I'm Pissed...

[Explorer]

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  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8973626/
  
  

 

[Tannin]

So. Given the amount of tea I habitually drink, I should be able to go away on a trip and run ... oh .... a dual-core Athlon 4800 with a 15K SCSI RAID array, and my 22 inch Mitsubishi CRT? No problems. I like it.

 

[CougTek]

Here when we have energy surplus, we can sometimes sell it to the main electricity company. Maybe the Aussie electricity company will ask you to piss on the power line?

Would you do it?

 

[Pradeep]

Obviously Coug you've never peed on an electric fence.

 

[sechs]

There's a lot more power in poo. And it's far easier to extract.

 

[Sol]

Yeah I think pee is more for portable devices...

 

[jtr1962]

By definition pee-powered batteries also offer ultra-quick recharge. 8)

I wonder if these can be scaled up to power something like an electric car? I can imagine the entire family taking turns peeing in the "fuel" tank before a long trip, and drinking lots of fluids along the way to keep the tank topped up. Of course, the used stale urine represents a disposal problem. :x Wait a minute-I have the prefect solution for that! :excl: Just dump it on the subway tracks. :mrgrn: They already smell like urine anyway, plus it'll give the rats something to drink.

 

[ddrueding]

Of course, the used stale urine represents a disposal problem.

Um, how about pouring it diwn the sewer? Wasn't it going there anyway?

Along this vein; what baout adding power-generation capabilities to sewer treatement plants?

 

[Sol]

I believe most sewage treatment plants are already capable of powering themselves and usually supplying a little excess power too by burning methane produced in the treatment process. This is also true of a lot of landfill sites.

So remember, in case of some sort of doomsday scenario where the world gets bombed back to the stone age, or similarly decimated, sewage treatment plants and old landfill sites will be the last, self sustaining, bastions of civilization...

 

[iGary]

...sewage treatment plants and old landfill sites will be the last, self sustaining, bastions of civilization...

...which, respectively, need electricity and vehicles pumping and hauling "fuel" to them.

On a similar topic, I've always wondered if their is enough electrolytic charge in common seawater to where I could run a long wire to something on land that's separated from the ocean that has a significant difference in potential. Hence: I run a DC motor off the current that would flow through this wire. I know there are free electrons in magma, but there may be some sort of alkaline lakes or acid lakes or geological whatnot that I can pound a 1 km copper rod into or put conducting plates into (or something of the like).

Basically, I'm looking for electrolytic potential. We already know about mechanical potential in waterfalls, tidal pools, wind pressure. etc. Man, if I could only come up with an electrical generator that could harnesses continental drift, I could make billions of dollars! Then, I could probably afford to get one of those plexiglass Raptors and have it outfitted with internal LED lighting!! OK, *now* I'm inspired to take it to the next level!!!!!

 

[Sol]

...which, respectively, need electricity and vehicles pumping and hauling "fuel" to them.

...Or some sort of local post apocolyptic tribal society who have managed to preserve a couple of dozen porta-loo's.
They could trade recycled water and battery recharges to the Mad Maxes of this theoretical wasteland in exchange for using thier rest rooms...

You could almost make a movie... "Beyond thunderbox"...

A generator that harnesses continental drift is an easy one... Just string a cable or rod between two continental plates, anchor one end and attach a pully or gear to the other end so that a wheel spins as the plates pull apart. Then just add gears to speed up the spinning and attach a generator...

O.K so it's not eaxctly going to make billions or get me a Nobel physics award... But it'd work... Sort of...

 

[Sol]

Doh... Preview is my friend...

 

[Tannin]

Ha! Great post, Sol! Beyond Tunderbox - that just cracked me up. And as for the cable and pulley continental drift power extraction method .... it sounds like Nobel Prize stuff to me.

PS: come and borrow those hard drives while I've still got them. I got 3 x 300GB PATA and 3 x 250GB STA, but I'll probably be taking one of the 300s home tonight to swap over with a 200. Probably. Seems too much like hard work at this instant, but maybe I'll feel refreshed enough to start shortly. Where is that tea?

 

[iGary]

A generator that harnesses continental drift is an easy one... Just string a cable or rod between two continental plates, anchor one end and attach a pully or gear to the other end so that a wheel spins as the plates pull apart. Then just add gears to speed up the spinning and attach a generator...

You'd need a multiplicity of such mechanical contraptions along a rift zone to produce a sizeable aggregate of energy conversion. These mechanical contraptions would also be ugly. So, I propose having them just below the surface, just out-of-sight, but still relatively accessible for maintenance.

If you want to go the pulley-and-cable route, you could use an all-pulley system without gears. The goal in harnessing the kinetic energy of tectonic plate movements is to efficiently convert small very powerful movements of the earth's crust into usable mechanical energy. Using a series of pulleys with a hell of a pulley ratio (like 1:10000000) would be a step in the right direction. With all of this mechanical energy on tap, you could do something with it like pump trillions of cubic meters of deep ocean seawater up to a lake on a high plain, where it could be released through a dam with a hydroelectric generator.

 

[sechs]

I might suggest tapping a readily available energy source -- the sun.

 

[Sol]

The Sun? Sounds far too complicated... I think my next project will be to figure out how to harness the energy of migratory birds...