Thomas Kirby

I didn't even think of it as protection for on the way down. One "quick fact" sheet says that it reaches 1650 C, which is way too hot for the paint. I was thinking of it as protection for the external tank on the way up. Maybe it can substitute for that foam that keeps falling off. Hey, I didn't even know that the tank had foam on it until after the Columbia disaster. There are a few hundred degrees to consider from air friction from supersonic flight. They spent over two years trying to solve this one problem, and here we are again, foam is still an unsolved problem. I have no great clues on whether a paint might solve their problem or not. Darn right, if it takes Freon to make it, I will go with Freon. I never believed that Freon damaged the ozone layer anyway. We're also going to be having airplanes dropping out of the sky because lead-free circuit boards will lose components more often. This is one heck of a bind.

Newty asked for the lights to dim or brighten over a period of 1.5 hours after being activated. I'm not sure I can completely make sense of what he said, either. If the circuit has to detect the first light of dawn for one phase, then detect the sunset for the other, we have complications. It's easy to reliably detect the first light of day, and much harder to detect the moment the sun sets, depending on the weather. This gets complicated and less reliable.

If it were true, it would be scary. I personally refuse to be converted to a true believer by threats (not made by you or anyone here, Beauty) against my reputation, my job, my life, or my comfort and peace in the afterlife. Most often people receive those, however they are sugar-coated, as the reasons to believe. These aren't good reasons. Also, Beauty, with all respect, a lot of these "white papers" are bunkum. Science will go with whoever underwrites the funding. I wish it weren't true. Anyone who turns up positive effects of underage sex will lose their funding. If they're particularly unlucky, someone will also sandpaper their sensitive parts, douse them in turpentine, and set that turpentine on fire. Also, I know where at least some of the biases, bad logic, and poor reporting are in the report you just gave me, Beauty Undone. One of the problems is that a report like this will inevitably merge the molestations of pre-pubescent children with sex with teenagers who are willing and able. Another problem, as I already said, is that only the negatives will be reported without allowing any mitigation by information of positive effects. For example, if someone finds that a small percentage of children who have some kind of sexual contact have lowered IQs, and that small percentage includes those who are physically raped before the age of six years old, and are exposed to street drugs, live in an impoverished neighborhood, and have missed a lot of school, all we are going to read is that children who were molested have lower IQs. We're not going to be told the results of a reading comprehension test applied, evenly weighted, to a representative sample of the population of humans who were molested as children. Some of these people, I have reason to know, are very intelligent and have very high reading skills. If I wrote a book debunking all of the fallacies, I might well become one of the most hated humans in America. I would wind up with a label even worse than "faggot", and my books would probably be banned by author's name no matter what the subject matter or content. Were I someone who wrote books on scientific matters, I would have to give it a pass. Even the vanity publishers would probably lock me out. No, I do not agree that some people are falsely charged with pedophilia and it's blown out of proportion. I firmly state that a lot of people are falsely charged with pedophilia on purpose, the prosecutors ride them and their lives into the ground as hard as they can, and they milk it for all it's worth. Even with the best face you could possibly put on it, in my book a prosecutor is still obligated to only present the court with cases where the charges are very likely to be true, not with cases where they might be able to trick up a conviction and the charges are extremely unlikely to be true. One more thing I have to say is that most of the perpetrators of child abuse do not have sex with the children, and that these perpetrators do most of the damage, even to those who have been sexually molested. Most of what they do is simply beat people down, help out the school bullies, and make childhood a living hell. They also, and this is a minor fraction of the damage they do, put a guilt thing into people's heads that multiples the psychological damage of sexual molestation by a huge amount. These people are just as likely to be the ones who report sexual molestation at the same time they are damaging young minds. They also do it on purpose. Here is another, separate point to ponder. What is a sheriff going to do when someone shows up at the shelter, the database is down, and he can't prove one way or the other if that someone is a sex offender or not? What if the supplicant can't produce ID? Anyone who can't be identified is refused shelter from the storm? Don't have ID, or it can't be run through the computer, you get sent out to take your changes with debris flying around at body-piercing velocities?

Not really, Kermit. This is a new material that has useful properties that is easy to apply but isn't familiar to so many people. It's so much like paint you get at the hardware store or Walmart that it's even a water-based latex that you can clean off your brushes with water. And it's no surprise that it can be that way. Any paint you get is a cocktail of different powdered chemicals like iron oxide and aluminum. Forty years ago people would have camped out in their parking lot to get five gallons of the stuff. I will bet a dollar that NASA hasn't even considered this one yet. I am more concerned with making it available to homeowners, though. Would I pay $200 for five gallons? When my income tax return comes in, yes, I would. This stuff would even enhance the fire resistance of aluminum or thin layers of steel. It would make it so that if someone tried to set fire to my toolshed, they'd have a hard time of it.

It is not a rumor or an urban legend that someone invented a paint that is so resistant to heat that it can protect an egg from being cooked by a propane torch held to it for several minutes. It's not even physically that implausible. I can easily imagine that some mixture of chemicals can form a barrier that refuses heat. Something that contains a mixture of borates and silicates could form a sort of borosilicate glass when it cures. Pores could make it difficult for heat to penetrate, the glass-like substance could radiate heat away quickly and be a physical barrier that keeps the flame away from what it is protecting. If it is mixed with glass spheres to begin with, the glass can withstand at least a thousand degrees Fahrenheit easily. The idea that came to me is that a paint like this can be applied to a wood frame house while it is under construction. It could make house fires as rare as lottery wins. A bottle of flaming liquid smashed against the outside would cause only superficial damage. There would be an end to fires started by soldering copper pipe. Electrical fires would become quite unlikely. Almost no common household problem would cause the actual frame of a house to sustain a fire, or even the wall board. And now that I start Googling for information, I find out that just like the idea for LED growlights, someone already has the non-toxic heat-resistant paint on the market. I'm surprised that it isn't on those morning infomercials. It seems like some kind of really important thing is missing from our perceptions. http://www.firefree.com/firefree88.htm I had wanted to invent the stuff, but it's already out there. This isn't an advertisement. It's something I have an interest in. I've become a little more worried about fire safety after the number of burned outlets I have changed in just one house where someone put paint in the outlets. They didn't start a fire, but two of the outlets that I removed had burned so badly that the plastic utility boxes they were mounted in had burned and melted. We were lucky here but I like the idea that even when someone does something stupid, like paint while using drugs and alcohol, they don't burn down the house or set it up to burn down later. This idea was so obvious when I first read about Maurice Ward's "Starlite" paint. He's the one who demonstrated on BBC that his paint would protect an egg from cooking by a blowtorch. I'm still wondering why it doesn't receive a lot of fanfare and publicity. Even painting the inside of a room with it will make to so that if the furnishings catch fire, it would take much longer for a fire to spread to the rest of the house. Best is to coat the frame as the house is being built. Depending on how ambitious you are, a lot of old houses could probably use new wallboard anyway, so it is worth considering the idea of stripping the wallboards, painting the framework with fire resistant paint, and taking that opportunity to insulate at the same time. Painting the outside would protect the house from brushfires. If the paint protects for at least two hours at 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, that would stop a Molotov Cocktail. A grease fire in the kitchen would burn itself out before it set the walls on fire. I have to wonder also if the same coating can prevent the damages caused by water infiltration, like the kind caused by horizontal rain during hurricanes. They don't mention waterproofing, but it would almost seem that the paint would be waterproof by default and able to prevent water damage to the wood and wallboard, and to prevent fungal growth. I will propose another application: Check into the feasibility of using a paint like this on the shuttle tank instead of the insulating foam. It may have to be modified, like stuffed with hollow glass spheres, but it just might work. If not, well, at least it's an idea.

It's a lot more like I'm in the position of trying to hand out guns to people in the hope that they will use those guns to protect me. Those people act like idiots, shoot the wrong people, and are highly ineffective at actually protecting me, my property, or my children. I might as well not be letting them have guns, but guess what? Once they have them, I can't get them back.

How precise do you want these to be? Without some fairly sophisticated stuff, your setup might be able to pinpoint the first light outside, but it's going to be a lot harder for it to anticipate the last bit of twilight. At best, one sensor is going to have to be set for the transition from darkness to dawn, and another sensor is going to have to be set to detect sunset. Each is going to have to trigger a timer that progressively dims or brightens the LEDs over an arbitrary period of time. An hour and a half can be done using some kind of RC circuit, but it will be temperamental and not particularly stable. This gets to the point that it could be easier to use a microcontroller board with a real time clock and analog outputs. A Basic Stamp can be had for less than 50 US dollars, and there are some others around. The Stamp can be programmed from your PC. It could well be easier to write a program that includes a way to calculate times of sunset and sunrise than to try to get sensors to do it accurately.

While I'm here, does anyone know where to find a copy of Einstein's field equations on the net that is readable? The one I found was in JPEG, and that pretty well wrecks the readability.

Dak, it's not people breaking the laws that I was talking about, although it could be argued that when someone uses a law to penalize someone inappropriately, that law has been broken. "Abuse" of a law means things like using it to give out excessive penalties for innocuous actions, stretching its meaning to cover things it wasn't meant to cover, or just plain pretending that someone violated it because they can't prove that they didn't. Some laws are abused by using them at all, even if that is more an abuse of the idea of law and order than of the particular law. Why compare the purchase of child pornography with the purchase of a snuff film? If as some people say the sexual activities are somehow harmful to the children, isn't that bad enough? Why the need to attempt to exaggerate the extent of the problem by throwing in something that isn't part of the genre? Also, simulated child pornography would get people thrown in jail, and these days it is becoming more and more possible to simulate anything, even if somewhat inaccurately. Hollywood would lose more than half its income if it were forced to get rid of simulated snuff. We buy and rent a lot of movies in which people are killed in all sorts of ways. The abuses I most object to include calling it "rape" as if someone held a knife to a 14-year old person's throat. I know it's on the books that a prosecutor gets to do that, but I still think it's an abuse. I don't know myself anyway how a man can get in bed with a 14 year old girl or boy without wanting to be a hundred miles away and without acting on that desire, but I think that the girl or boy know whether they want to be there. I don't know how they can stand it either. If I were them I would want to be TWO hundred miles away. Even so, there are worse things that are done to teenagers without their consent, worse abuses of their free will and their humanity, and a lot of the problem that I have with such encounters is because of massive pain and emotional trauma that were inflicted on me as a teenager. It would seem that I could very easily be flipped to support of "statutory rape" laws because of how much I hated many adults when I was a teenager. But this is beginning to ramble. I think that the McMartin preschool case was no accident, and no act of incompetence on the part of the prosecutors, unless you consider the deliberate disregard of all proper procedures to be incompetence. The message of that case was that the prosecutors wanted the ability to put anyone in jail they wanted, and mark them up for life, using secret evidence, non-credible evidence, nonsensical evidence, non-credible witnesses, and criminally wrong methods. This isn't what I would call a competent prosecutor. I also wouldn't call the child protective services of that region competent. I would call those people, the prosecutors and the child protective services people, vicious, without morals, and a danger to society. Here's a link from a moderately credible source, Court TV I have to ask, why did they go through that production? One isolated nutcase cannot make a herd of responsible intelligent people do anything like that. If she can, they are not responsible intelligent people. They are stupid or vicious, or stupid and vicious. There are a lot of people who mistake stupid, vicious thoughts and actions for intelligent thought and responsibility. Here is a quotation of a statement by the mother of the child who started the case: Lawrence Wrightsman reports that Judy said her son had seen a live baby beheaded and Ray Buckey fly. You have to wonder who could have followed through on a program with such auspicious beginnings. No one is that stupid or that unconscious. If these people are actually taking this kind of stuff seriously, they are dangerously insane. I'm not talking about "potential" danger anymore, I'm talking about a pogrom in which a community was torn apart, people lost their businesses and homes, went to jail for charges that should not have been credible in any court in the world, and it was all touched off by one insane idiot. Somewhere in all of these messes that I read about, I lost the urge to hang on to these laws against sex. If there is a law severely punishing men who have intercourse with minors, and I can see some good in that, but this law's only use seems to be to punish people who haven't even done that, it's really hard to hang on to any perception of its usefulness. It's a very nasty feeling to have vicariously participated in numerous witch-hunts conducted by people who are not my friends, and whose brethren have in fact been my worst enemies. The same people who would, as they did in the McMartin preschool case, deliberately falsely accuse people of actions that aren't even considered possible are the people who slap children around in class. The people who did that exploited the children to cause a mess of trouble. The same kind do contrive reasons to beat and otherwise torture children in school. It's the same exact mentality. You cannot expect vicious people to be vicious to adults and not vicious to children. They can put up a pretty good pretense. Some of the most vicious teachers I had in school had my mother completely snowed. The law should have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that actual harm was done. Every time something like this happens a measure of protection of civil rights is stripped away. The goal is to reach a state where "the law" doesn't have to prove anything, it doesn't have to use credible witnesses, it doesn't have to make a case, it just points and shoots. They cry "it's for the children" and we just give up thinking that justice should still be forced to go through its proper process. The theory that this somehow helps justice is just about as viable as the theory that we should just shoot burning gasoline out the tailpipes of our cars to power them and bypass the use of the motors and transmissions. It isn't a fair trade when laws that protect some children from some molesters give other molesters the chance to damage the lives of many children and adults at a time. The "other molesters" I am talking about are the only people we have to enforce the laws against child molestation. Whatever laws we approve go through them before they have an effect. If they are unable to administer those laws fairly or intelligently, we might as well not have them make the attempt. We must also be prepared to accept full responsibility for tragedies like the McMartin preschool case. Instead of that I read a lot of excuses. If those prosecutors haven't been put in jail by now, no one has taken responsiblity. It's tempting to make this quote my signature: And you know, people, these children will grow up to be adults. What kind of world do we want them to live in as adults? We can't be careless about that in favor of attempting to destroy anyone who might want to have sex with them. And another note to throw in with this: In this case, in similar cases, and overall, I think that we have the same mixture of nutcases on all sides.

Why do we have to lump so many people in with people who actually have raped and murdered pre-pubescent children? Why do we have to do this to the extent that we completely fail to respond to most other kinds of abuse? Why does abuse have to be politically popular to be responded to? I am quite able to separate a lot of issues. What I see is the intentional use of the term "sex offender" as a dumping ground for anything that someone simply doesn't like, harmful or harmless, and the deliberate use of "it's like pedophilia" to spread propaganda against just about anything.

Obviously only extremist terrorists would try to expel the U.S. from Iraq after an illegal invasion of that country. It is a foregone conclusion that they are terrorists, not people who are fighting for the freedom of their country.

I'm going to go ahead and post twice in a row, and apologies to anyone this offends, but there is something else to say. I am not a sex offender. I am not even homosexual. However, I am a "faggot." You go to the school I attended, mention my name, and receive the automatic reply "you mean that faggot"? WTH is a faggot? I still don't know. It's what they used to call some kind of piece of wood cut up the right size for burning. When you have the label on you, people you don't know pop out of nowhere and punch you in the gut for just existing. It's all because another 7 year old told him that "that Thomas Kirby is a faggot." It's like a not very secret signal used by an age-old conspiracy to destroy certain people. I don't even think there is a reason except that they get off on it. A "faggot", in the "minds" of people who use the term that way, already is a sex offender even if he is too young to have ever had sex. He "just has that look" about him. You just know that he, well you just know. You don't have to ask anyone, you don't have to do any research or watch what he does, you just know. What I think, just from my life experience and from reading about these things, is that it's not so much that a faggot is a sex offender. A sex offender is another kind of faggot, another target of cruelty and sadism. One of the symptoms of this phenomenon is the dissociation from the deeds against them that I can see even here. Hell, a lot of people still don't even feel safe with gay men around their children. One of the big reasons I don't believe the "sex is dangerous for whoever" crowd is because of this sadism against "faggots." They make up these stories so they can hurt people and murder them, and I've come to believe that even more firmly after arguing with some of these people. Their personalities are sadistic and homicidal. They like cruelty and killing, and they like having non-humans to do it to. They are a lot more fun to these people when the victims can cry out and curse against them, too. Now you may have an idea, too, why I tell you that these practices are used to make humanity its own worst enemy.

I do mean that the idea of defining someone as a "sex offender" is all of the above, and is promoted by the above. Some of those who promote the idea are sex offenders, if they were only caught. Am I a sex offender? I've urinated on trees in public. I've held hands with a 14 year old. I was 13 at the time, but these days that doesn't seem to be a defense. Some of the promoters are honestly concerned about children, but I don't think they are the main force behind the movement to classify so much of human sexuality as dangerous. I think that the main force includes the usual suspects, including people who do things to small boys that customs men would back away from doing. When I read about who has levelled accusations against people, how they have been convicted of sexual offenses, how the trials went, "farcical" doesn't quite cover it. The real thrust of the movement to "protect" children against sexuality comes from the same current of vicious sadism against all humans, the current of hatred of life, the thing that makes people hate you for even having consensual sex with another adult. I think it needs to be said. I don't think we are being "inconvenienced" by people who run a genuine program to protect children. I think we are being torn into by a group of wingnuts who think that all sex anywhere is rape. In too many cases it has been just plain nuts, irresponsible, and stupid to call a person a sex offender. I don't think it's by accident, I think it's on purpose. I think it is actually the program to use "sex offender", "sex offense" and "we must protect the children" as passwords for root access to bypass Constitutional rights, frighten people, practice a vicious kind of social control, and generate a lot of profit. The people who do this would make Genghis Khan look like a bleeding heart liberal. You just don't know what you are facing.

I'm not going to answer that question.

The whole idea of defining someone as a "sex offender" is vicious, mean-spirited, hateful, and promoted by dangerously insane people who are at heart homicidal. It is just one more way to make the human race its own worst enemy.

There is a safety issue that I have to mention. A straight line of LEDs across any line that can supply a few hundred milliamps or more is potentially dangerous in an unpredictable way. Basically, it is potentially dangerous if it carries enough current to set one unprotected LED on fire. The upward curve, current vs. applied voltage, is too steep. An LED can burn and form a short circuit, its voltage drop can change just enough, or several in the string, the applied voltage can increase just enough to cause a runaway condition, and temperature can affect the voltages. The reverse voltages are not predictable if you string a bunch of them across the mains or any source of AC current, and that's another source of problems. One resistor and one diode eliminate almost all of the potential fire hazard. One resistor of the right resistance and power rating makes it so that you know how high your current will ever go, and resistors aren't nearly so prone to thermal runaways or burning shorts. One diode prevents any reverse currents from flowing. Your lighting project is then safer and will last much longer. You also don't have to worry about attempting to precisely match the voltage drop of your string of LEDs to the supply voltage. One of my illuminators would work just as well from 48 volts as from 9 and no worries about burning out or starting fires.

I'm looking for silicon, not carbon. Fiberglass, silicone, plus maybe some other semifluid substance to make a better sealer. Fiberglass would be leaky if it were just fiberglass cloth. Make it a teflon or silicone impregnated cloth, you've got a more airtight combination. Make it a material that can be re-annealed by heat, and warming it can fix leaks that do develop. More sealer could be poured in too. I'm visualizing many layers of impregnated fiberglass, several inches thick if at all possible. What the moon isn't all that great for is metals if I understand correctly, although there ought to be some areas absolutely crammed with meteoric iron. How long were they able to mine the iron from the crater in Arizona? Yourdad: Metal corrodes in space from the inside out, like a sealed can of acid, only more slowly. Just plain condensation is bad enough, but you have the action of bacteria and small amounts of organic residues like human sweat, plus chemical released from the equipment. Glass and silicone pretty much do not corrode under those circumstances.

It was a lot harder to believe that it was hypothetical after Ku said that he had had the police out and they wouldn't do anything about it.

Yes it is. Try to keep soldering heat at least an eighth of an inch (3 millimeters) from the case. They are called the leads. The "ea" sounds like the "ee" in "reeds".

That's about 2.4 kilowatthours per 20 hours using your values, YT2095. (my mistake, .24 kwh in 20 hours) Try five rooms, three illuminators each, standardized at 12 volts * 50 mA per illuminator. That's .6 watts each times 15 for 9 watts. About 111 hours per kilowatthour. If your power capacity is really low you can turn off the unused ones and run the ones you have to have at much lower currents. If I weren't so lazy I would have fitted the entire place with them by now. The one I've built is bright enough to read by easily using 9 volts at 4.5 mA. At about 50 mA (six LEDs, sets of three wired in series, two sets parallel to each other), it's bright enough to use as a flashlight at a decent distance, able to make street signs readable at over a hundred meters. It's low tech at my end, just find something to fasten them to and wire them up to a 12 volt power source. A 12 volt 750 mA output transformer can do the whole house. You aren't getting the same illumination, but you are getting usable and practical illumination for a hundred or more times less power. Compare it to five 60 watt bulbs, which if run 24/7 would use 21.6 kwh per month. That's not very much money a month around here, no, but energy seems to be becoming increasingly expensive lately. Then you realize that the fixtures can be less expensive, less demanding of wiring, will last much longer, provide excellent solutions for dark hallways, and so on, plus leaving them on doesn't even move the meter. Realize also that some people leave three hundred or much more watts on continuously just to illuminate dark areas that they almost never use.

A lot of electricity can be saved using LED lights. Most situations where you need a little bit of light, one or just a few white LEDs can illuminate that area bright enough to read using a fraction of a watt. Trying to read with an LED headlamp doesn't work so well for me because it's too bright. I would actually have to turn it down or place the illuminator farther from the book. White LEDs are also good for illuminating dark corridors, for night lights, and outside area illumination. It isn't quite as bright as incandescent, but the illumimation seems very clear. One thing that's great is that even when dimmed the LEDs don't appear to change their spectrum. The 60 watt bulb in the ceiling is too red to read resistors by. I use the headlamp. It would be quite easy to power all the illumination you need in a house, cabin, or camper from a small solar panel this way. They do last for a very long time, at least 7 years continuous by the ratings and they fade instead of burning out. They are really good for emergency lighting. An emergency light can last for weeks on any decent sized battery.

I didn't think that it was appropriate to label the thread as a government conspiracy thread. Ask yourself how the factual statement that the government has lied before makes me a paranoid or a conspiracy theorist, especially in the way you seem to mean the terms. To try to make the discussion an honest one, I have to bring in the fact that you can't simply take the word of government experts. I have been personally attacked here for saying that you can't simply take the word of government experts. At least two of you owe me an apology for that, and if it isn't too much to ask, if you are going to talk about depleted uranium, actually talk about depleted uranium. Of course the previous paragraph is just the delerious ravings of a paranoid madman. What else could it be?