bdunshee

I have to say... wind power won't screw up your radio reception and is very quiet done properly. (it does have the big problem of being useless without wind though.) (I'm a big fan of wind power, but not yet an expert.) That said, if you have a idea work on it and see where it goes. Be prepared if it can't work for some reason... I've had some ideas that after some research I discovered for one reason or another weren't going to work very well... But in following that path I had new ideas.... and following up with those ideas I had more ideas... and some of those turned out to be things I could make work in my house... I don't feel one should think of gravity as energy... you could think of mass kept away from another mass a kind of energy storage, for example the lake at a hight elevation feeding a dam allowing the water to fall to a lower elevation. The energy from a dam comes from the sun heating water... to clouds, to rain or snow.... Falling at a higher elevation than the dam. Gravity is a force not energy.... Live well Enjoy life! -Ben D

Wind is messy fluid dynamics stuff. When you're calculating the energy available for a wind generator the energy available goes up by the cube of the wind speed. (Mass X Speed^2) When you double the wind speed as the previous poster noted twice the mass passes that point so a wind twice as fast has the potential of 2(mass) X 2(speed)^2 for a total of 8 times the energy. However in the case of the wind hitting a house it gets messy... The way a house is shaped and the landscape around it would dictate how much of that energy is transfered to the house. It's possible that it could be modeled on a computer if you included the neighborhood... A good wind tunnel test would give you more info though. I think the car and truck questions may be answerable, but the building questions I think would have to be modeled building by building with the surrounding buildings in the model. Just my thoughts. -Ben D

I don't understand the idea of pain threshold having anything to do with social engineering. Social engineering could be seen as similart to a con game. The trick is convincing a human to do something they aren't supposed to that is advantagous to the person pulling the trick. Usually without the knowlege that they did so. Torture is not social engineering. Everyone hates inflexable procedures.... However for security reasons they can be very important. Just some thoughts. -Ben

As a big fan of giant biped robots..... It's not really about the Gyros although they are important for detecting changes in balace as are accelerometers. Bipedal walking isn't easy. Your whole body reacts to keep you stable. That's pretty hard to build into a robot. Also think how much control motion a human foot has. If a robot is to walk naturally one would need a good bit of articulation in the joint proceeding the foot. People are working on it. I'll edit in some links when I get to my computer to remember them. (This is a work system) As a side note I recomend the Japanese show Patlabor. It's a reasonably realistic depiction of what giant human controled robots could be like in the future. With the rise of giant robots so comes the rise of giant robot crime. (Drunk operation, Bank Robbing, Terrorism ect....) Giant robot crime leads to special police forces with giant robots. (It's a comedy but has a amazingly possible depiction of the future.)

Where's the fun in that.

Sounds like a wonderful idea. Instead of the americium-241 I think I'll scrape the uranium galze from thousands of pre WWII Faberware Dinner Plates. (Post WWII there was no 235 in the mix.)

I use Word once in a blue moon. I prefer Textedit or mac OS X. I sometimes use Quark Xpress. As a semi universal format I recoment Rich Text Format (.rtf)

How are the guidelines for working with human subjects? There's a great history of simple experiments on how humans recall events. However if you wanted to do even the most simple experiment that involved humans at my college it was a pain in the rear end to get approval. (It was important that they did that though. Some people had some really pretty dangerous ideas and didn't think them so.)