mistermack

This actually is pretty much a non-story, in reality. It has no new invention involved, it's just a rack of vertical axis wind turbines, of which there is already a plethora. Siting them so close to each other could be a unique feature, but only because it would impair efficiency. There's a reason why designers don't pack turbines into a small space, they need an unrestricted flow around them. That's why the big efficient ones have only three vanes, rather than thirty. The story isn't actually what it appears. The gif seems to be computer generated, the shadows are all wrong. And the article says : " Doucet has built a prototype for a single spinning rod and run simulations based on that." So what he's done seems to be to rig up a single unit and extrapolated from that. Hardly an industry shaking event. He says he's "in conversation" with manufacturers. That probably means he's phoned them. Most would laugh at him. There nothing patentable in what's shown in the article. He's actually got nothing to sell. Putting 25 in a line isn't an invention, it's just an inefficient arrangement.

Don't be silly. Ice will soon be a thing of the past. Except in your freezer. Children born today will have to have ice and snow explained to them using old video footage.

As pictured, the wall would cause backup of pressure and ruin the efficiency. Even free standing, it's likely that having the individual turbines so close together would greatly reduce their efficiency due to turbulence downwind. Even turbines at sea need a good gap between them to maximise the output.

There are loads of vertical axis wind turbines on the market which you can already put in your back yard. The article describes this as "ingenious", but all it is is an array of existing technology, with the apprarent disadvantage of no escape mechanism for the wind once it passes through, if it's up against a wall as pictured. You don't see many people using the existing technology, and I don't see where this would have any advantage over what's already out there. It has a lot more moving parts than a single turbine.

Anything at ground level would have the problem of children and animals getting caught up in the mechanism, unless there was some sort of ratchet system included and other safety features. And small scale usually means big maintenance bills and higher overheads. I personally don't have a problem with big wind generators on land. They don't strike me as ugly. Quite the reverse in fact, compared to the pylons that carry the wires they actually look quite nice to me.

It says in wikipedia that Donald Trump did actually instigate an enquiry into declaring martial law, with a view to cancelling the election result. So the US came closer to this sort of chaos than it seemed at first sight. But if you elect a psychopath, you are playing with fire. Maybe this will have a long lasting effect on who the Republicans choose as candidtates in the future.

When I was a lad, I was always told to eat up my greens. I never knew why they were called that. Mystery solved !! Now I might have a clue why potatoes are called reds, and whites. I'm on a roll here !

I was given it, I was curious so I tried it out. It does work ok, but you need to be accurate with the water quantity. It does turn itself off, so it doesn't need watching. And it doesn't need washing, it cooks clean. I would use it if I was regularly cooking a number of eggs, but not otherwise for the odd egg or two. I very much doubt if there is any danger from refilling water bottles from a tap, even if you never ever rinse, steam or detergent wash. Historically, the dangers from drinking water were things like Cholera and Typhoid, but if you have that in your taps, then you're in big trouble. Other stuff like lead from old pipes, or bacteria from damaged pipes, wouldn't be affected by rinsing, so there's not a lot of point. I store and use spring water, and the only precaution I take is to keep stored water in the dark. I've never had any problems from it. When I was a kid, I used to visit the family farm in Ireland, and they just had water from a well. That often had tiny things swimming around in it, and when my uncle periodically emptied the well for cleaning, there would always be the odd frog and various other creatures coming out in the buckets. It didn't seem to bring any problems. On the other hand, a friend of mine almost died from Legionnaire's Disease a few years back. They never found the source, his house was extensively tested. A few years after, he mentioned using powered jet washers cleaning cars, drawing water from a pool of standing water, and I told him that that was almost certainly how he got the Legionnaires. You need to breathe the Legionella in on a droplet, and a jet washer is just the job for that.

The secret of hard boiled eggs is two factors. Age of eggs and speed of cooking. Firstly, and by far the most important, you want old eggs, not fresh. At least a week, but older is better. Secondly, they want to go straight into vigorously boiling water. And definitely not put in cold water, and slowly brought to the boil. That makes the shells stick. If you cool them in the air, you need to reduce the boiling time a bit, because they carry on cooking when taken out of the boiling water. That's all the ice bath does, it stops the cooking quickly. Some cooks do it because it gives them more accurate control of the cooking time. Having said all that, I've got an electric steam egg-cooker and it works ok. It has a little punch that you use to poke a little hole in one end of the eggs, presumably to let pressure out.

Worryingly, the rioters were constantly referring to each other as patriots. That seemed to be their buzz word. I'm suggesting that something could be written into the constitution that would remove the confusion, under these circumstances. I'm in agreement really that the scenario is fairly unlikely in the USA. But I think a lot of people were surprised by how far that riot went, how much confusion there was over what to do, and how ill prepared the country was. It's just as well that it WAS just a fairly disorganised rabble, and not a carefully planned affair. I would think that the same thing will be well covered in the future, with preventative measures, but there may be other weaknesses in the system.

It wouldn't be the second though. Or the 102nd. It's been happening since the year dot. The Germans had a pretty stable democratic system before Hitler. If you asked them, before the Nazis took over, they would probably have said that "it could never happen here".

I was thinking in terms of not just an expectation that an illegal order must be disobeyed, but a constitutional duty. I would make it apply all the way down the chain of command, so that any lower rank that received such an illegal order from a superior, would be obliged to disobey it. So that even if all of the generals went with a coup, their subordinates would have to disobey. And so on and so on, all the way down to the rank of private. So that nobody in the services would be in a quandary, "should I obey a clear order, or disobey because I don't think it's legal ? " It's that lack of clarity that often enables a coup to succeed. Soldiers are conditioned to obey and not question orders from their immediate superiors. So when the worst happens, they obey through fear, and confusion. And once the process starts, the herd instinct takes over, and it would be a scary prospect to go against it. You would have to fight it out in the courts. Say Trump actually DID steal an election, he could be impeached legally, and in the meantime, any illegal orders issued by the White House would have to be disobeyed by the military etc.

It can be, but not always. Ask Romeo and Juliet.

I'm a Brit, I know very little about the US Constitution. But I'm wondering if it needs amending. What would have happened, if Donald Trump had gone all the way on the day of the Capitol Riot, declaring a stolen election, and issuing orders to the military, and security services, to suspend normal government and institute martial law? That's how a coup is normally achieved. How close is the USA to that actually happening at some point? As the nation worships it's constitution, should there not be some amendment to cover such an event, to give clear guidance to the military and security services on how to respond to an illegal order from above? So that they have a clear duty to simply refuse the order, on constitutional grounds? Maybe it is already covered. But the way that the event was covered in a recent documentary, the situation looked quite shakey for a while during the riot, and there was real uncertainty what would have happened, if Trump had issued those kind of orders.

The have quite a record of hurting each other. Tolerance and democracy don't feature very highly in the actual doctrines of Islam. Although individual people and countries can obviously be far less authoritarian than others. But I would say that your Muslim friends would be far safer under the Republicans, than under the Taliban.

I would experiment by adding a measured small volume of ink or dye to the bottle, and then measure the results after pouring various quantities of clean water in and shaking. Shining a light through a standardised section could then tell you how effective the various rinses were.

All this talk of love being the purpose of life is baloney. As I said before, the PURPOSE is to reproduce your genes. Love is just part of the mechanism to achieve that. Saying that love is the purpose of life, is like saying that the purpose of a car is it's steering wheel.

The impression I'm getting is that this idea regards suffering as so abhorrent, that it would be better to erase anything with the capacity to suffer. It's an incredibly stupid idea, as bourne out by the fact that many individuals CHOOSE to suffer, in order to achieve something. I suffer from chronic pain, I could erase it with the right drugs, but I would rather suffer, than be dependent on the drugs. Other people put themselves through torture, just for the chance of an olympic medal, or to better support their kids, or even just to try to look skinny. I make my own decisions about my own suffering, and I wouldn't presume to decide for every other person or organism on the planet. That's best left up to them.

Well, I'm convinced. Are there any airlines run and maintained by poets, using planes designed and made by rap artists? Because if there are, that's how I'll be travelling from now on. 😎

Just as there is no absolute right or wrong, there is no absolute "responsible". It's purely down to what we decide as a society. And since we have lots of societies, there is a wide range of ways that responsibility gets treated. So the OP question contains a false assumption, that there is such a thing as "really responsible".

The question is a bit like "how long is a piece of string?", there are so many possible anwers. A lot depends on how mobile the population is. If you had two similar populations of similar animals, and one was more mobile than the other, then you have more chance of mixing the genes. On the other hand, if you have a much bigger population, but of far less mobile individuals, then you are more likely to get inbreeding even with the greater numbers. To illustrate that, imagine a big population, that lived in small numbers on scattered islands. They are more likely to inbreed than a smaller population all living in one herd. And you can get the island effect without islands, with barriers like mountain ranges or rivers or deserts.

Really, your self-induced outrage is quite childish. David Bowie wrote the classic song, "Space Oddity" back in 69 with the words "here am I sitting in a tin can, far from the world, Planet Earth is Blue and there's nothing I can do". It's widely rated as one of his best. In 2013, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, commander of Expedition 35 to the International Space Station, recorded a video of the song on the space station which went viral and generated a great deal of media exposure. It was the first music video ever shot in space. They just changed a few words and gave it a happy ending. A much more adult approach.

There are approximately 8,700,000 species on Earth. For the other 8,699,999 species, the purpose of life is to survive long enough to reproduce their genes. So it's a fair guess that that's our purpose too.

None of it should have happened. But Project West Ford was concieved around 1958. The Chinese blew up the satellite about fifty years after that. The dangers should have been better understood by then. I have a suspicion that China's interest in space might be more military than scientific. But then, that might well apply to the US and Russia etc as well, so nothing new there.

It's in the nature of space junk that it has the capacity to kill astronauts, whether they be Chinese, European or American, so what the Chinese did with that weapons test I thought was outrageous. Phi, I chose my words carefully in that post, and I think the way you twisted them was nasty and unwarranted, and quite cowardly, to phrase it as a question. There was nothing in my post to indicate what you suggested. That came out of your own head. To point to irony in no way suggests a wish for it to happen. Nor to satisfaction if the worst happens. If I bought a gun for self protection, and accidentally shot myself with it, I would call that ironic. It doesn't mean I would be pleased about it.