not any more. Just an American, blue-collar man, who tries to be the best he can for his wife, and tries to help those he can. That's about all I am. Sworn to no political party. I'm also told I'm pretty weird. Might be true. --Kyle, who in the past couple of days, has come to the conclusion that nothing oscillates when you want it to, but always will when you DON'T want it to. Special deal for Yahoo! users friends - No Cost. Get a month of Blockbuster Total Access now http://tc.deals.yahoo.com/tc/blockbuster/text3.com
[Vo]:Gasoline prices...
...or Petrol, depending on from where you come. $3.87/U.S. Gallon here in western NY. Crazy, considering that when I moved here six years ago it was about $1.50. Yay-big increase. Now, as I was in a somewhat contemplative mood earlier, I decided to sit back and see how this really affected me. We'll ignore whether or not I agree with why the prices are going up, and so on. Let us look at the matter purely objectively. Your mileage may vary of course (HA!) but this is my personal experience. It really ain't done much to me. Why? I noticed that, perhaps subconsciously, I was planning trips differently. I still go to the same amount of places per week, I still get the same things done that need to get done, and so on. But I plan them to be on one trip, and in a single loop. I.e., a typical Saturday morning: Go to bank, get money. Go to hardware store, get stuff for home and/or experiments. Go to Radio Shi--- er...Shack. Get (what few they still carry) components. And so on. All in a logically drawn out loop. The end result is, I still pay about the same amount for gasoline, I have more time to do what I need to get done...transit time does add up. And an added benefit: less wear and tear on that car. I'll also grudgingly admit that it produces less CO2 to do this. I guess I'll be good if I /have/ to. I am also getting damned tired of people going to the gas station, and getting in line ahead of me and bitching about the price per gallon... ...and then getting $20-40 worth of lotto tickets. Can we say, hippochrissy? (Yes, I spelled that wrong on purpose. I have to do something to maintain my reputation as an evil bastard, yeah?) --Kyle Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ
Re: [Vo]:Casimir Generator
Horace, I don't know if this would have any bearing on, or be any help with this thought experiment you are working on, but there is a paper describing the theorized energy density within various cavities, authored by the late Dr. Robert Forward. I have it in PDF format if it would be helpful to you. The title is Apparent Method for Extraction of Propulsion Energy from the Vacuum, AIAA 98-3140. The idea is that the zero point energy (whatever that actually is) within an enclosed metal box of some dimensions has a certain energy density. For a box of some dimensions, as given in the paper, you can have negative energy density of a some value, as between two parallel metal plates. Here's where it starts to get odd, in my opinion: The paper concludes that for a box of dimensions 1x1x1 units, there is a net positive energy density, and the Casimir force is now repulsive. For a box of 1x1x3.3, the net energy density is zero, and there is no Casimir force. It seems therefore that if the box walls could be manipulated in a certain way.you get the drift. I don't know if the paper is available online any more. If you want a copy, I'll send it to you, or I can post it online. I hope this helps in some way. Of course, as most everything else I post is ignored, it might be prudent just to turn this into recycled electrons. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Casimir Generator
--- On Fri, 7/4/08, Horace Heffner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thanks, I'd appreciate a copy. Alrighty. I'll put it online in a bit and send you the URL. Probably be better that way, as it is a bit large, at 1.2 megs. I don't want to be rude and direct email something that big. Say, that was a handy reference title. A brief search on it leads to many things, and led me to snip Interesting. I will look over these in a few minutes. Alright, here's waxing ridiculous. But hey, it is the 4th, everyone around here is getting drunk and such, so why can't a mad scientist like me go out on a limb for a short period of time? Thinking on the 1x1x1 cube (the same is rumored true of a hollow sphere)...if there is supposed to be positive energy density inside it, and it has a repulsive Casimir effect... What if one of Bill Beatty's energy sucking resonant antennas was placed inside this thing, and made to sing at some frequency contained therein by the cube. Should it be an integral value of standing wave that 'fits' inside the thing? Put the ground reference somewhere outside the cube. Or better yet, put it between two parallel plates, spaced the same wavelength apart. Energy sucking antenna is in the positive energy space... Ground (low side) is in the zero (or negative) energy space... Can we take some of the 'space stuff' that everyone calls ZPE? Just some brain droppings to amuse. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Casimir Generator
Horace, File uploaded. http://www.fdscience.org/1/aiaa983140.pdf --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Chinese building space drive unit
Vortex, This discussion over whether or not Shawyer's theory is correct or not is pointless and the wrong subject. You can prove or disprove anything if you have enough mathematical and speculative handwaving to say what you want to say. The two points that SHOULD be very carefully considered are, 1. Whether or not it works. It doesn't matter if the theory is right or wrong. What matters is whether or not it produces a thrust that is truly 'reactionless'. Meaning, not expelling matter or energy, or if it expels energy, giving more thrust per energy input than an equal photon drive. If it works, then the theoretical physicists who said it couldn't should be all sacked. Then the technology should be developed. As far as I am aware, with those I've communicated with about this, the problems of heat causing convection effects have not been ruled out. The weighing methods haven't been very good, especially when you've got a microwave source this powerful hanging around nearby. I've worked on many different concepts for reactionless thrusters, and I can tell you from experience, there are MANY MANY MANY 'gotchas' that can bite you. They will almost invariably come from the one place you DIDN'T think to look. On a more personal level, I'd love to see a reactionless engine work. If for no other reason (primal, I admit), than to see a lot of so-called scientist's reputations destroyed and the physics house-of-cards utterly trashed. 2. No one has discussed thisso I will. And it is as on topic as screaming about overweight people and suggesting that vegetarian cats are good things to have around. China should NOT BE BUILDING ANYTHING THAT WILL GIVE THEM AN ADVANTAGE IN SPACE! Does anyone remember Tiananmen Square? The three powers that should be working on this should be the USA, the EU, or Japan. China should have no involvement in this whatsoever, given their atrocious human right's violations. You think the USA is bad? Go see what the Chinese do. There is no comparison. But everyone these days, Liberal or Conservative, seem to have a sick love affair with China. The USA can't build a power plant, but China can build dozens and dozens of unscrubbed coal-burners. They can have a population so oppressed that there is no hope whatsoever, and that's okay. It's not that they are bad...it's just that we in the USA and the other 'decadent' countries are too 'good off.' Once you have the high-ground, space in this case, you can do almost anything you want and get away with it. There is little defense. China, in its current state, has NO business occupying this top rung of the ladder. Last night, after reading about this, was incredibly depressing for me. It shows how badly my country, and so many others, have sold out their industry and ingenuity to an enemy regime that cares NOTHING for human life, for but a fistful of dollars and euros. If anyone in the USA, the EU, Japan, or any other free nation (they are, compared to China), has any sense left, they should research this and leave China in the dust. Hell, how about Taiwan? AKA, the nation that the USA stupidly refuses to admit exists. I'd support a Taiwanese space program, if for no other reason than telling China: We don't care about your threats, we don't need your poisonous cat food and toys, we don't need your slave-labor produced garbage. And guess what? Taiwan don't belong to you any more, their purpose is their own, so go f**k yourselves and leave them alone to their own destiny. And by the way, if you want to exist in the next 100 years, you'd better consider releasing Tibet. If Shawyer and his company willingly gave this over to the Chinese, especially if money was involved, then he is worse than the worst, in my book. What happened to the UK's national pride? Where has it gone? Think I'll go listen to Roger Waters' The Final Cut. It seems appropriate. --Kyle P.S., if you think I'm defending the myriad nasty things the USA has (and/or is) doing, don't bother replying. It is simply a question of who is more evil in the absolute sense. That does matter when you are talking about human lives.
[Vo]:Re: They'll take a friggin' mile... And your little people, too!
Mark, and all, You're worried about something minor compared to producing what, in worst case, could be American Brownshirts. See: http://www.reason.com/blog/show/129949.html Before I go further, no I have not reviewed other content on that site, so I don't endorse anything besides what the facts show. Those facts, shown in the above link, can be easily found. I find it fascinating that it is the so-called Liberals who are behind this sort of unconstitutional garbage, when they are the ones who scream about America oppressing its people. Aren't you Liberals supposed to be the ones fighting for individual rights and freedoms? Or is that only if you're a special case? Read: minority, either sexually or ethnically. As the late John Schnurer would say H??? 18 to 25, required to serve. What is this 3 months of service? Yank you away from your family for three months, indoctrinate you? Or is it more benign...just go there for a few hours a week, learn some things, a new civil defense? If you take them OUT of the workforce for three solid months, you will rape our economy even worse. Who is going to pay for this? Oh yes, this applies to women as well. Women's rights has really progressed...they can be effective slaves (heh...slavery reinstituted by a Black president!), but they are STILL TREATED AS SECOND CLASS CITIZENS. If you don't think women are, please remove your head from your rectum, and allow the CH4 to get out of your system so you can think clearly, and we will then converse. Kay? If you are a true Liberal Democrat, and truly believe in all this feel-goodness and oneness and happiness, then you had better do what you preach, and oppose any of this before it is too damn late. Most likely, this will turn out to be nothing. I expect the ACLU and all the other alphabet soup boys will never let this happen. But there is a need, I feel, to send a very clear message to any even POTENTIAL threats to our individual rights and liberties: do what WE THE PEOPLE say, and leave our rights alone, or we will forcibly remove your ass from office. You too can go from being President/Senator/Chief of Staff/Governor/whatever to flippin' burgers and McD's faster than a speeding photon. I fully support a VOLUNTARY programme of service. Help out, get involved, etc. In other words...things I and my wife already do. Nevertheless, you will get far more our of us by asking, than you will by demanding. Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country. He never said, and your country will fucking TELL you what to do. So don't even ask, you'll get instructed. I will close with this, and I fully expect to be beaten by the bleeding-hearts who would have chomped this like a milkbone dog biscuit if it'd come from the political right... I am 25. I fall within this, but it wouldn't happen. I will be 26 at the end of March. In two months, they won't be able to turn the political supertanker fast enough to get me. But my wife is 24. If anyone thinks they can have her, and indoctrinate her for three months, I have a very rude awakening for you. Touch me, I'll tell you where to go, and laugh. Touch my wife, and you will die. Natalia belongs to herself, and not the state. Not Barack Obama, not Rahm Emmanuel, not G. W. B., not anyone. She is who she is, and I thought you Liberals were all about that sort of thing. Worst comes to worse, Canada is a fifteen minute drive from here. Question to our resident Canadians...how's the weather? Any better than Buffalo NY? Lake effect is no fun! --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Re: They'll take a friggin' mile... And your little people, too!
--- On Tue, 11/11/08, Harry Veeder [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: Harry Veeder [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Vo]:Re: They'll take a friggin' mile... And your little people, too! To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Date: Tuesday, November 11, 2008, 11:19 PM I suggest I-Thank-You's (money created independently of central banks) should be injected into the economy to cover the cost of tuition. Not much of an economist myself, so I couldn't really say if it would help or not. It might, but if it's a good idea, no self-respecting politician will try it. Other student expenses could be covered by an optional program of community service. Good idea, but the key word here is 'optional.' Involuntary servitude, as Emmanuel and presumably (only presumably now, and not definitely, since Change.gov was scrubbed) Obama want, is slavery. Hmm. One wonders if minorities would be exempt from this servitude, or at least given a big heaping helping of ways to get out of it, or ease on through. By the way, guys... I'm a bit surprised none of the main beef of my post was answered or discussed in any way. Usually the residents here like to beat the living hell out of dissenting opinions. The deafening silence speaks volumes. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Re: They'll take a friggin' mile... And your little people, too!
--- On Wed, 11/12/08, Jed Rothwell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Speaking for myself, I don't respond to things like that because it is embarrassing. I mean, I pity you. You need to take a deep breath and come to your senses. I don't need your pity, or anyone else's. I don't do the whole handout thing. Do you REALLY, honestly, for one second believe that Obama or any other U.S. politician would make a thing like this obligatory? Are you that bleached in the head? It said MANDATORY on Change.gov! It said MANDATORY in Rahm Emmanuel's damned book, for crying out loud! YOU need to read the facts, I'm afraid. If the facts from the proverbial horse's mouth aren't valid, what do you suggest is? Note, I said this PROBABLY WOULD NOT happen. But, they do say this in their own published works. To deny it makes your position as a bastion of truth extremely questionable, to say the least. That is so far out of the realm of the possible it isn't worth the effort to deny. What else do you think: that Obama is secretly a Muslim and he intends to make us all bow to Mecca?!? That he isn't a U.S. citizen? I don't think he's a Muslim, and for that matter, don't have much of a problem with it anyways. I've come to know and befriend many Muslims in the past year or so, and find them to not be a bunch of nutcases. They're actually quite friendly, and pointed out to me many times that stunts like suicide bombing is forbidden by their Koran. Kindly remove your strawman. As to his citizenship, I don't know. He might NOT be an American citizen. Or he might. Who can say? Er...maybe the SCOTUS. Obama apparently has to answer to them with documentation by Dec. 1st. I take no position on this, because I simply do not know. I don't have the facts on that matter, and I haven't seen the birth certificate. I honestly do not know. But I do know that Obama could have quelled these fears easily by simply complying before now. I do know that if McCain (who I did not support) did this same thing, you and your buddies would be howling like mad. Apparently you buy these absurd fantasies wholesale from right-wing organizations. You are a gullible person. I suggest you calm down and try reading valid sources of information. Change.gov is right wing? Rahm Emmanuel's book is right wing? Well shit, I guess the Republicans managed to hoodwink us all...they must still be in power. What's a valid source of information? National Enquirer? Is it gullibility, or just being alert? If you've got any common sense, you'll keep an eye on anyone who has power, Republican, Democrat, Green, or Neptunian, and make sure it is not abused. Power does go to people's heads, and the checks and balances do NOT always ensure that abuses won't get out of hand. If you think there's no chance for anything, either now, or fifty years from now, to happen that is so bad, there's about six million Jews who'd like to differ with you. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Re: They'll take a friggin' mile... And your little people, too!
To Jed, and all Vortexians who are still here: Most likely, this will turn out to be nothing. I said that. So I think I covered my ass previously. If the above sentence is too difficult to understand, I'll try to explain it better. R.C. Macaulay could probably say it better, and more humorously, than I can. R.C., always have enjoyed your posts. They make this place seem not so depressing. I will state this for you (Jed) and you (all Vortexians). Please let this sink in: I do NOT think it will get this bad. But with threats such as this insinuated on Change.gov, Barack Obama's official website of transition, and in Rahm Emmanuel's (future Chief of Staff) book, we as /The People/ cannot be too careful. If you think we CAN be too careful, then I ask you to review the past 8 years. It hasn't been too great for freedom. I specifically stated I did NOT endorse the views of the website hosting the link I posted, only the specific content I pointed out, which is in print in Emmanuel's book, and was in the pre-scrubbed Change.gov official website. I am NOT a Republican. I am NOT part of the 'vast right-wing conspiracy,' whatever that is. I am an American Citizen, and I have the right and responsibility to make certain that my nation is governed by the will of the people, not tyrants, from whatever direction they might come. I HOPE you are completely right, Jed. To NOT hope you are right, to not hope that I am having completely unfounded fears, would be alarming indeed. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:electrogravitics
Thomas, and all, As far as 'electrogravitics' goes, I can speak to this a bit, as I've experimented with it for quite a number of years. The first thing I'll say is, Townsend Brown obviously meant something different by electrokinetics and electrogravitics. This is glossed over in modern times. The former is almost entirely (probably IS entirely) driven by electric wind and differential excitation of oxygen and nitrogen. It does not work in a vacuum. The Lifter is this sort of thing. So is the thruster worked on by Miklos Borbas. These things won't produce any external thrust if you shield them properly against wind effects and field effects, from interacting with the surrounding environment. There's been so much disinformation and bad research here, that little progress can be made in anything that may be real, assuming it exists. As to Brown's original 'electrogravitics', it is plagued by trying to cast out artifacts...such as, eliminating all spurious, conventional causes for thrust. This is not easy, especially when you get towards 60 or 70kV. It gets worse and worse the higher you go. The highest voltages I worked with in my experiments were about 300kV, and these were very definitely hard to wrestle with. The power supply was just too big to mount on the torsion platform I used for testing, so you'd get things that looked compelling, but were never able to be conclusively proved. One of the things I tried to test for was whether or not the 'massiveness' of the dielectric had any effect, as Brown claimed, on thrust. I used a thruster made of two lead plates, about 4 square apiece, separated by a block of paraffin wax, with large plexiglas spark shields between the plates and the wax dielectric, so as to prevent arcover. This gave some weak thrust towards the positive pole. Replacing the wax block with an identical sized block of lead monoxide mixed with paraffin gave greater thrust...probably about 3 or 4 times as much. Replacing this with a block of barium titanate and wax gave identical thrust. Putting the block of barium titanate and the block of lead oxide both in between the plates gave something interesting, at least at first glance: the thrust was always towards the heavier end, the lead oxide one, regardless of polarity. BUT...replacing the oxide block with a block of styrofoam (unquestionably lighter than the barium titanate block) didn't change things...it moved always in the direction of the styrofoam block. It then seemed that motion was always in the direction of the LEAST k dielectric. This was in contradiction to what Brown said. I fought with it, and with artifacts and shielding for years. Then the Lifter thing came along, and has so polluted this field of study, that I gave up. There is no separating what MIGHT be something, from the pseudoscience. As to the PDF...I looked it over. It doesn't really say much, does it? As far as Wallace's work, I have no experience here, so cannot comment on it. Trying to make something like that out of brass would be expensive, and require some careful machining. --Kyle --- thomas malloy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Vortexians; I just received the following. The question is, will it fly, eh? [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dear Thomas, I just released a free e-book that I think you'd enjoy. It's at http://www.ufohowto.com/How%20UFOs%20Work.pdf. Let me know what you think. Thanks and best regards, Luke --- Get FREE High Speed Internet from USFamily.Net! -- http://www.usfamily.net/mkt-freepromo.html ---
[Vo]:For the resident nuclear experts...semi-OT?
All, Here's a question regarding a bit of fiction I am writing as a side project. What would the radiation effects be of a hypothetical pure-fusion nuclear weapon? That is, a nuclear bomb containing no fissile material whatsoever, triggered by some other means. The following scenarios are used in the storyline, and I'd like to get the physics reasonably correct: 1. Moderately-high altitude detonations over sea and/or largely uninhabited areas, with intent of destroying American, Russian, Chinese launched ICBMs, aircraft squadrons, etc. How much fallout (if any) is produced by the pure-fusion device, and will remains of the intercepted fissile-material-containing missiles cause fallout? I would assume it would. 2. Air blast of pure fusion weapon over land, for example, a city. Fallout? Neutron activation? How bad would this be, and would there be some fusion reaction schemes that could mitigate neutron activation? 3. Same as above, but a ground blast of the fusion weapon. Again, I'd assume neutron activation would be a factor, and is there some way to minimize it? Thanks in advance, --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:For the resident nuclear experts...semi-OT?
Google neutron bomb. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk [EMAIL PROTECTED] Already know about them, read Cohen's articles and all. What is described by 'neutron bomb' still contains fissile material...albeit not alot. Still some fallout, but the amount of fusion fuel is very limited, so there's a subkiloton explosion. Radius at which fast neutrons kill far exceeds zone of blast damage. I'll explain what I'm getting at in response to Leaking Pen's reply... --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:For the resident nuclear experts...semi-OT?
--- leaking pen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: pure fusion would be a so called neutron bomb high emp, lots of radiation, little blast. if they worked, you could basically drop a few dozen, instantly kill most of the population, wait a year, go in and use all the land and buildings and such, no sweat, just some corpse clean up. basically, you WOULDNT use a pure fusion device to block icbms. We're not talking the same thing, at least on a sense of 'relative scaling'. For instance, let's say you have a bomb which produces a blast of 57 megatons, 97% of which comes from fusion alone (very clean). As luck (?!) has it, this was built and tested by the USSR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba If we knock off that 3% and use what's left as a basis for pure-fusion (in my scenario), we've got a bit more than a 55 megaton bomb. That is not a neutron bomb, it's a crustbuster. Blast damage would far exceed the neutron lethal radius, and thermal burns from the long lasting fireball would far exceed even that. The general idea is: 'these guys' know how to build a weapon that can be scaled dependant almost entirely on how much fusion fuel (probably lithium-6 deuteride) is present in said device. A wee bit gets you a quonset-hut-crusher. A bucketload gets you a mushroom cloud bigger than you can shake a stick at. I *don't* want to touch anti-matter, for a couple reasons... 1. It's been done to death worse than Dracula. 2. There's no easy way to make it actually explode with a nuclear-level blast. As far as we know, it just blows apart before it reacts efficiently (you can't mix the stuff with its own weight in normal matter fast enough) and what's left 'burns' slowly. Bad, yes, but not quite the same thing. 3. It hints of Star Trek, which ain't what I'm aiming for. Obviously a lot of neutrons are going to be released, unless there is some other reaction scheme that can be nearly or totally aneutronic. p + B? I don't know if that could ever be 'bombified.' So my concern is, how much fallout could we expect due to neutron activation? --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:For the resident nuclear experts...semi-OT?
--- leaking pen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: fast neutrons can cause physical damage, de magnetize things, and cause other issues, but i was under the impression that it would only cause actual nuclear reactions with certain ALREADY radioactive species. and i cant find anything online to the contrary. Care to link some info on fast neutrons causing such reactions? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_activation --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:For the resident nuclear experts...semi-OT?
--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: While true, all those energetic neutrons have to go somewhere. They will do two things:- 1) While still energetic they will damage other nuclei, producing radioactive species. 2) When absorbed by other nuclei, they will also create radioactive species. In short it isn't *really* going to be a clean bomb. That's what I would think. Far cleaner than anything we have today, but if it is ground blasted, there's got to be a little something left. My question was basically, how bad would it compare to something manufactured with today's technology. IF I am correct in my thinking... 1. Ground-blast leaves some (maybe not too much) fallout, probably far less than a normal fission-fusion ground blast. 2. Air blast leaves very little, depending on how far the neutrons are able to go and be absorbed by atoms in dust and debris. Widespread destruction, thermal and blast effects, initial ionizing radiation, but little lasting radioactivity. March in a few days later. 3. Higher altitude aerial blast (something like a Nike Zeus), for all intents, no fallout. Little to speak of nearby to activate. Some remnants of the bomb parts, destroyed missiles, etc. might become a bit radioactive, but not like Castle Bravo did. Incidentally, while following up on neutron bombs, I found a document by Sam Cohen which discusses pure-fusion bombs and lack of fallout. I guess the idea is, there's very little produced even by activation. My only beef with calling a multimegaton pure fusion nuke a 'neutron bomb' is simply that the neutron effects radius is far overshadowed by blast and thermal effect radii. The Tsar Bomb obviously put out more neutrons than a 10 ton yield neutron bomb...but no one is calling the King of All Bombs a neutron bomb. :) But I guess in the end it boils down to this: it will still kill ya if you're unlucky enough to be nearby. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Predictions for 2009
Hmmm. Considering that for the time period between Christmas and New Years, that the following took place at my home: 1. Freak high-velocity winds took the shingles off my carport. 2. I got the flu. 3. Someone stole my garbage can (not the wind, the winds were dead calm that day.) 4. I discovered that with favorable (!) winds, you can shovel the same snow out of your driveway 5 times. 5. Was cussed out by my boss for the heinous and evil deed of helping get someone unstuck from the snowy slush in our shop's parking lot (because da boss didn't want to snowplow) 6. A faulty photocell caused my furnace to quit on New Years Day, several hours before anyone was awake. Once started, the hydronic radiator supply line was frozen, due to it being 7F outside, and that the line was located next to the cat door, which somehow one of our cats, or possibly a raccoon, removed. The door ain't been found, either. A blow torch solved this, eventually. (the pipe, not the cat.) 7. Upon hitting a pothole in The Land of Taxes (NY State), the coil spring seat for my car's R/F strut broke. 8. Got the flu back, after messing around in the cold with all this whatnot. So yeah, '09 isn't looking too charming at this point. No, but seriously. I have no idea. All I will say is, there is a lot of hope and potential, but the human race has a tendency to waste opportunities, and pave them over with good intentions, thus furthering construction of the Highway to Hell. The same earth is still in the ground. The same air is still here. The same snow is still on the ground outside, each crystalline bit glittering as the luminous melody of distant streetlights, moonlight, and skyshine catches it in the right way, allowing it to provoke something of a profound feeling in even so jaded an individual as myself. The same people I love are still near to me. The same familiar yellow light will rise again in a few more hours, and will do so for 5 billion years to come. The same hope and possibility exists today, as it did yesterday, if only we would take it. The same constants of nature still exist, that bind matter together, that make molecular machines such as ourselves possible. And yet we concern ourselves so, build our lives around, dictate our actions by, and all too often harm one another... ...based only on a few jots of numbers, which exist only on paper. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Predictions for 2009
--- Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: I do not think so. In ~4.5 billion years the sun will be a Red Giant, and I think the wavelength and power of the light will change considerably before that. http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Lectures/vistas97.html As far as I can tell, from reading this and other sources, the main sequence life (roughly G type yellow dwarf) will last about another 5Gyr. Supposedly, in 1.1Gyr, it will become too bright, by 10% or so, for surface life to exist here. This doesn't, I think, do the Gaia hypothesis justice. Something might evolve that removes more CO2, or does something to offset this. Of course, this can't last forever. Eventually it will get too hot. Or will it? By then, human civilization, or whatever or whoever the current landlords are, may do something to change all this. Stellar rejuvenation has been discussed, to extend main sequence lifetime by 10 times or so. If they can do this, putting up some solar shields to dump a few tens of percents of insolation is trivial. The sun might end up lasting much longer than I said. If I wasn't exact, at least I was closer than some who say it is only going to last a few more years. I sometimes wonder how many of the peculiar stars we see out there might actually be someone's engineering project. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:A Modest Proposal
. . . . . . This isn't aimed at any one person, but to all who are of the likeminded mentality which I am finding myself anathema to. Which one of you built the Georgia Guidestones? Or maybe some drunk from the Dime Box Saloon built them. If so, they're excusable as a funny prank. I don't have any Gummi Bears, I don't really like them, and they damage my already not so great teeth. Sucks to be born with not so good enamel on your teeth. But that's the way she goes. If anyone wants to raise taxes, alright, I'll listen. But I want to see minorities...wait...I'm not going to be politically correct here, I'm going to say it as it is. I want to see blacks, puerto ricans, and white trash such as litter down town Buffalo thrown off welfare. I am tired of paying for these scumbags to pass kids from God knows how many fathers, get them on SSI/etc., and get them paid for. These people, so-called, aren't paying for anything, nor are they contributing anything. So if you want to go after the working class American man (or woman) who does his/her job, pays taxes, and generally tries to help out his/her fellow human being, you'd better go after the real drains on our society first, or STFU. If you don't know what that acronym means, Google it. After all, that's what you guys told the late John Schnurer to do back in the day. I bust my ass each day at work, trying to eke out a living. I pay my taxes, have the maximum withdrawn each week, and get back whatever the state and fed tells me I should. I pay for social security I'll never see. Of course, I might not live long enough for that to matter, see below. I try to help people out as much as I can. But when you want to mandate that I do something, you're speakin' trouble. Come to my house and tell me not to idle my car before leaving for work when today's high is 2F, and I'll not hesitate to blow your brains out. Liberals, take note: YOU DO NOT RUN MY DAMN LIFE! Take your feel good shit, that benefits no one but the voters you seek to culture up from the burned-out cores of once-thriving cities, and shove it where the sun don't shine. You want Canadian style healthcare? Let me tell you something about the Canadian healthcare system. It sucks ass. How do I know this? My father in law is a Canadian citizen, dying of ALS. The government-run hospital and staff that he's at does not give a damn when his feeding tube gets dislodged. Several times this happened, and was not corrected for a couple days. They said he'll be fine. Without food for a few days? And you can't complain. There's no one to complain to. It does, just like everything in bloated government that liberals masturbate to, nothing at all. And you are not ALLOWED to put the tube back together yourself. No, have to have a specially liscenced professional do that. Why? The law. Libs love laws for laws sake. I'll pause a moment to say this: Conservatism in the USA is dead. G.W. Bush raped it, Dick Cheney sodomized it, and the rest of their assorted hangers-on shot what was left. Thanks, guys. You screwed us all. You have a problem with me calling blacks BLACK, or pointing out that most of them within a fifty mile radius of here (with exceptions, some of whom I am honored to say are close friends of mine, people I would lay my life down for), are lazy bums, and have with their garbage music, nasty style of dress, emphasis on treating women as ho's fo' fukkin', dragged the white youth down with them. You have a problem with me saying that? Oh, but you don't have a problem with throwing blacks under the bus, or women, or whoever, if they don't line up with your liberal agenda. Then they're fair game. L. Ron Hubbard should have got a load of your types. I'll give you an example: this past summer, I was minding my own business, driving down U.S. 62, with the windows down, as it was hot. (no doubt my fault because I drive to work, and don't leech off the system). I was jamming to Hall Oates, when a black kid pulls up next to me in a car he obviously bought with drug money. BMW, plus 20+ rims. (You should see 'em try and drive in the snow with four gyroscopes for wheels. Let the precession occur!) He proceeds to cuss at me for listening to what I was listening to, instead of his rap. Said I was rayciss. I said I don't race cars. He got mad, said some garbage, swore a lot. I said I'm sorry sir, I don't speak Ebola, and drove away. Now obviously that makes me racist because, one, I didn't start it, two, I'm white, which automatically makes me one, and three, I don't like black culture such as gangsta rap. I never felt like this, or had to deal with this shit until I moved to a liberal state. I didn't know what racism really was back home. I met it here, and it's directed against me. The minorities, scum, and other assorted fruits and nuts get handouts. I go to the doctor yesterday, and attempt to pay with cash. No medical insurance, can't afford it. Ain't that something? CASH DON'T TALK ANY MORE! All I found out
Re: [Vo]:Detecting the Holographic Blurriness of Space-Time
For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. snip... Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. snip prophecy in science... dissolves into dots as you zoom in. It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time, says Hogan. Is this why my shock absorbers are buffeted when I drive down Niagara Falls Blvd.? Or is that just the potholes? If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram. Wow. We hear some noise between 300-1500cps, and that means the universe is a hologram. Planck sized nougaty bite-size bits on a pringle-shaped universe of some kind. Can I get some quantum foam atop my Guiness? There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. -- Mark Twain Cheers, --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Homegrown wind generators
--- OrionWorks svj.orionwo...@gmail.com wrote: My wife could not live without chocolate. Mine either. She'll kill for it. P.S.: IQ of 200 does not mean a person is not stupid. ...Only that one's stupidity is more ingenious. I get a sudden mental image of Wile E. Coyote, assembling some Acme product. :) --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:OT: Limbaugh: I hope [BO] fails
--- OrionWorks svj.orionwo...@gmail.com wrote: Years ago, I watched a number of late evening RL TV shows that aired. Almost invariably they all started out with unimpressive cartoon skits depicting Bubba doing something stupid, insofar as conservatives were concerned. Ok... I stand corrected. It was not so much hatred I viewed, as constant ridicule. Like what the left (and now the right, since it's 'CYA' time now) did to Palin? I'll state here, I thought she wasn't very great a choice...McCain was even WORSE. But while it was completely forbidden to say almost anything about Obama, for fear of being called a racist, it is OK to beat the hell out of a woman. I thought the left was all for women's equality? I also thought they liked blacks? Only when it fits their agenda. And the right tends to follow suit these days. Which is why you find me here, in the independant DMZ, watching this stupidity. I was wondering if someone might be offended by the mob mentality association I made here. I apologize for that. Apology accepted, Captain Needa (yes I know you were saying that to Rick, but I couldn't resist.) I don't have a problem with your expressed political opinion on the matter. It makes no difference that I might disagree with it. Point is, plenty of people out there in the mass-media and such apparently DO. Hell, on Tuesday (black tuesday...in a good way or bad? Time will tell.) whites, native americans, and orientals were insulted by the Right Rev. Lowery. If he'd really been joking, he should have said: A time when Blacks will pay welfare back... On that note...we'll let the obvious bullshit of whites [needing to] do what's right slide a moment. Let's look at yellows being mellow. Now, I know, some are gonna say this was taken from that stupid play, whatever it was called, but most people have never heard of it. Most people, and if Lowery is not a complete fucking retard he would have known this, will associate yellow with oriental, red with Native American, and so on and so forth. I know a ton of people of oriental descent. They're fabulous people to hang around with, don't blast trashy music around town, have jobs, pay taxes, and don't knock up a dozen different women and then skip out on child support. As for the reds needing to get ahead, man. Okay, as part Choctaw 'Injun', I do not particularly like this, but given the existence of Red Man Chewing Tobacco, I'll pass on judging that /directly./ What I will NOT pass on is pointing out that, in New York at least, it is the liberals who keep the red man from getting ahead, man. These guys want to...you guessed it...tax them. On cigarettes, gasoline, and now...snack foods. While forcing them to do all sorts of baloney impact statements before being allowed to build anything, even if they own the land. The political right up here basically lets them do what they want. The bleedin' hearts of the left are the ones keeping the red man addicted to handouts. It's a nice, insidious trick, and it makes ya just feel so good 'cause you DID SOMETHING TO HELP. vomits Ask a Tuscarora or a Seneca if you can trust the left to help. ...and then I feel less apologetic. Perhaps we both need to look in the mirror and acknowledge our biased flaws. I'll look in the same mirror you two are looking in as well, bud. My flaws are plenty. But I, and those with my view or similar views, have as much right as you or anyone else to speak our mind. I've posted time and again, trying to stir up some interest in really doing something. Homemade apparatus to help, how to cut costs of solar generation stations, and so on. Either no one replies, or I'm told to buy a commercial unit. Don't you people get it? That was NOT THE POINT!!! The point was to get people together, to build something cheap that will... 1. Prove that it works IN A WAY THAT PEOPLE CAN TANGIBLY SENSE, unlike a big distant spinning gizmo. 2. Save money for those who the left wants to tax out of existance (you may lower income taxes, but you'll raise something else to pay for all those minorities having kids) 3. Give people a sense of doing something. Jeez, that almost sounded (shudder) like what OBAMA stands for... Me??? Going along with part of his agenda? Think about it. Or, fellow vortexians, WITH EXCEPTION OF: R.C. Macaulay, Philip Winestone, and plenty of others who've said kind words to me and tried to do something...if your name isn't included, I apologize, I'm too angry to recall them all, but know that I have NOTHING AGAINST you. I'm glad you guys are here. I'm simply saying this to the /others/... ...Are you just here to bitch and moan, spout something that gives you a sense of accomplishment, feel good about being 'on the proper side' and so highminded, hope that an unproven scientific concept will save the day...and in short, do nothing to really HELP anyone except screwing around? I'm gonna build my windmills this summer. Maybe they'll work, maybe not. If nothing else,
RE: [Vo]:OT: Limbaugh: I hope [BO] fails
actually told the American public we need to grow up! Talk about audacity! Telling a bunch of overgrown children to stop acting like spoiled ninnies . . . Jed, Talk is cheap. First point, I hope Obama DOES make things actually better for us. It's crazy to hope that he fails so badly that the U.S.A. is dragged down even further. IT DOES NOT MATTER what political party the person is of, if he or she can truly make things better, please, let it be so. But we will watch carefully to make sure it is truly so. Second point, just what in the hell have I, my wife, and likeminded and like-lifestyled people DONE to be so unAmerican, so ninny? You want me to rehash the laundry list of things we HAVE DONE to make a difference? You people really think people like me DON'T care about the planet? Why'd I go buy the Planet Earth box set then? (one made by BBC, which I highly recommend.) Or, let's turn this around another way: all you highminded far-leftists on Vortex... ...what have /YOU/ done to make a difference? --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:OT: Limbaugh: I hope [BO] fails
--- Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Kyle Mcallister wrote: Alright, two can play at this game. You fellas want to further pollute Vortex with this shit . . . Speaking for myself, my remarks on this subject are carefully considered, well researched and calm. I do not consider them shit. I say that you, Kyle Mcallister, are out line referring to them as such. You should apologize. First of all, I didn't really direct anything against any one person. I was going more for the 'sawed off shotgun' effect. Mafioso It's not personal, it's business. /Mafioso Second of all, you don't realize how corrosive some of the things your side say really are. You say them politely, I say them rather crudely. Quibbling over the windowshades clashing with the vinyl siding is ridiculous when the whole house is burning down. Put another way: you can say something terribly offensive to many, just as completely out of touch with reality, and make it look beautiful and heartwarming with the right application of words. Your side has mastered this, as the Russian Revolution attitude around me seems to demonstrate, at least here. My comments are probably equally offensive to many. The difference is, I don't try to hide the fact with pleasing words. If I say a few swear words along the way, well, that's what us little-guy working-class need-to-do-right white man/need-to-get-ahead-,man red men do. And yet, the silence is deafening. Again I say, to all you bleeding hearts and high minded liberals: What have /YOU/ done? The moving hand writes, and having writ, moves on... --Me, Myself, and Eye.
Re: [Vo]:Obama puts Schwarzenegger in charge of energy policy
Okay, here's my input from a mechanic's standpoint. Guys like me keep you driving. Jed, this includes you, and I have worked on Prius' (Prius's? Priuses? What DOES that name mean?!?) before. 1. Applying emissions restrictions to new vehicles is not that big of a deal, as far as I am concerned, meaning, I am not really opposed to it. Call me indifferent on this matter. AS LONG AS: A. It is done smartly, not the bandaid on bandaid on bandaid etc ad tedium ad nauseam that is placed under the hoods of cars made now. The WORST for this are the imports. Asian and European manufacturers have no clue how to build an EGR system. They are lost. B. Does not significantly impact the price of the vehicle, read, burden on the buyer. You'll help the economy this way, by encouraging people to buy better, cheaper, cleaner cars. C. Obama should encourage GM and so on to do B. D. Liberal lawlovers stay out of putting more of their beloved garbage into the process. Leave it to the engineers, let them and us mechanics do our jobs. It CAN be done and SHOULD be done. 2. If these restrictions are to be gran'daddied onto older cars, I and others like me will beging immediately looking for ways to help the 'little guy' such as myself, who cannot afford a new car right now, to cheat the test and 'pass'. Dumping the right blend of denatured alcohol into the engine, replacing the spark plugs RIGHT BEFORE the test, and a few other tricks can accomplish this with pre-1996 vehicles. With later than 1995 cars, OBDII becomes an issue, but there may be ways around that which I don't know of. I'm not much of a computer guy, to be honest. There are also tricks to permanently reduce emissions of an OBDII vehicle, but it causes the computer to misunderstand what is happening, and fail the vehicle even though it is cleaner than before. This kind of blanket coverage has to stop, and now. 3. You want to make a Great Society: The Next Generation? Okay. We can do that, and I'll even help. But, Obama, Terminator, and all you bigshots out there: you must not be lazy about it. How do I mean lazy? A. Zero tolerance policies are for losers and lazy bastards. It just means you don't want to take the time to REALLY think things through and cover the situations that don't fit the cubby hole. Such as, OBDII failure, but with tailpipe emissions that make Emperor Penguins oh-so-happy. B. Liberal democrats should HATE zero tolerance policies. After all, they adore clogging the system with unneeded crap, tagging junk onto bills whenever possible, why wouldn't they love going through convoluted permutations? C. Conservative republicans do the same thing these days. See a pattern? 4. You want a cheap electric car. Fine. You want it to plug in and shift the carbon upchuck somewhere else, or if we use something else, not put out carbon at all. Fine again. But we don't have the electric infrastructure to handle the load in many places, like L.A., as mentioned. ... I really don't see the problem here. If we could put a man on the moon nearly 40 years ago, why are we arguing about this? Stringing some lines, adding transformers, building a few more power plants, that is no big deal compared to Apollo. Except liberal controlled organizations won't let us build nuclear plants, even though they have little to no carbon footprint. Now, if we are to believe that Obama is going to give us change we can believe in, let's see this: Mr. Obama, direct the U.S. to construct enough new, safe, nuclear power plants using modern designs, to both reduce carbon emissions, and to take the first step to electrifying our roads. While you're at it, tell the EPA and the greenieweenies to go screw, as there is a war on, the war on energy, you see. We don't have time for anything but the most cursory of 'impact statements.' Well? Change? We are waiting. --Kyle, who has more change in his sock drawer than you can shake a stick at.
Re: [Vo]:Obama puts Schwarzenegger in charge of energy policy
--- Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Kyle Mcallister wrote: I have never heard of retrofitting older vehicles with emission controls. In any case, the main concern is for CO2 and this cannot be reduced in an older car by any means. No, they just want to boot them off the road. No thought is given to extending the useful life of a vehicle, re: expending much more energy and/or producing more waste (some very harmful) to make a new one. Throw-away is not always the right way. Reducing fuel consumption reduces the overall cost of the vehicle, although it may raise the purchase price. By the same token, adding safety features may raise the purchase price somewhat but it really reduces the cost of insurance and the overall cost of owning the vehicle because most of the money paid in insurance claims go for bodily injury rather than automobile repair. I'd like to see insurance prices actually reduced. So far, despite what the lizard says, I see them only go up. Not counting on this incentive. Second, if you want to dictate how to build cars, the burden is on you to figure out how to make them cheap, but cheerful at the same time. Bipartisan does not mean (and bipartisan is applied here loosely, not just to the ancient Reps/vs./Dems thing) YOU get to dictate how everyone manufactures and does everything. It means we meet in the middle somewhere. Environmentalists should learn this. 2. If these restrictions are to be gran'daddied onto older cars . . . That is physically impossible, as I said. You are no mechanic. If you reduce the amount of fuel used to go a given distance at a given speed and/or a given acceleration, you automatically reduce the amount of CO2 produced. If you think it is physically impossible to do this to older cars, I invite you up here to Buffalo, to actually learn about it. You love your Prius, with it's bells and whistles. Can you fix it when it breaks? You also go on about your old 1.0L 3-cyl Geo Metro. You say it can't go more than 55 or 60 unless going downhill. What's wrong with it? I've done 80 in them. My boss had one, a beat to shit '94 with rust holes all over it, and we got it up to 80 on level pavement. Maybe the added speed was due to so much sheet metal having fallen off previously, though. One gets the impression you really don't know a lot about how cars work. This is a real problem, when people that don't know much about the thing they are bitching about start trying to decide what is and is not legal. 4. You want a cheap electric car. Fine. You want it to plug in and shift the carbon upchuck somewhere else . . . This is incorrect. You cannot move carbon emissions. Carbon goes everywhere instantaneously. I didn't know carbon had anything to do with Bell's Inequalities or the EPR effect. What is your problem with what I said? If the electric car is not producing carbon dioxide... ...but the power plant 75 miles away is... ...the emission is 75 miles away. You are still emitting (an admittedly smaller amount, due to efficiency gains) of CO2. But you have physically moved the point of emission. Electric cars do not move carbon emissions; they reduce them by half or more. Yes, while moving the emissions. Which is neither bad, nor good. I'm simply pointing out to the dull witted (not calling you this, don't take it personal like last time) that electric cars are not emissionless /with current centralized energy production facilities that emit./ Hopefully this will change later as we invent better things, and hopefully grow the balls to railroad the greenieweenies standing in the way of nuclear plants. Electric cars are cheaper than gasoline cars because they save money on fuel. My '86 Monte Carlo got 28mpg, and cost me $400. How would buying an overly complicated (a hybrid can be far simpler) Prius compete with that? There were also no toxic batteries to have a Superfund team scrambling over, well, besides perhaps the standard 550CCA lead-acid Neverstart. (Bear in mind that the cost of gasoline is far greater than the purchase price at the pump. You have to add several dollars to pay for wars, terrorism, global warming and so on.) And to pay for welfare, and to pay for free birth control, (I am not opposed to birth control) and to pay for blah blah blah. If taxed as much as you like, someone, probably a liberal, would find a way to spend it on something stupid. For the record, I wouldn't trust a republican with the tax revenue either. I know, someone is going to say, oh the taxes aren't to spend to SOLVE the problem, they are to cause people to drive less. If you feel this way, you are NOT solving the bigger picture, you are impeding it with an ohms rating so big that you cannot put enough zeros behind it. If it is guaranteed (how?) that the tax is spent on building infrastructure to let people live their current or better quality of life, while not harming the environment, I don't have
Re: [Vo]:Pickens wrong about trucks
--- thomas malloy temall...@usfamily.net wrote: If I were appointed the car czar, I would require the vehicle's design to be reviewed by a panel of mechanics. That's a bloody good idea, speaking from a mechanic's point of view. The trash being sold for $20k+ these days is absolutely pathetic compared to what could be. Mercedes-Benz ML320 has for balljoints in the rear, made of aluminum (the metal that should be forbidden) and plastic. Each part costs $350+, with labor times to replace being about an hour per ball joint, plus time to disassemble the control arms to a point where the joints can be pressed out. The control arms are aluminum too, and sometimes crack. Also, aluminum does not rust in the saltwater environment...it DISINTEGRATES. 2006 ML320 required all four rear joints to be replaced, no warranty coverage. 51k miles. EGR systems on most modern cars fill with carbon after a relatively short time. Asian/European cars do this the worst. Terrible designs. The old, vacuum operated EGR valves in Chevrolets almost never did this. But that's the inexorable march of progress. Evaporative emissions system (stupidest idea ever) is the absolute king of failure these days. Most 1996+ cars fail low-enhanced emission test because of this pointless system. It is designed to fail. All plastic parts, overly complicated. Should be forbidden to be placed on vehicles. Either do something useful with the vapor, or forget about it. Besides, everyone is looking at CO2 these days anyways, their eyes are averted from things that are really dangerous (which this isn't, anyhow). The objective being to assure that they are easily fixable. I'd require a stainless steel underpan so that road salt wouldn't rot them out. Such a vehicle would last 1,000,000 miles. The economics of such a vehicle are totally different from one designed to cost too much to fix at 100,000 miles. Easily fixable is a very good thing, in my opinion. Making a car from stainless steel might jack up the price a bit. It is hard to weld, and 'cold welds' itself at times. But there might be a way around all this. I doubt it would last 1M miles without repair, but if you mean the actual vehicle structure would last that long, it might. Rust is the killer up here. It wouldn't be too economical to the manufacturer to make something that lasted that long without needing repairs. Of course, given that so many today think making the USA --- USSA is a good idea, many might flock to the idea. That might not be the company you want to keep, though. :) A simple reduction in the amount of bullcrap(tm) in a modern auto would DRASTICALLY reduce the price. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:more power - arrh, arrh!
--- Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Late model gas furnaces are better than 85% efficient, but of course they do not generate electricity! Oil burners are up to 85% these days, some even better. I think some SlantFin furnaces are a bit higher. Nevertheless, I loathe oil heat. For one, it is not the best for efficiency if something is just /slightly/ out of adjustment, for another, the diesel stink of No. 2 oil is impossible to wash off with one or two showers. Bleah! Now, here's something to ponder: can we replace No. 2 oil with biofuel derived product? Such as algoil? That won't solve the whole energy problem, but just taking the raw heat production used by the northern states out of the equation (and thus having net zero CO2 emissions) should be a step in the right direction. No? The HVAC installer told me that with the highest efficiency model, they could abandon the chimney in my house (which is a ~2 pipe) and have it vent at ground level. He said only thing that comes out is water vapor and CO2, no CO, and it is at moderate temperature, so there is no danger. This is true. However, caveat emptor: just because it will emit no CO at factory adjustment and when perfectly clean doesn't mean it won't if it gets out of adjustment, or gets dirty. Cat hair, dandruf, spiders, etc. can clog the thing. Dust will accumulate. Now, this is not to say ventless is not good...it is. And has great advantages in regions where it gets dry during the winter (aka, here). The added water vapor in the air does the job of a humidifier, and costs no electricity. But, always keep a CO detector near it, just in case. I personally have a ventless furnace, and love it. He said that to recover more heat, they inject a lot of water into the combustion product. Not sure at which stage. Some do this, some do not. Even without, the efficiency is very high. Well over 90%. I decided to go with a less efficient model that still needs the chimney, because I got a heat pump and the gas furnace is only used occasionally in cold weather. I think it kicks in below 40 deg F. 40F is cold? Er... nevermind, I'm getting used to Buffalo. :) --Kyle
[Vo]:Thoughts on this and that
Vortexians, left, right, center, up, down, backwards, sideways, snakebit, and/or whatever political/religious/etc. leanings you may have: A few points, directed in seemingly random directions at no one party (all seem equally guilty here), but maybe not so random? 1. Someone should go read the f---ing list rules again, about what Vortex-L is for. Where's VortexB-L when we need it? 2. Where's Bill?!?! 3. On 'pay the government well to do it for us'... yes, that's fine. But do so with a large caliber and large number of guns pointed at them, and tell them, don't screw up. You want my taxes, you spend them right. 4. When you get down to it, no one owes anyone anything. It all cancels out. You highminded geeks owe the lowly greasemonkey and metal press operator just as much as he owes you. So shut up. 5. Think 4 is wrong? Try and live without a mechanic, a truck route driver, a line stringer for the electric company, etc., for a few days. You can't telecommute everything. 6. In progressing from a Kardaschev type 0 to a type I civilization, energy expendature/generating capacity must increase. To hell with efficiency and conservation, let us make more, better, cleaner. Let's do it so well, that no one needs worry about turning the heat down. 7. Barack Obama is not a god, and he will screw up. Anyone would. Whether or not he makes good decisions in the long run, no one knows yet. I hope he does; I would be insane to hope he trashes the place. But we don't know, and he has already done a large number of stupid things, and made a lot of people mad. Before you liberals say anything, consider this: your side is the one that bitches about not hurting feelings. You love feelgood. So stuff a sock in it. 8. Republicans...now I turn to you. Why are so many of you HOPING Obama et al trash the place? Wouldn't it make sense to hope that, despite what it looks like so far, they do something that helps PEOPLE, and not highminders (on both sides) and stupid causes? 9. The stimulus bill (soeee!!! pigpigpig...) should have been spent on energy. And no one should disagree with it. If you do, then you lie in what you post to this list. 10. I do not give a damn about polar bears. I could care less if they all die off. I would gladly kill every single one of them to save a single human life, and that includes everyone on this list, even those I totally disagree with, with no exceptions. Human life is something meaningful, and it is more important. If you don't agree, I don't care. 11. You on the religious right. You are guilty FAR more than many others. You claim to speak from God's perspective. May he hold you to that one day when you face him. You say (not pointing fingers, almost all Christians say this) that works are filthy rags before the Lord. Have you ever read a book called James? Faith alone without works is /dead/. 12. I am not done with you. Let's sit around and wait for judgement, because there's nothing we can do about it. The human race is more valuable than that. And you know what? It forbids such actions in...oh...that book called the 'Bible.' Maybe some Christians have heard of it? You are supposed to be prepared, in CASE the 'day' comes, but live as if it weren't for a thousand years. That's pretty damned ironclad. And from what I can tell, that means, get off your lazy asses and MAKE A DIFFERENCE. 13. Yes...laziness. It is very pervasive these days, ain't it? Christians seem to be among the lazy, liberals, conservatives, and so on. Hell, I can't really find a boundary. What group isn't lazy? Oh, right, very few individuals are. Talk is cheap. Go do something. 14. Worshipping Godman Obama will get you about as much result as worshipping anything else, in my experience: not a whole lot. 15. I am...spiritual. I am /sort of/ Christian. But oddly enough, I find better company these days with agnostics. They remember how to ask some questions. To be honest, I don't know what I believe, but I know this: God means, GO DO GOOD. The Christian church should learn this. 16. Freedom should never be exchanged for increased safety. Else, what's a life for? Or are you one of those people who thinks life isn't worth anything? Come, let us put you in a situation where your life will end quickly. Let us see how truly valuable your life is to you. Whether it is instinct born of evolution to survive and multiply, or whether it is the great designer's will that you /have something to do/, you will strive to live. And live you should. 17. Having money and 'stuff' doesn't mean you are free. I have very little money, but I have seen and done things that not many have done. I have tried to live by Heinlein's advice: specialization is for insects. I am not an insect. 18. /Why are you here?/ We were supposed to, as a friend of mine so aptly put it, 'stick it to the man' and find ways to generate limitless amounts of power. If you can believe that the 2 and 4 year term gods we've elected can do so much HOPE CHANGE HAPPYHORSESHIT,
Re: [Vo]:Asteroid 2009 DD45
--- Horace Heffner hheff...@mtaonline.net wrote: Asteroid 2009 DD45 had a 48,000 mile close call March 2, 2009. What has not explicitly been said AFAIK is whether or not that was within a window that can establish a resonant return, i.e. a direct hit on a return fly by. Perhaps it is too soon to know due to the near earth gravitational anomalies. Chilling thing is, it was already bloody close to us when discovered, about 1.5 million miles. My major fear of this is not so much the damage it would cause if it hit...we can survive a multimegaton-equivalent impact. But what is preventing some idiots from seeing this, not thinking, and saying ROTATE LAUNCH KEY AND RELEASE. With so much utter trash in The Mighty Hambone stimulus bill, why is there not some cash for asteroid detection and defense? We know this is a threat, we have clear proof of it. Much more so than 'other' things in there which the threat of is decidedly unclear. Where's Eugene Shoemaker when you need him? --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Asteroid 2009 DD45
[snip] I thought it *was* detected by someone paid to do exactly that? Not paid very much it seems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siding_Spring_Survey And someone else tracked it after the discovery by way of funding provided by The Planetary Society. This is not the scale of skywatch program we need. If people can scream about CO2 emissions, they damn sure ought to get a bit scared when a rock is discovered only 1.5 million miles away, heading basically right for us. What could we do in less than a week? With more advance notice, we might be able to do something. My guess is, asteroid defense doesn't make a ton of money for the select group, nor does it allow some people to control others. But all that aside, it is unquestionably important to do something about this. Rendezvous with Rama by the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke comes to mind. No, not suggesting that this was an alien spacecraft :) Just that the asteroid detection program was interesting. If during this financial mess we can monitor volcanoes (which we can do NOTHING about), we can watch the skies a little better. Ironic that moving a rock up there is much easier than stopping a volcano from erupting and possibly letting someone or some turbofan breathe in a bit of dust. On that note, it seems that birds and rubber boots have more dangerous effects on aircraft than some dust. I'd actually like Rick Monteverde's opinion on this as well...seeing as he is both near volcanoes, and near some of our best observatories. Rick? --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Asteroid 2009 DD45
--- John Berry aethe...@gmail.com wrote: The only way we can realistically do anything is if we have technologies or friends that we don't generally admit to, I hold out no hope for a mission as in the movie Armageddon or lasers or... We can do it with nuclear weapons, either a direct impact surface detonation, or 'glancing blow' to shove the thing. Simple kinetic impactors would work as well, although the sooner we detect it (the main point I was making) the easier it is to change the thing's orbit with smaller amounts of kinetic energy applied. Read: less crap tossed at it, and possible at less velocity. We don't have the technology yet to deploy solar shields either, yet that isn't forbode discussion here. I'm not talking lasers or Armageddon, or even building an Orion-drive spacecraft as in Deep Impact to do something. I'm reciting things which we've known about and studied for decades on this subject. Though with a bit of foresight get Podkletnov of the job and he may be able to redirect it. We don't know what range the effect propagates out to. No one alive has successfully replicated his effect in a way that is accepted or would be accepted. Caveat: John Schnurer did make a device that works. I tested it. It does work, but it is tricky and very crude. But a 1-2% decrease in gravity, or a 0.5-3% increase in gravity is not really going to do much for you compared to lobbing a nuke or just a rocket hulk at the rock. Another thing: if you're referring to Podkletnov's 'beam' experiments, there's not enough writeup for me to comment. John didn't tell me much about that, as I guess Podkletnov and he had some disagreement...apparently Podkletnov thought John's device couldn't possibly work as the disk didn't rotate. (the fields did) 1 2 3 2 1 2 3 2 1 2 3 2 1.and so on. Given that I've now made a couple nice power supplies, maybe I should do some tests of the Morton effect. I don't have a sphere terminal. Maybe a stainless steel soup pot will work? :) --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Asteroid 2009 DD45
--- Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: As I wrote repeatedly, we can LOTS about volcanoes. We can't stop them, of course, but we can prevent them from killing people or damaging equipment unnecessarily. We can mitigate the danger and financial loss. Horace Heffner also reiterated this. Same with volcanoes as it is with asteroids: we can save lives if we know ahead of time. If the thing blows (or enters atmosphere) without warning, people die. Only difference is, with our technological level, we CAN stop asteroids. Unless something happens a la Jack McDevitt's Moonfall. The notions that volcano monitoring is only good for doomsday prediction or that the intention is to do something to stop the volcano are ludicrous, and unscientific. I didn't say this. I said, asteroid defense makes more sense in light of the fact that we can do something about it. AFAIK, we can't stop eruptions. We should still keep an eye on them, but the point is, if we can spend money on vulcanology, we can spend it on asteroid defense. We should also keep an eye on asteroids, and possibly develop a method of deflecting them. Cold fusion and antigravity would be a great help in deflecting them. Assuming cold fusion ever amounts to anything. Look guys, it is time we stopped messing with making the most sensitive calorimeter in the world, and try to make the stuff simply work. Make a coffee pot with the thing, using whatever materials work, and brew up some Maxwell House. Then Park et al can choke on their java. This applies to all claims of overunity (whatever it is), antigravity (whatever it is), and so on. Doing la de da de da is for later. Just make a coffee maker with the thing, using raw heat, and that'll get people interested. Why can't we do this? If it is so well proven, as you assert, why can't anyone seem to reproduce it? Why are we doing experiment after experiment, changing things? Find one that works, stick with it, and heat some water. That aside, there is also no funding in the bill for antigravity or cold fusion, or anything of the sort. What's so wrong with nitpicking the damn thing? --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Asteroid 2009 DD45
--- Horace Heffner hheff...@mtaonline.net wrote: A couple hemispherical metal salad bowls might work and are not too pricey at Wal-Mart. Good idea. I will get a couple of them, split some vinyl tubing down the side, and wrap the lip to prevent corona. Noticed Bill Beatty did some attempts at reproducing it, but with according to the late John Schnurer, the wrong polarity. Given that I have identical + and - 100kV supplies, I can try both ways. Where is Bill? Did he ever try it the other polarity? Will he ever reappear, wielding the Broom of Doom and clean up the mess that Vortex-L is becoming? Can we all get back to experiments, please? If *I* do some experiments relevant to the list and post results, will it garner any discussion, or just fade away into the abyss of religious and political nonsense? --Kyle
[Vo]:Morton experiment
Hi, Okay, as per Horace's suggestion, made a crude spherical (er...kind of spherical) terminal out of two mixing bowls. Didn't go to WalMart, as that place frightens me, so I got them from Kmart. Duct taped them together at the seams, so as to make a crude corona seal. It works very well, actually. Fed by the HV terminal (negative WRT ground in this supply), it charges up with little leakage. Will jump a 2-3 gap to a flat metal plate. Sparks are intense, almost pure white with tinges of blue. Very loud, like a .22cal firing. !!! This power supply is not a toy !!! Power supply is a 6 stage (or 3 depending on how you look at it) full-wave Cockroft-Walton multiplier. Input is 10kV 23mA from a 'liberated' oil burner ignition transformer. Capacitors are .009uF each. Ground (0V) is to the center tap of the HV winding of the transformer, common to the center input of the multiplier stack, common to house ground, common to the dedicated RF ground I drove into the soil last summer for radio experiments. This ground has a lot in common. You might even say it covers a lot of ground. Sorry. Anyhow, the first experiment wasn't very great; I ran into the same problems that Bill Beatty had. The sparks do not like to hit the same place every time, and loathe going through the tube. I don't have large diameter glass tubing, so I used PVC, 3/4 inner diameter. When I get my bottlecutting hotwire running again, I'll snip the ends off a glass test tube and try it. An insulating plate of lexan or something similar might be good to go over the side of the metal plate facing the HV sphere terminal. The plate was connected to ground, had a hole drilled in the center, diameter of hole 1/4. The tube was glued to the plate, with the hole dead center facing through the tube. In any case, despite the fact that only one lonely spark ever went through the tube the RIGHT way, I placed my hands near the thing, in line with the hole, etc., and felt nothing untoward. The plate does rock back and forth each time a spark jumps to it, but this looks pretty conventional to me. If all goes well, and my health holds up (varies from day to day) I will try again tomorrow with a lexan spark shield. In case anyone's wondering, I can do the same thing with +HV, I have an identical multiplier supply. But the suggestion from John Schnurer to Bill B. back in the day was that only a negative charged sphere works. Otherwise the supposed anomalous force is reversed and weak. Probably this won't amount to anything, but it is simple, fun, and has a Frankenstein appeal to it, what with the sparks and all. Now where'd I put that Edgar Winter CD??? --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Morton experiment
--- mix...@bigpond.com wrote: In reply to Kyle Mcallister's message of Mon, 9 Mar 2009 19:58:55 -0700 (PDT): [snip] I thought that in Podkletnov's experiment the device was a superconductor, and that the electron pairs in the superconductor were mandatory to getting an effect? The SC isn't required, supposedly. This is sort of a different experiment using normal conductors. The effect may be related, as John Berry speculates. Assuming of course that the effect even exists, and isn't just another dogless tail. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Morton experiment
--- Stephen A. Lawrence sa...@pobox.com wrote: I'm curious -- why is common grounded? Seems like a hand placed too near it would reward you with holes blown through the soles of your shoes as a result, no? Wouldn't it be safer to let the hot parts of the rig float? A few reasons why common is grounded: 1. The case of the transformer is hardwired internally (inside the potting mixture) to the transformer's case. Given the proximity of the 120VAC winding, the core, and the case-connected centertap of the HV winding, it is easier on the transformer to have things not wandering around. 2. Safe? Forgot what that word means. :) 3. It firmly establishes the sphere as 'definitely negative' and everything else around it as 'definitely not so negative'. That might be important. Hmmm. Now this might be interesting to try. Make the sphere negative, ground common, and break out the sister power supply producing +HV. Make the target plate positive, ground the common of that multiplier. Double your pleasure, double your fun? written up. A link would be appreciated (and I realize the info is surely already in the Vortex archives but, well, another post of a link would still be appreciated). http://amasci.com/freenrg/morton1.html http://amasci.com/freenrg/mort2.txt You have to wade through some tenuous 'stuff' to get to what the 'effect' is supposed to be. I'm not investigating Morton's other claims, just the basic one. I try to pick up the most interesting bag, and leave the rest of the matched(?) luggage for another day. Same way with the 'amplified capacitor' circuits of Greg Hodowanec. Leave Mars out of it for now, just try and see what my 'scope can tell me. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Morton experiment
All, Another update. Didn't get as much done today as I'd like, as I did end up getting pretty sick. Nevertheless, here's what I did and what I found. I took the original 'target' plate, connected to ground, and shielded it with a 7.75 square sheet of .125 plexiglass. A 1/2 hole was drilled in the center of the plexi, with the 1/4 hole in the (4x4) steel target plate centering in it. On the plexiglass side, the 2 length of 3/4 PVC pipe was glued with industrial hot-melt glue. The open end of the pipe was propped against the steel HV sphere, the target plate once again connected to ground. Sparks now reliably fire through the PVC tube, through the hole in the plexi, and strike the steel plate. The flash of the spark is enough to make the PVC pipe glow brightly, and the edges of the plexi fluoresce. There *is* a force produced in very narrow beam extending from the hole in the steel plate. It can be felt up to about 18 away, and is very narrow, perhaps only one to three times the diameter of the 1/4 hole in the steel plate. However; it does NOT pass through my one hand into the other (as far as I can feel). As far as I can tell, and there is I admit more testing required, it is a pulse of air blown out due to the spark momentarily increasing the pressure within the tube. Unresolved issues: 1. If it is overpressure, why isn't it going out the easier path, between the PVC pipe and the steel sphere? It is not air tight...there's a decent gap there that one could stick a screwdriver in. Much lower air resistance there. 2. How does the air impulse, if that is what it is, maintain coherence over a distance, in such an apparently beamlike fashion? Is this like the old WHAM-O air vortex launchers? 3. Put some smoke in the tube and see what comes out? Smoke rings? Put smoke around the device as it fires, an see what way things are moved around? 4. My replication is flawed, I now see. Morton clearly drew the spark going out of the tube, curling over, and then striking the plate. The hole in the steel plate thus should be BIGGER than the hole in the plexi spark shield. I'll have to try this and see what happens. 5. Try with the positive supply? If no force from the hole, then is something else going on? --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Tesla coil music
--- Nick Palmer ni...@wynterwood.co.uk wrote: If you're going to waste energy, you might as well have fun. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJqoRaphiEk Nick Palmer On the side of the Planet - and the people - because they're worth it Argh...resending to the list. Apologies in advance if you get this twice Nick, I neglected to note that only your personal address was placed in the To field. This one is great: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOZEpP_zzaw Popcorn! --Kyle
[Vo]:Fear and Loathing in Las Vortex
. . . . Alright, I don't really know how to start this, so I won't. I'll just start hacking away into it. What's the deal? Now maybe I'm reading this wrong, but there's a bias it seems against any results, theoretical or experimental, that have a superluminal result. What's so %^$%# bad about FTL? My tax dollars can pay for scientists (so-called) who are not worth the gunpowder it would take to blow them to hell, to come up with a bunch of unprovable theoretical/religious garbage, and everyone loves this. I assume this is because it takes some motivation for these people to get off their asses to do an experiment. So fine. BTW, the scientist I am thinking of is Lawrence Krauss. A dumbass, who believes that conjecturing that looking through a telescope will alter the universe is a good bit o' science. While, of course, killing the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program (there's that hatred of FTL again...) You can publish about time travel. But you can't talk FTL, because it causes causality violations, and by extension, time travel. blink Does anyone besides me see how stupid this is? I will wager this: one day, we will figure out how to go faster than light (assuming the lazies are dead and out of our way). It will never, ever, result in a causality violation. You will just get there quicker. I'm not dragging Van Flandern into this, don't worry. I don't much go in for exploding planets. But someone ought to take note that there's a perfectly valid alternative for the disaster that is special relativity, as brought forth by Tangherlini. It isn't mathematically pretty. But neither is the mess that we currently accept. But you can't convince true believers of the religion of science. Debate one of these guys, listen to what they have to say. Then go to Sunday School, see what they have to say, and try to ask questions and debate. These people were cut from the same sheet of mylar. What's the point to all this? We don't know jack diddly squat. Not about God, about science, about the universe, about ourselves, about the climate and/or its change, etc. Trouble is, we can't *not* look for answers. But we must make sure we are finding answers, and not just making them and the story up as we go along. Next... Some scoundrel does an experiment, a real, actual experiment, and posts it to some list called Vortex. I guess scientific experimentation is still welcome on a list that . Currently it has evolved into a discussion on taboo physics reports and research. SKEPTICS BEWARE, the topics wander from Cold Fusion, to reports of excess energy in Free Energy devices, gravity generation and detection, reports of theoretically impossible phenomena, and all sorts of supposedly crackpot claims Two people replied to the thread (three if you count Horace's suggestion [and a very good one too!] made in a different thread), no discussion except off list. Robin van Spaandonk, let me publicly thank you for letting me discuss the experiment with you. I appreciate it very, very much. But the rest of you, with the aforementioned exceptions, chose to duke out politics, religion, and assorted nonscientific whatsit. It makes me wonder why Bill Beatty doesn't show up around here much any more. Is he just disgusted with this? Maybe my science is just amateurish? Wait a sec...oh yes. This list is directly connected to a site called AMASCI.COM. Alright, if Morton's experiment (which I seem to have shot down in my own research, will post more if any interest) is not worth discussing, let's talk cold fusion. What can I do? I'm giving no one any money. The opportunities have been essentially wasted for two decades. Positive here, negatives here, uh, need better calorimeter here, let's look for ash here, to burn/recombine or not burn/recombine, x-rays here? Neutrons? Er, what's the theory behind it? /Can we build a damn thing that will make a cup of warm coffee or tea?/ If not, why not??? I'll take a moment to _really_ stir the pot here, and publicly thank Grok. He's the only one (unless I missed a message) who responded to this. Quote, How come no one ever answers this oft-made reasonable request with a working device..? The lack of any known response is what is giving all the skeptix a field-day. Now that all this is outta the way, who wants to warm up their soldering irons, throw 'the main switch,' pull some vacuum, slam some electrons, electrolytically fuse some stuff, reactionlessly impel, superluminally signal, test some claims, throw some sparks, have a Martini*** at the end of the day and say boy howdy, that was some fun, regardless of the outcome? Am I gonna have to go buy a video camera to prove that I do this crap? Or at least try? ***Perfect, of course. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Inertial Propulsion
--- Terry Blanton hohlr...@gmail.com wrote: Anyone know what become of Robert L Cook? His web site has been closed circa Dec 2007 but is available on archive.org (see forceborne.com)? Don't know much about Cook, myself. Also, I noticed in the Laithwaite patents (approved posthumously) there is a claim of IP. Laithwaite's trolley? Precess a mass one way, drag it back nonprecessing the other way, slinky your way through space. The only problem seems to be, from reading the patent (Laithwaite Dawson) and from a little thought experimenting, that the device does not accelerate; merely ratchets its way through space. Precess mass to right, no force generated (what Laithwaite etc. claim) Stop the precession, no counterforce. Drag mass back inertially, reaction force on device. Stop the mass, reaction force cancels first acceleration, halting device's motion. You've moved a bit to the right. Repeat. Velocity is limited by the mass ratio of the precessing gyro mass to the ratio of the drive mechanism, by the speed at which it is inertially moved back, and probably a few other minor factors. Assuming it even works. It will be damn near useless for space travel, in this case, and perhaps dangerous; that much ratcheting acceleration/deceleration would probably not be healthy for crew or spaceframe. Anyone know of someone pursuing Eric's ideas? I am. There *seems* to be something possibly going on, but what, I am not certain. The lazy man's way of looking at this gyro business is to accept the theory without questioning it. Which, once you really start digging into it, is so stupid it is almost unreal that the conventional explanation is acceptable. Laithwaite's ideas about reactive mass (analogous to reactive power in an electrical circuit) are something to think about. His Ohm's law analogy makes a scignostic (scientific agnostic...meaning, one who does not hold to a particular part of the religion of science being absolutely immutable and true) start to wonder. Coil of wire, resistance 4 ohms. Put AC in it, looks like the resistance is say, 16 ohms. Why? Is Ohm's law wrong? No, we didn't factor in inductance. Is Newton's 3rd wrong? No. We just might not have factored in something else. If you'd like me to go further with this, just say the word. I've done a number of experiments, and don't mind talking about them. --Kyle --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Inertial Propulsion
--- mix...@bigpond.com wrote: Since a = f/m, and m is constant, if there is a force in one direction only, then that force should accelerate the mass while it operates. That acceleration should increase the speed, which should then remain constant until the next acceleration pulse. IOW the speed should increase in steps. It may be that there is a way to make it accelerate. I don't know. But what Laithwaite/Dawson say, and as far as I can tell, what happens in their setup is this: 1. Mass M is moved say 10 units to the right by precession, thus (supposedly) forcelessly. F=0 at this point. 2. M is moved back to the left, to the starting point inertially. As it accelerates, the trolley moves to the right, say, ultimately 2 units. Velocity of the entire system is towards the right. 3. When M reaches the starting point, it is stopped, decelerating, thus cancelling the previous acceleration. The velocity is now zero again, but the trolley is 2 units to the right. 4. Repeat. Each cycle, the velocity ends as zero, but a 'net' constant velocity is attained based on the acceleration imparted to M, and its mass ratio versus the rest of the trolley. As far as I see, there is not a net gain in velocity over time, so no additive acceleration. You get 'displacement' over time, however, each cycle moving the trolley's center of mass 2 units to the right. Assuming, of course, that it does work. I don't know if it does or not. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Fear and Loathing in Las Vortex
--- Stephen A. Lawrence sa...@pobox.com wrote: I suspect not. CF (or LENR) is finicky, and no one is yet certain of the precise requirements (though there are now a few claims of complete replicability). Those who can achieve it have been trying for quite a while to get it right. Even then, I think a reasonably well equipped lab is a prerequisite. It's not something you can do in your garage, and expect to work. Saying it can't be done in a garage is going a bit too far. It depends on /what/ one has in his/her garage. People are building fusors in their garages. It takes brains, determination, cunning in designing with what you can scrounge, someone to listen (hard to get), and motivation. There is something else as well. There are some reproducible, repeatable experiments which work, if not every time, then a good fraction of the time. But reliability is not what stands in the way of making a tea heater. There are two other problems with making a gadget which does something useful. OK. Exactly how do we set up the reproducible experiments, what specific (read: NOT unobtainium) substances were used, etc.? Why do we not concentrate almost exclusively on that which we KNOW works, and expand upon that? Make variations of this one setup that demonstrates excess heat, eventually using materials from different sources, testing equipment from different manufacturers, and so on, and then toss that into the public eye? Second, and more important, the same bugaboo that plagues hot fusion is at work here: The best of the wet-cell CF experiments is nowhere near breakeven. It's as bad as all that? Why the hatred towards hot fusion by the cold fusioneers? Seems neither is doing well. The late Bussard's group a possible exception, I am watching that one with great interest. I will say this: an army of willing amateurs is nothing to sneeze at. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Fear and Loathing in Las Vortex
--- grok g...@resist.ca wrote: But the Mylow HoJoRotor is _exactly_ the kind of thing you can do in your garage -- or on the kitchen table, even. However, people are flat-out stating that the magnets are giving up their magnetic energy as they de-magnetize. If this be the case -- then there indeed 'no free lunch', as far as magnets are concerned. At least in this case. I haven't read much about Johnson's motor, but I will listen to the MP3 Esa provided a link to. If (BIG if) the thing does work, I'd doubt the magnets giving up their magnetization would provide enough energy to keep the rotor spinning for any significant length of time. It doesn't take much energy to magnetize a chunk of ferrous material. If the thing runs more than a few minutes, it would seem to rule that out. Which would be a good thing. I'm a bit leery of messing with magnetic motors, as I remember the Greg Watson disaster from years back. But what the hell? I'll give it a listen. Lord knows I got enough magnets wandering around this place... --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Inertial Propulsion
--- Stephen A. Lawrence sa...@pobox.com wrote: 1. Mass M is moved say 10 units to the right by precession, thus (supposedly) forcelessly. F=0 at this point. This is a neat trick. He he he. Let me add this: neat trick... /if it works/ If you can do this you've already shattered Newton's laws, no need to go any farther. Well, it depends on what I said, does it allow you to keep the velocity gained per cycle, or is it just a sort of curiosity? Note that the center of gravity of a top or gyroscope does not move forcelessly as a result of precession, not with a conventional gyro operating with conventional physics, anyway. There's a lateral force on the support which is equal and opposite to the force needed to accelerate the center of mass as it precesses. Noted. Something still bothers me about the experiments I've done with suspended flywheels. Laithwaite was right about one thing, at the very least: gyros are like women. They will, when presented with a certain easy course of action, choose the opposite simply by way of 'principle'. As I said before, I don't know *what* is going on. Note: if anyone else decides to take up this line of research, be damn careful. A flywheel can be a very dangerous item when 'live'... (read: spinning fast) I have been hurt by them. Though many are prompted to say it is 'way cool' to have been bitten by HV, flywheels, radiation, etc., it isn't. --Kyle
[Vo]:Crazy?
V, Since there's apparently little to no interest in learning what I found re: the Morton effect, or what I've done/am doing with Laithwaite's inertial propulsion work, or discussing faster than light travel, implications thereof (resistance to in sci-community/effects and/or testability of alternatives to SR/evidence supporting/etc.), constructing a simple LENR heater (still I maintain, we should try), and so forth, here's a bone to chew on. I tried getting away from this, but I felt that since the experiment has apparently died, maybe something else is wanted. You called me crazy when I said, Obama and Co. would salivate over the idea of forcing mandatory service on people. Read this, particularly section 6: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-1444 Look up HR 1388 on there as well. And this: http://wizbangblog.com/content/2009/03/27/the-house-giveth-and-the-government-taketh-away-our-freedoms-1.php Ignore the somewhat ridiculous at times right-wing banners and whatnot, but the meat is all there to read, and you can find it from the horse's own mouth. Or is that donkey, given the political asses behind this? Allow me to quote this little thing called the 13th Amendment. It isn't just for blacks. Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. Being a young American citizen is a crime now, I suppose. And pray tell, if as HR1444 states, volunteerism is up, why do we need to even consider making it mandatory (which is unconstitutional and illegal)? Creedence Clearwater Revival got it right: And when you ask them, how much should we give? Oooh, they only answer more! More! More! I will qualify what I am saying for you that say, 'he posts this only out of concern for himself.' Wrong. I am not age eligible for this as proposed, nor would I be required due to my (numerous and increasing) health problems. I am worrying for my family, my friends, my acquaintances, my neighbors, and those I do not even know. Last note for now, what would the bleeding hearts (weren't you guys the same ones supposedly against drafts and such? Peace, flowers, etc.?) say if this had been proposed by a Republican? The only news outlet that /wouldn't/ be trashing it in that case would be Fux. Er... Fox. Sorry. Ahem. They'd be right to trash it too. Regardless of party line, this is wrong. --Kyle V for...Victory?
Re: [Vo]:Crazy?
--- leaking pen itsat...@gmail.com wrote: Being a young American citizen is a crime now, I suppose. Where have you been? Being a kid has involved a significant lack of the normal human rights you normally get the moment you turn 18 for a LONG while now. Well, I was mostly referring to the age bracket targetted by these people, 18-25. and, this has been in the works for FOREVER. I don't doubt it. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Crazy?
--- Rhong Dhong rongdon...@yahoo.com wrote: I don't know why people are getting worked up about O's national service proposal: plenty of countries have or have had that. The US had a draft from 1940 to around 1972 and it didn't destroy liberty. 1. We are not other countries. If we can't Americanize them (and I don't necessarily think we should), don't try to convert us into other countries. 2. The same party that opposed the draft and wanted amnesty for draft evaders, is now that which proposes the same, possibly much worse, thing. Americans need to get in line, toe the line, keep quiet, and obey orders. That sort of discipline would do wonders for them. Excuse me. I am in line. I do the best I can to help my fellow human being, WITHOUT being forced to. I /TOW/ the line. I pay my taxes without question, I help people whenever I can, I give out of my own pocket what I rightfully earned for myself. As I type this, I returned with my wife from the grocery store. I picked her up, as she works there. We didn't need to buy anything, but some local church had a food drive going on. We bought $50 worth of items and gave it to them. They were surprised that we bought one of everything on the list; most just bought one or two things, felt good for what they did, and went back to their SUV and/or brand new hybrid with an Obama sticker on it. I drive a beat up piece of crap, barely make ends meet, and yet I gave. $50 for us is a LOT of money. So fuck you and people like you for telling ME to keep quiet and get in line. Take your discipline, which the NSDAP would have loved, and shove it where the sun don't shine. O's proposal is a step in the right direction. No it is not. You should read a bit about pre-WWII Germany. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Fascism in the Near Future -was: Crazy?
--- Mark S Bilk m...@cosmicpenguin.com wrote: Kyle, I haven't read all of your posts, but if you achieve positive results in any alternative physics areas, by all means tell us (and post the complete details of the apparatus to hundreds of lists, in order to preserve your life). And if you're in need of advice regarding such experiments, this is certainly the place to ask for it. I've seen a lot of strange stuff, to be sure. As to the Morton effect, I think I figured out what was going on, and it was sadly conventional. The stuff I'm working on/have been-continuing to work on is basically this: 1. Reactionless propulsion A. TTB's stuff...looks like a dead end for now, more thinking on that later. B. Schlicher's antenna (I have one. Yes. I have the antenna. I'm looking at it right now. It's about 18 feet away. No foolin'.) C. Inertial propulsion attempts using gyros, attempting to follow up on what was labelled Davis Mechanics (Stine, Davis, et al.) 2. Scalar...stuff. Whatever it is. I'm trying to build things based on whatever little info I can find and whatever positive claims were made. Anyone know where Bob Shannon is at? Anyone ever succeeded with any of his designs? 3. Homegrown windmills (Obamanites should love me for this, yet, no encouragement whatsoever.) 4. Remediation of radioactive waste (going to try some experiments soon as I finish this. ***) 5. Lots of other stuff that don't fit into any one category. As far as this being the place, it doesn't seem like it. I can only get a response it seems when I post something that draws out the blind and the dead, but if I post about an actual experiment, or suggest that we do something that involves, you know, actual work... cricket starts chirping As to Obama's new service organization, widely known as Hitler Youth -- even if it isn't compulsory, once the economic crash gets deeper, the avoidance of starvation and homelessness will provide a very powerful incentive for tens of millions of people to join, and to OBEY ORDERS WITHOUT QUESTION. Exactly. See Rhong Dong's post, re: Americans need to shut up and follow orders. Goering would be proud. What will those orders be? Obama has said several times that the purpose of the corps is to protect national security. Protect it against what? The thing that drives me nuts is, especially in my position as a political independant, is that if Bush, Reagan, whoever said this, they'd be slaughtered. When Godman Obama says this, it is praised. As far as what happened to the WTC, I don't know. It's a rather dark place for me to consider, so I try not to 'go there' mentally. There's arguments either way, in my opinion. I do think that the people supposedly investigating this on the official (government) end are handling this about as badly as Norton Symantec handled PIFTS.EXE. It turned out to be (relatively) harmless, but the PR bloated it into something that makes Jabba the Hutt look like Calista Flockheart. You're not crazy at all; it certainly is mandatory, or at least it was originally. But that may not matter. Having food to eat and a place to live _are_ mandatory. As a political truth-teller, I'm afraid that I'll be faced with a troop of armed young men, brought up on first-person shooter video games, whose choice will be to follow orders and kill me or lose the only job they can get and starve. It will be them or me, and they will have the guns. For the moment and forseeable future, I'll be able to eat and live. If a bunch of young punks (probably relatively close to my age, sadly) come banging on my door and mess with my family, there will need to be a baby boom of massive proportions to replace losses. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Crazy?
--- Stephen A. Lawrence sa...@pobox.com wrote: Kyle, you do cool stuff. Your posts about stuff you've done are always interesting, sometimes fascinating, often extremely entertaining. Don't think nobody's interested, just because there are not a lot of comments! (Politics is easier to comment on than experimental results, by the way.) Why? But when you mix politics with experiment with theory I, for one, kind of lose interest. If politics makes interest be lost, why is Vortex the slum of political and religious postings now? So Morton says that *his* experiments indicate that for the last 300 years physicists have been totally confused: Newtonian mechanics flat out doesn't work for bodies which are accelerating ... and until Morton came along, nobody noticed. Nobody noticed what you could do with certain rocks, either, if you put them together the right way. Where'd that heat come from? Can't be right, all of chemistry would be wrong. No, it was just something else going on. I don't think we're exactly talking about the same Morton effect. I am not investigating his other claims, which I myself, in a post that was probably either misread or skimmed over, said were kind of kooky. In my mind, the Morton effect is simply *the report of a beam of some unknown force emanating from the configured Van de Graff generator.* That is all I tested. I don't know about anything else he did. I'm pathologically skeptical about just a few things, but this hits dead center as far as I'm concerned. If Morton's experiments indicate that accelerating bodies violate Newton's laws really badly (and at low velocities, too) then I write it up to Morton having crummy lab technique and I move on. I don't know what caused the effects he observed with spinning tops and I'm not willing to spend the time to find out. Great. Fine. If you don't want to spend the time, don't. But don't confuse what I'm doing. I am not testing these parts of his claims, simply the 'effect' itself, whatever it is, from the VdG. That's all I ever claimed to be working on, period. I qualified that quite a while back. ...You do know that pathological skepticism is somewhat frowned on here, yes? WVORT.HTML and all that? On the other hand, if *you* want to test his claims, I'm interested in reading about what you've done; your writeups are nearly always worth reading and you are apparently an honest experimenter, who is not bending the results to fit some theory. I try not to be biased. It is easy to do when looking for something unusual, that would be good, when you are a person who has so little hope any more that whenever I do feel it, I try to grab ahold of it. It isn't possible, it is a chasing after the wind. Inertial propulsion is another instance where for it to be correct, Newton and all who followed must have been wrong, confused, stupid, or dishonest. This is very, very hard to believe. Far easier to believe is that Laithwaite was (fill in the blank) and his results are incorrect. They need not have been wrong. Newtonian mechanics still works until you reach velocities where relativistic effects come into play. Then there are modifications needed. Again, the Ohm's Law analogy. Newton, et al., did experiments and saw things that happened, so they built a theoretical framework around it that works pretty well. That is not to say there is not a hidden addition to the home's basic frame. Just because something is hard to believe, does not make it wrong. And from where I am sitting, the risk to reward ratio is worthy of the pursuit. So, if you want to test it, by all means write up the results, they'll be interesting to read. If *you* get a contradictory or impossible result, it'll be very interesting to read the description of the experiment and try to figure out what led to the result, because you are an honest experimenter (or so I believe), and by the way I'd believe you before I'd believe a British eccentric with a batso theory whether or not he's got a PhD. He didn't exactly have a theory. He based most of what he did on experimentation, which admittedly could have been misinterpreted. That is mostly what I'm trying to do. And I'm not going to let any theory, new batso or old batso, stand in the way of steel, bronze, copper, and a heaping helping of angular momentum. Yes, for sure, someone should try it; if you can see a way to convert the low grade heat generated by all CF experiments to date into useable energy output that would be *extremely* interesting. Kay... for starters, can anyone say how much was the best amount of heat produced, what the experiment was, what is needed to do it, and so on? You called me crazy when I said, Obama ... Now there you go again, mixing in politics. Bad excuse, I know, but... everyone is doing it. Why should I not? Obama's currently in the honeymoon period of his presidency, and seems to be trying
[Vo]:Morton effect, take two
V, Alright. I will try this again, and we'll see...what we can see. WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE Charles Morton reported an effect (a series of effects, actually, but we will only concentrate on this one) wherein a beam of force of an unusual nature is generated by a high voltage discharge coming from the sphere of a Van de Graff generator and striking a target with a particular geometry. The force was said to be extremely penetrating, even of metal. It was said to ionize plastic (assume, charge), cause fluorescent light bulbs to flash, and so on. It is said to project outwards into a (at least somewhat) tight beam from the discharge. The original writeup is here, under the section FORCE CONCENTRATION. http://amasci.com/freenrg/morton1.html William Beatty attempted a replication, notes at: http://amasci.com/freenrg/mort2.txt Apparently without success. Bummer. However, he notes that John Schnurer (rest in peace, buddy) stated the sphere should be negative. Bill's VdG was positive. REPLICATION ATTEMPT BY YOURS TRULY Two empty stainless steel bowls, found at KMART, were procured. After banging them together, and making obligatory Monty Python jokes, they were taped together with duck tape (quack). This geometrically perfect sphere (cough) was placed on top of a column made of 4 diameter thin walled PVC pipe, with a length of about 1 foot. The spark target is the 4x4 galvanized steel cover of a wiring access box. I didn't buy it, I swiped it from a guy who owes me a roof. The strike plate had a 1/4 hole drilled in the center, and a 6x6 lexan plate (1/8 thick) glued to the face of the steel plate facing the sphere. Likewise, a 1/4 hole was drilled in the lexan plate, centering over the equal sized hole in the steel plate. A piece of plastic PVC pipe, schedule 40 thickness, about 3 long was hot glued to the lexan plate, open end with the holes centering in it. Several other pipe lengths were used, to either lengthen or shorten the spark. They all had the same effect, so assume 3 length. The free end of the pipe was cut to butt against the curved surface of the sphere. The spark thus jumps from the sphere, through the tube, through the hole in the lexan, and hits some part of the steel plate along the edge of the 1/4 hole. The spark was very reliable in this regard. The plate was grounded nine ways from Sunday, and the sphere was held to about -100kV. The sparks produced were dazzlingly bright, blue-white, and could cast flicks of orange whatsit from the steel plate. The power supply was a full-wave Cockroft-Walton multiplier, powered by a 10kV 23mA oil burner ignition transformer. A pulse of air, it seemed, was jetted from the hole, once per spark, and could be felt physically impacting against my skin at almost 2 feet away. It was in a very thin beam. It did not pass through metal or plastic, but would make them vibrate with the impulse. Thinking that this was just air overpressure, I moved the spark plate apparatus a bit farther away. The idea was, if it was overpressure from the spark shooting out an air vortex (like a smoke doughnut... YES! LET'S CALL THESE AIR BISCUITS!), making the air gap between the sphere and tube bigger in area than the hole at the end should reduce or eliminate the impulse. It had, in my tests, no effect in reducing it. One wonders if... 1. Something weird is going on. Preferred direction of spark-induced air impulse? Why? 2. Moving the plate let the impulse voltage get higher, thus counterbalancing any reduction in air impulse. But why didn't it blow smoke around? I tried, and it didn't seem to. Unless the charge around the sphere conspired somehow to hide everything. Also, I tried it with an identical voltage multiplier, producing +100kV on the sphere. There was still an impulse, but at much reduced intensity and cohesion, it seems. NEXT EXPERIMENT Or: the experimenter realized he f'ed up in the replication a little bit. Morton's drawing depicts the spark not only going through the tube and out the hole, it turns around, then strikes the plate. The only way to do this, and the drawing sort of shows it, is to have the lexan plate's hole be smaller than the strike plate hole. Conveniently, the metal plate had a knockout in it for conduit to enter, so I punched that out. The spark now exits, turns 90 degrees, and hits the plate. Now the air impulse is gone. Just gone. But something else happens. Metal plates vibrate on impact of some stuff, and the force which causes it will make a plate placed 6 or so behind the first one vibrate as well. Interesting... BUT: it works off angle as well, as long as there's a spark. The strike plate is not needed. Further, the force is apparently shielded by a grounded metal cage. This looks conventional, but maybe I have missed something. Ideas? It does, sometimes, but not always, have a minor effect on plastic (a grocery bag made of PE). This effect works independently of polarity. Lastly, I did attempt the following: both multipliers were
Re: [Vo]:crazy
--- Rhong Dhong rongdon...@yahoo.com wrote: I assume you are talking about the HitlerJugend. Boy scouts from what I hear. Got the kids into clean country air, got them to clear brush, live in tents, take responsibility. Just what O wants to do. Stop being part of the problem and start being part of the solution. Until that clean country air was polluted with ash from 6+ million souls. If O as you call him, or any other American politician for that matter, wishes to follow the trail of the NSDAP, I will never cease to oppose them. Thus, I am part of the solution. --Kyle
