Pleiades

Sorry, I wasn’t clear in my last post. I was planning on using the cloudiness of the water as an indicator but the cloudiness is probably caused by the titanium dioxide, so even if the water is clarified, I don’t know that the other chemicals are removed. As far as I know, titanium dioxide is non toxic when ingested and is also tasteless, so I'm not particularly worried about getting it out. The problem is, I have no way of empirically testing for the presence of the other contaminates to know if the filtration has worked.

Well I tried it and it didn’t remove the cloudiness form the water, I'm not sure if the cloudiness is from the chemicals or from the titanium dioxide pigment. The water tasted better after 3 passes, but it isn’t the best test. Maybe I’ll try a Brita water filter. Does anyone know of a way to test for these chemicals?

A little back story first, here in Bermuda we use our roofs to catch rainwater. We have no lakes or rivers; all of our water comes from the rain or is desalinated from brackish/marine water. In order to keep the roofs clean, they are power washed and painted every few years. To make a long story short: while painting our roof, some of the paint washed off and got into the storage tank, and now our water supply (about 17,000 gallons) is contaminated with paint. The water is now slightly cloudy and has a very slight paint smell; I also noticed a very small amount of foaming when shaken. I estimate the cost of wasting the water and replacing it to be just over $1000 USD for the whole tank. I am going to try and get some more info from the local company that makes the paint, but they mention on their website that the paint used is Acrythane paint. I did a search for Acrythane and came up with this MSDS (http://www.abccompounding.com/MSDS/LA-489%20MSDS.pdf) this may not be the exact mixture, but I believe it to be the main ingredient. My problem now is: how do I remove Diethylene Glycol Butyl ether, Dibutyl Phthalate and Ethylene Glycol from my water? Any and all methods of removal are welcome; I want to know all the ways I can do it before I decide which is feasible. Reverse osmosis? Carbon filters? Thanks in advance for any help; the issue is putting my family under a lot of stress.

Aren’t clicks roughly 1 second apart indicative of a track 0 failure? Not that it really helps you to recover the data… also, I would recommend using an USB external enclosure for the hard drive, then you can keep it in the freezer while you access it, you will also be able to boot the computer first and then plug in the drive when you are ready.

I know for a fact SD cards can be submerged in salt water without ill effects. I had it happen to one of my card briefly and I've heard a story about a card surviving the Christmas tsunami and the pictures being recovered and used to identify the owners. Assuming it can withstand submersion, I see no reason why it wouldn’t withstand boiling and freezing, although I have yet to try it personally. That leaves only physical durability, which is dependent on construction and packaging; the use of larger circuit components and a tough casing could make flash memory very resistant to physical abuse. See http://www.pcdoctor-guide.com/wordpress/?page_id=243 for some more flash durability tests. Of course if you just want to save data for a long time, put your SD cards in a safe. Flash memory is limited in that it can only retain the electrical charge that represents a bit for about 10 years. This limit could easily be solved by having a device periodically copy and rewrite the card to refresh each charge.

Any sounds heard before a bomb goes off on TV are just sound effects. In reality a bomb could be detonated without any sounds (except the sound of the explosion of course). The basic principle for electronically detonating a bomb it to heat up a piece of wire using electricity, this gets hot enough to detonate a small charge of sensitive explosives, this small explosion sets off the larger one almost instantaneously. This is grossly simplified, but I’m not going into any detail.

Really any program that can burn on multiple drives simuilatinously would work.

Before i buy it, is this the right book? http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0672326663/qid=1147494689/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-9800864-6075065?s=books&v=glance&n=283155 I'm really looking for a book to learn c++, not c

I meant an IDE specifically for c++; I already have IDEs for java and VB, they may not be the best, but I know them. Borland has a lot of products, is C++Builder what I should be using?

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction encipher, ill read up on those things, I’ll be back with more questions no doubt. I have been meaning to learn C++ for some while; I would welcome any recommendations of IDEs and books to get me started.

As part of our business, we take digital photos of people; the photos are put on a CD with some additional materials and sold to the customers. Currently the process goes like this: Create folder structure on computer (day, AM/PM, group number) I do this fairly quickly by copying template folders Insert the SD card and copy the pictures from it onto the hard drive, into the folders created in the step above Use ACDSee to select only the ‘portrait shots’ and batch rotate them (the pictures are a mixture of landscape and portrait) Open Nero Burning ROM and load a base compilation, verify and change the date in the compilation label if necessary. Add the pictures to the compilation, and then burn them using multiple recorders. This is no problem for me, but it could defiantly be streamlined, eventually I want someone with little or no computer skill to be able to do this. I would like to write a ‘wizard’ type program that could guide the user through each step and help speed things up some. Unfortunately I am familiar only wish VB and Java, I am hoping I can finish this project with one of the two. There are several gaps in my knowledge however. The first is ‘Auto Insert Notification’ (I think that’s what it’s called). How does windows tell a program when removable media has been inserted? If anyone can point me toward some information about how to implement this I would be grateful. The second is displaying JPEG images and allowing the user to quickly select which ones need to be rotated. Is there an easy way to show thumbnails in java, some API I’m not aware of? The third is the CD burning, I’d like to be able to simply write a Nero compilation file and then simply load it in Nero and let Nero take it from there, the only problems is I can’t seem to find any documentation on Nero’s compilation file formats. Thanks in advance.

How about household bleach? A 5% sodium hypochlorite solution will cause a burning sensation quite quickly after contact, and then it makes your skin all slimy. Higher concentrations would be quite nasty.

You’re right, it is a huge difference, but my point was that the hardware will soon be advanced enough, but the software necessary for intelligence is far, far behind what it needs to be. I did address that in the last paragraph.

Oh, but you’re so wrong, computers are powerful, they are just easy to ignore. Consider Google, behind that simple interface lie roughly 100,000 computers all linked together to form a super fast supercomputer. How can Google search through an index of billions of pages and return an answer almost as fast as human reflexes? I search for ‘Science Forums and Debate’ returns results in 0.27 seconds, that’s 270 milliseconds, human reflex time is 100-200 milliseconds. I know there all sorts of tricks used to do things so fast, but it still blows me away. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform Google isn’t usually refered to as a proper supercomputer but its performance is comparable to those in the top 10.If you look at the top 500 supercomputers list (http://www.top500.org/) you’ll see that the fastest is the DOE's IBM BlueGene/L system at 280.6 TFlop/s, that’s 280 Trillion floating point operations per second! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene). Although it’s comparing apples to oranges the human brain is sometimes estimated to have between 1 and 10 petaflop/s of power, (1 petaflop/s is 1000 teraflop/s) These supercomputers are many smaller computers linked together, the supercomputer as a whole is massive. What we are lacking is the programming knowledge to create Artificial Intelligence on a human level (or even a mammal level).

If you just want a momentary spark, you should do what KFC said and use a Piezoelectric Igniter (http://www.americanpiezo.com/products_services/ignitors.html) you can get these out of some of the fancier cigarette lighters. You know you have a lighter with one because of the way it feels; you’ll feel increasing pressure as you press the igniter button, then it will give and make a ‘clack’ sound, and you should see a small spark. You can also find them on old barbeque grills, the big red button that some models have is a piezoelectric igniter, usually a more powerful one. The bbq ones have two wires already, but the ones form lighters need a wire soldered onto the brass bit on the end. These can make a spark that will go 6 or 7 mm. they hurt if you shock yourself, but not much. I managed to build one into a pen; I could shock people with two small wires coming out of the tip of the pen.

Ok, an RPM governor is a good idea even if the engine can’t react fast enough right (it should react fairly quickly shouldn’t it, since it’s an automotive engine?)? So I’ll buy the governor I mentioned in Post 8 (assuming its compatible), and then I’ll include a voltage/frequency controller if necessary. Now about these voltage/frequency controllers: what is the proper name for them so I can read up on them, or can you just post some links about them. Shouldn’t a controller like this be built into the generator head I’m going to buy and attach to this engine? I’m going to try and get a hold of the Engine Supplement service manual for this engine, until then, I don’t know much about it except what is show on this page: http://www.jescoweb.com/LD20.htm I haven’t researched it that much, but I will probably be using a Marathon generator like this: http://www.marathonelectric.com/generators/Catalog/details.asp?IDQ=608&IDQ_MODEL=283CSL1507 , or similar. It seems this has an Automatic Voltage Regulator built in, so as long as the engine has some sort of RPM governor, the output voltage and frequency should be pretty stable. Does anyone have any ideas on how I can record and graph how many watts my house is using over a few months so I can figure out exactly how much variation in the load I can expect? I imagine the mobile fairs use a preassembled generator set with all the control systems built in. Oh, I was slightly off on my fuel prices, I had a look at the pump today: $5.47/gal for diesel and $6.52/gal for gasoline. The service manual for the engine was first published in 1983, so the engine may possibly be a pre-FCU engine, but I don’t know.

As far as I know the shaft RPM and the AC frequency are directly proportional to each other; governing one should govern the other too. I’m assuming the electronic governor will have a fast enough response time. I would like to add a massive flywheel to it, but I think it might add too much complexity. The engine is oversized, so that should help. I’m not sure what you mean by “electronic fuel control unit”, as far as I know the engine is totally un-computerized, as it is fairly old. I don’t know for sure, because I haven’t had the vehicle apart yet, but I assume the accelerator is connected with a cable to a mechanical device on the engine that regulates the amount of fuel pumped into the cylinders. I’m hoping I can attach some sort of actuator to the linkage on the engine, but I’ll have to wait and see. Now that I think about it, it will probably be about a year from now until I can get my hands on the engine, as I will be going away to uni this fall. I’m a bit wary of adopting hydrogen as a means of storing electricity at this point; the tech just seems too immature at the moment.

Electricity here is about 26c/kWh (yes that’s US cents), diesel is about $5.34/US gal, and gasoline is over $6/US gal. Currently we have a 5kW air cooled gas gen set for emergency use (a few times a year at least, we get a few hurricanes) I want a generator that can handle 4 room air conditioners and 3 fridges, not to mention the heat pump and water heater, plus a whole bunch of intermittent loads, like the water pump, toaster, microwave, etc. we use about 40kWh/day on average. We use propane for our dryer and oven, and we have a solar water heater panel, but we would still need a huge photovoltaic system, I’m having a hard time getting my family to lower our energy use. I worked out the cost of an all photovoltaic system, and regardless of size, it would take about 17 years to pay for itself, since we get no assistance form the government (I’m hoping they’ll come out with cheap plastic PV soon). Also our power company is an evil monopoly that doesn’t allow net metering, in fact if you try to put power back into the system the new wireless meters they just installed will notify the company of tampering (I checked the product sheet from the company that makes them). Wind power is a possibility, the island is pretty much suburban all over, I might be able to get permission for a windmill, but it would be a fight. The other problem is the wind is normally fairly low, 10-12 mph, but it can get up to damaging speeds during ma hurricane. I’m also behind a hill. I’m also having a hard time finding any info on the engine I have, should I just email Nissan, or is there a better way to get detailed specs and performance curves?

What about brain cells, I know they can regenerate, but don’t you generally keep the same brain cells and their matter for your whole life?

I found this thread http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/2006/ that seems be about a very similar problem, it’s worth a shot. Was the game updated recently? Did you download the latest drivers? Or did you just reinstall the ones you were using? You could also try removing your graphics card in Device Manager, and then reboot it and reinstall the card, I don’t know, I’m grasping at straws here..

You make a good point; I did indeed assume RedAlert was male. If RedAlert is female, well that would be one explanation as to why the girl in question is acting weird I don’t particularly approve of lying either, but that friendship isn’t to survive if she still believes RedAlert is in love with her. Lying isn’t necessary if RedAlert can truly change the way he(she?) feels about this girl, but that’s a pretty hard thing to do. Pursuing other relationships might convince her that RedAlert isn’t in love with her. Of course, once another person is involved, RedAlert may find no desire to return to the friendship.

Maybe if you were a little more specific about what kind of experience you are looking for. Some background information would be nice.

Have you tried running the game again, once you run it, it might fix whatever it broke when it crashed, you should be able to launch the game with just the keyboard.

I thought I read somewhere that water can be split up at efficiencies approaching 100%. I don’t know about recombining it though.