MountainGuardian

I was reading an article about building a floating city in the ocean. I have to wonder if the plastic already floating in the ocean could be utilized as a building material. Collect plastic melt it with sunlight using parabolic mirrors on site in the ocean and create floating blocks. Loosely connect blocks together and plant mangrove trees into the resulting floating creations. The mangrove trees will eventually root everything together into a flexible floating mass. Get grants paying x dollars per ton of plastic removed and utilized and sell the islands thereby created.. What does a small tropical island go for these days? With three million tons of plastic and more being added each day into the Pacific gyre there is plenty of material to make some sizable floating islands in international waters. What would people pay to have an island they could buy and create a new country out of?

I posted about prime numbers earlier today.... I came up with the idea of using frequency to find primes when I was in fifth grade, tested it with my brothers help about 10 years ago. I realized that if you created every frequency all prime numbers would cross only with the frequency of one, so prime numbers would only be resonate with a frequency of one. . My brother wrote a program to create a visualization of these frequencies and it worked well up to around 50,000 or so and then it took so long to generate it was not worth messing with. . We used every frequency from 1 to just about 50,000 and discarded all numbers with more than two frequencies crossing each other on the number lines. A simpler way to do it would be to eliminate the 1 frequency and then all primes would have only themselves and no others. This is not a formulae, but it does work to predict primes to infinity. Either way you would do it, you wind up with number two counting as a prime with this means it just has to be rejected.

Math is simply an idea that we use to interpret the world around us, the universe itself is not a mathematical concept, the mathematical "concept" is what we use to describe and predict the universe. . Math as we know it, is our limited form of understanding and is ever changing, our current ability to predict outcomes using our current understanding of math and physics begins to fall apart at the subatomic scale. This does not mean that subatomic particles are inherantly unpredictable, it simply means that the tool that we use to make this prediction understandable to us does not work properly in this scale. . Physics is a combination of direct scientific observation and mathematical prediction, again physics is simply an idea or tool used by us to help us understand and predict the universe around us. Math and physcs are not exactly some hidden function of the universe around us, but a way and means that we employ in interpreting and predicting the universe around us. Much of what we know is actually wrong, we have disproven many ideas and theories that we have used in the past with further observation and discovery. Math and physics is the current culmination of what has been observed, theorized and hypothesized about the universe around us.

I came up with this idea almost forty years ago after a science class lesson teaching about sound frquency interaction with different materials. My adoptive mother had been diagnosed with brain cancer and was under going radiation therapy which was having some pretty horrible side effects upon her. I immediately thought about the idea of using two seperate sound waves tuned to those specific cells to destroy the tissue rather than using radiation which has such a harmfull effect upon surrounding tissue. As a fifth grader there was only so far I could go with that thought experiment, but the idea of frequency and sound was strong on my mind. . Not long after that we learned about prime numbers and the difficulty in generating them and that at that time there was a $50k reward for anyone who could come up with a formulae for determining prime numbers. . I began to think of numbers as frequencies, and from that I realized that as a frequency a prime number was a wave form of 1 and itself but no other wave form would be in harmonic resonance with it. With that I figured there should be a fairly easy way to distinguish this, not with a mathematical formulae but with actual frequencies themselves. Again in fifth grade there was only so far I could go with this thought experiment and no adult seemed able to comprehend what I was talking about. . In this day and age we have the computer power to simply generate prime numbers without any real trouble so this is a rather mute thought experiment. My little brother is fairly decent at programming and actually made a program to test my theory about ten years ago and it was really quite cool, it works incredibly well though would require a supercomputer and some amount of time just as our current methods of determining prime numbers. . If anyone here has programming skills and has the interest you might find it fascinationg to try this out, heck you may even come up with a better more efficient way of doing it than we did. . I took and created a wave form 1/2 unit high to 1 unit wide, then waveform 1 high 2 wide etc on through. Prime numbers will only have the 1st wave and themselves crossing each other at the number, the rest all have more than that, with the exception of number two which has just itself and the first wave crossing over each other at the line. We generated up to around the number 50,000 but it was taking a couple hours for each generation at that point and getting significantly longer with each generation and becoming siginificantly harder to visually see the primes as the scale became finer and finer. . I have no interest in messing with this any more, but I thought maybe someone else might, so I put it out here...

I have always thought that particle accelerators would be the way to go as well, though I always had the idea of building the ship inside of an asteroid. Use the asteroid as protection from impacts of space debris and mine it from the inside for fuel to use in the accelerator. Use several nuclear reactors to power the craft. Position the craft with the accelerator and use planetary and solar gravity to sling shot it to higher speeds within the solar system and then sling shot out to where you are headed. Use the remaining asteroid and ship within when you get to where you are going as a base of operations. . You mention the accelerating to near the speed of light and you want to calculate the power and time required to do so, keep in mind it will take that much time and energy to slow back down as well before you reach your destination. I cannot hardly imagine the power even a small piece of debris would have with a speed differential of near light speed, it would likely become a nuclear detonation, which means if it weighs a few hundred pounds it would produce an explosion big enough to do vast damage to any kind of craft or even to a relatively good sized asteroid.

Without having any guess as to the power level of the field or the purpose of the unit I am working the other direction. How powerfull can a hand held one pound electromagnet be made?........ One could use superconductive materials and there are some pretty amazing batteries out there today. . I would question battery operation myself, a far more powerfull unit could be made if it was not battery operated and I find myself a little curious about the battery operated mandate, the thought of some potential terroristic uses comes to mind. Being ex military I have a bit of a suspicious mind... . With a little research you will be able to find information on current super conductors, you can easily research powerful batteries. Getting a field strength in the range of 1 cm is incredibly easy, in fact it would be difficult to keep a field of any real level of power from extending much further out than 1cm. . A permanent magnet would work for just an ordinary field, but for a modulated field you would have to go with an electromagnet, if you intend to modulate the electromagnetic field you have to realize that even electromagnets take some amount of time to switch back and forth, you would be constrained to relatively low frequency ranges with ordinary materials. This is also the part that I see as having potential as being used in ways that could be disruptive to technology ie terroristic potential.

On the surface you are dealing with drag caused by the "surface tension" of water. The surface tension of water is quite high and adds a great deal to drag. You also have wind and waves to deal with at the surface of the water, although those could help your speed in any instance the same as they could hurt your speed. . My official answer would have to be the surface tension of water, although that is simply an educated guess. . In the Navy they warned about surface tension when having to jump off of a ship at any height, in fact at the 70 feet from an aircraft carrier flight deck they described it as being similar to hitting the ground at that height. If you do not jump correctly the surface tension can break bones when you hit.

Wierd, I replied to this thread and my reply seems to be gone.... . As in my first reply, maybe I messed up or something on posting it, I pointed out that.... If we can use sunlight from space to power the world we are adding extra energy into a relatively closed system. If you increase the amount of sunlight energy hitting the earth by 1 percent, which would power all of our energy needs you cause the earth to warm. Whether we have the technological ability to use space sunlight as an energy source is a rather mute point, we still end up heating up our planet with the energy we are using to do work. . If we used that energy in space and moved much of our indusry into space then you might have something because you are not adding massive amounts of energy into a basically closed system. . The only way that sunlight energy will ever work in the long term on earth is to utilize the energy that is already hitting the earth and or utlize the wind, water etc that releases natural stored energy in easily useable ways. . There is no magic energy answer for humans, no matter what magic source of energy one may come up with, you still have the problem of adding too much energy to the relatively closed system of this planet....

The only major problem that I see with this kind of idea beyond physically accomplishing it, is that we would be adding more energy to a basically closed system, if you cause more of the suns energy to reach earth somehow, you will eventually cause imbalance, unless you export an equal amount of energy off the earth as well. . Any amount of energy that you add to this relatively closed system whether it be sunlight in origin or nuclear or whatever, slowly adds energy to the system, which will eventually result in a more and more energetic system, ie warmer and warmer...

I am not an electronic engineer, but I am a great technician. Without knowing more about the application or being able to actually physiscally test the circuit it is a bit hard for me to wrap my head around the problem. You are describing damage to your transistor on start up due to voltage spike, then later mention that this happens so many times per x minutes of operation? . An initial spike upon powering up would imply that you may not have adequate power supply, if your voltage drops enough initially it can cause damage the same as too much voltage can. Whether it is too much voltage or too little voltage when the circuit is powered, this can be remedied by bigger capacitors, the more capacitance the better it will smooth out the signal when you power the circuit. . As you later describe, the circuit also has spikes while in operation, if this is true then it is not just on powering the circuit. It is apparently imtermittent from what you describe, I would look for sources of static within the circuit, irregularities within the voltage supply and I would look for any kind of light or thermal protection within the circuit. I had a brand new electronic dart board that worked perfectly until you actually played, it would simply lock up at what seemed completely random times.We went through power supply, line voltage, static discharge, everything we could think of and could find nothing wrong. In the end it turned out someone at the factory had put the wrong light bulbs in it and it was drawing too much power when it would go through the light flashing mode which was just enough to drop voltage and lock up the processor. A thermally protected component could also slowly heat up and potentially cause an intermittent problem. . I would also look for the potential of a short within the circuit or the potential of a bad trace or solder joint, both of these can potentially cause this effect. I would also take a close look and measure of components within the circuit, because it is supposed to tolerate x amount of voltage or heat does not always mean that it does. Think about the flasher unit in your car, it flashes due to the heating of a small metal strip which makes and breaks the circuit, the same thing can happen within your circuit if a part is not up too par, it may say it is and may measure within tolerance, but that does not always mean that it is working properly under power. . For me, I generally work on equiptment that has seen a lot of use, I often go and replace all high voltage caps right from the start, if they aren't the cause yet eventually they will be and you save yourself a few service calls for the cost of a few dollars in caps.

Yes, pyrolysis (destructive evaporation) same concept, generally if I use the term "pyrolysis" no one has any idea what I am talking about. I studied a book 30 years ago just after HS, that my last foster dad had called Project Pegasus where they went through how German engineers used wood to power their vehicles in WWII Germany, in that book they used the term destructive evaporation...

I myself own a sawmill and have worked in several mills... At the mills I have worked at the bark generally falls off of the log before it gets into the mill. You wind up with two kinds of waste, sawdust from cutting and waste pieces of wood too small to be usefull or defect etc... . The waste wood is generally dropped into a track that carries it all to a large chipper which chips it and then drops it into large hoppers. The best grade of chips generally goes to paper manufacture, the company could get upwards of $75 a ton for paper quality chips. Most of the chips made at the cedar mill were not paper quality and was generally sold to the University of Idaho for hog fuel, "burned to heat water to generate electricity" hog fuel generally rought in about $35 a ton. . One mill that I worked at had a setup to compress the waste into firelogs. I visited a building built by a University of Idaho student that utilized wood chips and concrete mixed and poured into large cinder block shapes as an alternative building material. . As for insulation material, I was not aware that sawdust was used for that, I do know that recycled paper is often used as insulation, they turn it into a cottony mixture and add fire retardent to it. One problem with using wood/sawdust as insulation is that if it gets wet is tends to mold, it can also cause fires due to bacterial action within it when it gets wet. Bacterial action in wood is such a fire danger that most mills here keep sprinklers on there wood stacks to keep them from ever heating up. . Being in the logging industry I am quite familiar with the burning of slash piles, every year there are at least a dozen fires started by burning slash in this area. I have often thought that one could make money charging by the ton for slash removal and then chip it up into either rough building materials or use destructive evaporation to produce electricity etc. . Many years ago in the WWII years it was not uncommon for busses and cars to be powered by wood gas. They would use a sealed tank with junk wood in it a fire under the tank to heat it (destructive evaporation) and would then burn the gasses, carbon monoxide, methyl, ethyl, hydrogen, methane, etc. that were produced in the sealed tank, in the engine, . Another good insulation and or bulding material is straw and hay bales. . My mill tailings are either used to heat my house or turned into carbon and used in my forge and foundry work. The sawdust I generate is usefull to my livestock, they roll in it and it helps keep them free from body mites and other pests. I also use the sawdust in my gardens after it is well rotted. The sawdust is also a good source of bugs for my chickens... Sorry if I got a little off topic...