(video works now)
(Where are you going with this, Anchoress? (link fixed now))
20 Replies to “Energy”
Video no longer available. Link not working either.
That’s very weird – i just came to say video and link not working but I guess I’d already done it!
Video no longer available. “Where” link does not work.
Oh, I get it: this is another clever post about how broken Toronto is.
Sorry about that. I don’t know what’s happened to me — I’ve turned in to a bloody troll!
Until Kate has time to fix it if you stick an “l” in “theanchoressonLine” part of the url it’ll get you there.
Yes, noted the spelling error in the link and went there to check it out. The video is gone, but the religion is intact.
Where this is going, is, to church to be amazed at creation. An old theme, but one that pops up whenever something has not yet been explained by science.
Not everything will be explained by science I suppose, but that doesn’t mean it’s magic, like supernatural magic. Like go to the Art Bell for that. They don’t ask for 10% of your net worth to listen to those loons.
A blank screen with no sound? Are you showing us the inside of Stephane Dion`s head??
Speaking of inside Dion’s head , Cherniak on Coren , young Jason ought to be able to explain the Green Shift sensibly ……….
I guess the new energy fad is now a portable lightning catcher?
These people did too much acid in the 70’s.
People want to believe in the existence of some miraculous new energy source. If they hear about it from a reputable source, it can become a popular belief. One of the more popular theories is that there’s an almost unlimited supply of abiotic oil waiting for us under the earth’s mantle. Russian scientists are pushing this theory again.
I guess you can’t criticise people too much for wishful thinking. Sir Isaac Newton was a lifelong practiser of Alchemy. Almost seems out of character for one of the greatest minds in human history.
The Anchoress is completely off of her nutter. These vague, mystical, pseudo-scientific ramblings are the worst kinds of nonsense.
Video works at anchoress site again
For those of you who may be interested, here is a rebroadcast of my comments on lightening and energy sources from July 14, 2006, at 8:54 PM and 11:37 PM:
Just for y’all here at The Friends of Small Dead Animals, I have typed in the following from page F-176 of the 2,500 page, 12 pound, Chemical Rubber Company’s Handbook of Chemistry and Physics:
——————————————————————–
“Lightening, during its life time of up to a second, undergoes numerous variations, and all its parameters change by orders of magnitude. Also, there are many different forms of lightening.
“Even disregarding particular forms such as ball lightening, we find at least four classification criteria, which, taken together, give a great number of differences: intercloud, intracloud, and cloud-to-ground discharges and combinations of those; short hight-current and long low-current flashes, lightnings beginning in the clouds and moving towards ground, and lightening’s moving upwards, lightening’s lowering positive charges and lightening’s lowering negative charges, and those which do first the one and then the other.
“The usual cloud to ground lightening begins with a stepped ladder of low luminosity, probably a meter or so in diameter, followed by a return stroke with a diameter in the order of centimeters, with temperatures of about 30,000 degrees Kelvin, and pressures up to a 1,000,000 Newtons per square meter. After this, a dart leader may again move downwards, causing a second return stroke. This may repeat several times (multiple stroke flash).
“Typical voltage drop in ground or other conductors is in the neighbourhood of 10,000 volts per meter (dangerous!). Intra-cloud lightnings have been observed with up to 100,000 meter lengths. Energy delivered in a stroke is about 100,000 Joules per meter.
“There are probably about 100 lightnings occurring on Earth at any time. Lightening frequency over oceans is only about 1/10 of that over continents. Diurnal variations on continents show maximums in later afternoon and early evening, and over oceans late evening until after midnight.
“Long lasting, low current (thousands of Amperes) flashes are more dangerous to man and more damaging to objects than short high-current flashes.”
——————————————————————–
So, for those of you keeping score at home, we’re talking temperatures of up to 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit, pressures up to 145 pounds per square inch, and up to 13 million horsepower per stroke (over the length of the stroke). I thought you might enjoy that 😉
By the way, in case any of you think that 145 pounds per square inch is something to sneeze at, that pressure is over a surface area of something like a cylinder up to 100,000 meters long, by, say, 10 centimeters in radius. So, the surface area, A = 2 × π × r × L, is about 628 million cm² or 97 million in², giving a total, per single stroke of lightening, of 14 billion pounds of force, overall. And 10,000 volts / meter × 100,000 meters is 1 billion volts, end to end. To go with your 13 million horsepower.
Believe it or not, I do have a point here, other than fun with physics. Consider morning rush-hour traffic in North America. Say that, a some point, there are 100 million vehicles on the road, and they are running at an average of 50 horsepower, that is, on average, cruising (well, I’m guessing, but it’s somewhere between 1 and 100 horsepower on average, so that’s close enough for first approximation). So, that’s 500 million total horsepower.
Now, the CRC said 100 lightnings at any time, so at 13 million horsepower each, that would be 1.3 billion horsepower. In other words, the total power used over any second of the morning commute is something like 38 % of the total power of the earth’s lightening discharges in that second. So, say, the total North American power consumption at peak load is something like the total power output of the whole earth’s 100 lightening strokes per second. And those strokes are running 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit each.
So, my point is, when people run around debating how to optimize man’s use of resources, and arguing about the machines we are trying to make to do so, some of which run at extremely high pressures, temperatures, voltages, and currents, without understanding these basic forms of reasoning, their opinions tend to be worth less than a pinch of salt. If we want to replace the majestic energy density of hydrocarbons with something else, we’ve got a lot of replacing to do. And I’m sure, over the centuries, we will. I’m a hopeless optimist.
For those of you who are interested, tinyurl.com/px258 has an excellent image of the artificial lightening created during the operation of the gymnasium sized Z machine, which has achieved 1.6 million degrees Celsius. For billionths of a second, it has produced an output X-ray power of about 290 trillion watts, about 80 times the entire world’s output of electricity. Like I’ve said, we’re workin’ on it.
(And if there isn’t at least one mistake in my lazy summer Friday afternoon analysis above, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle 😉
/End of Rebroadcast from July 14, 2006.
Vitruvius; one of my instructors at college talked about an attempt to collect a lightning strike with a giant capacitor connected to an antenna on a mountain. This article discusses such things. Lightning strikes.
Sorry; link didn’t work. ***http://brentjh.blogspot.com/2006/10/harnessing-lightning-for-electricity.html***
Where are you going with this, Anchoress?
hopefuly to the loonytoons bin
Yeah, it’s a tricky business, Gunney99. For example, before one goes trying to capture significant amounts of energy from lightening into capacitors, one first has to get one’s circuit breakers to work 😉
I believe Dr. Frankenstein did some research into capturing lightning energy.
Vitruvius, we have such a high density source. It’s called uranium, and Saskatchewan is loaded with it. After the uranium runs out in several thousands or tens of thousands of years, we’ve got thorium, and there’s about three times as much of it.
Video no longer available. Link not working either.
That’s very weird – i just came to say video and link not working but I guess I’d already done it!
Video no longer available. “Where” link does not work.
Oh, I get it: this is another clever post about how broken Toronto is.
Sorry about that. I don’t know what’s happened to me — I’ve turned in to a bloody troll!
Until Kate has time to fix it if you stick an “l” in “theanchoressonLine” part of the url it’ll get you there.
Yes, noted the spelling error in the link and went there to check it out. The video is gone, but the religion is intact.
Where this is going, is, to church to be amazed at creation. An old theme, but one that pops up whenever something has not yet been explained by science.
Not everything will be explained by science I suppose, but that doesn’t mean it’s magic, like supernatural magic. Like go to the Art Bell for that. They don’t ask for 10% of your net worth to listen to those loons.
A blank screen with no sound? Are you showing us the inside of Stephane Dion`s head??
Speaking of inside Dion’s head , Cherniak on Coren , young Jason ought to be able to explain the Green Shift sensibly ……….
http://gizmodo.com/5034458/slow-motion-lightning-video-is-mindblowing-will-sell-a-thousand-slo+mo-cameras
I guess the new energy fad is now a portable lightning catcher?
These people did too much acid in the 70’s.
People want to believe in the existence of some miraculous new energy source. If they hear about it from a reputable source, it can become a popular belief. One of the more popular theories is that there’s an almost unlimited supply of abiotic oil waiting for us under the earth’s mantle. Russian scientists are pushing this theory again.
I guess you can’t criticise people too much for wishful thinking. Sir Isaac Newton was a lifelong practiser of Alchemy. Almost seems out of character for one of the greatest minds in human history.
The Anchoress is completely off of her nutter. These vague, mystical, pseudo-scientific ramblings are the worst kinds of nonsense.
Video works at anchoress site again
For those of you who may be interested, here is a rebroadcast of my comments on lightening and energy sources from July 14, 2006, at 8:54 PM and 11:37 PM:
Just for y’all here at The Friends of Small Dead Animals, I have typed in the following from page F-176 of the 2,500 page, 12 pound, Chemical Rubber Company’s Handbook of Chemistry and Physics:
——————————————————————–
“Lightening, during its life time of up to a second, undergoes numerous variations, and all its parameters change by orders of magnitude. Also, there are many different forms of lightening.
“Even disregarding particular forms such as ball lightening, we find at least four classification criteria, which, taken together, give a great number of differences: intercloud, intracloud, and cloud-to-ground discharges and combinations of those; short hight-current and long low-current flashes, lightnings beginning in the clouds and moving towards ground, and lightening’s moving upwards, lightening’s lowering positive charges and lightening’s lowering negative charges, and those which do first the one and then the other.
“The usual cloud to ground lightening begins with a stepped ladder of low luminosity, probably a meter or so in diameter, followed by a return stroke with a diameter in the order of centimeters, with temperatures of about 30,000 degrees Kelvin, and pressures up to a 1,000,000 Newtons per square meter. After this, a dart leader may again move downwards, causing a second return stroke. This may repeat several times (multiple stroke flash).
“Typical voltage drop in ground or other conductors is in the neighbourhood of 10,000 volts per meter (dangerous!). Intra-cloud lightnings have been observed with up to 100,000 meter lengths. Energy delivered in a stroke is about 100,000 Joules per meter.
“There are probably about 100 lightnings occurring on Earth at any time. Lightening frequency over oceans is only about 1/10 of that over continents. Diurnal variations on continents show maximums in later afternoon and early evening, and over oceans late evening until after midnight.
“Long lasting, low current (thousands of Amperes) flashes are more dangerous to man and more damaging to objects than short high-current flashes.”
——————————————————————–
So, for those of you keeping score at home, we’re talking temperatures of up to 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit, pressures up to 145 pounds per square inch, and up to 13 million horsepower per stroke (over the length of the stroke). I thought you might enjoy that 😉
By the way, in case any of you think that 145 pounds per square inch is something to sneeze at, that pressure is over a surface area of something like a cylinder up to 100,000 meters long, by, say, 10 centimeters in radius. So, the surface area, A = 2 × π × r × L, is about 628 million cm² or 97 million in², giving a total, per single stroke of lightening, of 14 billion pounds of force, overall. And 10,000 volts / meter × 100,000 meters is 1 billion volts, end to end. To go with your 13 million horsepower.
Believe it or not, I do have a point here, other than fun with physics. Consider morning rush-hour traffic in North America. Say that, a some point, there are 100 million vehicles on the road, and they are running at an average of 50 horsepower, that is, on average, cruising (well, I’m guessing, but it’s somewhere between 1 and 100 horsepower on average, so that’s close enough for first approximation). So, that’s 500 million total horsepower.
Now, the CRC said 100 lightnings at any time, so at 13 million horsepower each, that would be 1.3 billion horsepower. In other words, the total power used over any second of the morning commute is something like 38 % of the total power of the earth’s lightening discharges in that second. So, say, the total North American power consumption at peak load is something like the total power output of the whole earth’s 100 lightening strokes per second. And those strokes are running 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit each.
So, my point is, when people run around debating how to optimize man’s use of resources, and arguing about the machines we are trying to make to do so, some of which run at extremely high pressures, temperatures, voltages, and currents, without understanding these basic forms of reasoning, their opinions tend to be worth less than a pinch of salt. If we want to replace the majestic energy density of hydrocarbons with something else, we’ve got a lot of replacing to do. And I’m sure, over the centuries, we will. I’m a hopeless optimist.
For those of you who are interested, tinyurl.com/px258 has an excellent image of the artificial lightening created during the operation of the gymnasium sized Z machine, which has achieved 1.6 million degrees Celsius. For billionths of a second, it has produced an output X-ray power of about 290 trillion watts, about 80 times the entire world’s output of electricity. Like I’ve said, we’re workin’ on it.
(And if there isn’t at least one mistake in my lazy summer Friday afternoon analysis above, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle 😉
/End of Rebroadcast from July 14, 2006.
Vitruvius; one of my instructors at college talked about an attempt to collect a lightning strike with a giant capacitor connected to an antenna on a mountain. This article discusses such things. Lightning strikes.
Sorry; link didn’t work. ***http://brentjh.blogspot.com/2006/10/harnessing-lightning-for-electricity.html***
Where are you going with this, Anchoress?
hopefuly to the loonytoons bin
Yeah, it’s a tricky business, Gunney99. For example, before one goes trying to capture significant amounts of energy from lightening into capacitors, one first has to get one’s circuit breakers to work 😉
I believe Dr. Frankenstein did some research into capturing lightning energy.
Vitruvius, we have such a high density source. It’s called uranium, and Saskatchewan is loaded with it. After the uranium runs out in several thousands or tens of thousands of years, we’ve got thorium, and there’s about three times as much of it.