Posts by Chemist
1444 posts • joined Wednesday 24th March 2010 19:26 GMT
In electrochemical cells
These days, I think, a superacid conductive membrane ("nafion" ?) is used to separate the cathode/anode compartment so little or no mixing of hydrogen/oxygen. This would seem rather difficult to adapt as presumably the hydrogen/oxgen is being emitted all over the surface.
As for the ultimate feasibilty I and others have already commented on the max. output from a playing card sized device.
No, of course it's not photosynthesis
"energy produces from the O2/H2 burns"
It can't produce any more than the incident solar energy which it's already been pointed out is max. ~~1 kW / square metre of card area unless some mirror system etc is used.
To the ones worrying about the amount of water I'd guess a very thin layer over the card is all that's required. The major problem looks to be the explosive potential of the hydrogen/oxygen gas mix
Here's a simple calculation
Peak sunlight ~~ 1kW/m^2
Card is ~4e-3 m^2 ( I assume 4cm * 10cm - don't play cards )
*Assuming 100% efficiency*
That's an output of 4 W - turning it into hydrogen and then electricity can only lower the potential power.
Posted in Windows Server pushed to the super limit
Read about Pittsburgh SC's Blacklight
Blacklight, the World’s Largest Coherent Shared-Memory Computing System, is Up and Running at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
http://www.psc.edu/publicinfo/news/2010/101110_Blacklight.php
Featuring 512 eight-core Intel Xeon 7500 (Nehalem) processors (4,096 cores) with 32 terabytes of memory, Blacklight is partitioned into two connected 16-terabyte coherent shared-memory systems — creating the two largest coherent shared-memory systems in the world.
Running 2 Linux images on 2048 cores each
Earliest ref. I can find (quickly) is from1985 ...
Physics and Astronomy
Combustion, Explosion, and Shock Waves
Volume 21, Number 4, 401-403, DOI: 10.1007/BF01463407
Effect of a constant electrical field on combustion of a propane-butane mixture with air
G. A. Gulyaev, G. A. Popkov and Yu. N. Shebeko
Some of the refs. are a lot older
Posted in The Bayeux Tapestry archiving model
"I wonder what the equivalent of the BSOD is?"
Moths !
Posted in Nokia launches new corporate font
Too much ..
time on their hands.
Too much money. Er, no,wait...
Why don't they build ..
a tunnel ?
Xenon is "inoffensive
TRUE
"now turned into inoffensive Xenon"
Iodine-131 decays to Xenon-131 by beta decay.
Xe-131 is stable (i.e NON-radioactive) and the only hazard if concentrated is anesthesia or asphyxiation. At the truly minute amounts present in the water this is impossible.
What the hell the compounds of Xenon have to do with this ?
Any gas that isn't oxygen is an asphyxiant if it's not mixed with sufficient oxygen
Have opinions, but don't try and BS with 'facts' that aren't and science you clearly don't understand
" one tends to get a breakdown............ hydrogen and oxygen"
NO! Not again ! One does not !
Water reacting with hot zirconium of the fuel rod assemblies to generate hydrogen
The thermodynamics of water are almost totally in the direction of water unless the temperatures are VERY high.
Think - what does a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen do when you apply a match
Indeed drivel
I've posted this elsewhere but after Chernobyl the pharmaceutical research site I worked at in NW England ( >2000 km) from Chernobyl, spotted the radiation very quickly as it was concentrated on the ventilation filters. The news got around VERY quickly.
I had to correct them recently
They had a post on the Japan feed that actually, to anyone with even half a brain, was about evacuating Brits from Bahrain !
"because seen from outside the universe"
I take my hat off to you - what a hitchhiker !
Posted in The 64-bit question
Standard out-of-the-box on OpenSUSE
firefox: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64,
Posted in Fukushima situation as of Wednesday
That seems highly suspect
You can't keep radiation levels a secret !
All sorts of people will be measuring, near and far. After Chernobyl, for example, the pharmaceutical research site I worked at in England ( >2000km away) spotted the abnormal levels very quickly because they were concentrated on ventilation filters. It's so easy to detect extremely low levels of ionizing radiation
Posted in The 64-bit question
Re : True
Unless you want to run the moon landing game - I think that took almost all ( maybe 248 bytes ?)
For the last time !!
"Steam which has been superheated as in a reactor core can break up into hydrogen and oxygen"
NO IT CAN'T
People have been going 2H20 > O2 +2H2
The equilibrium for this reaction lies HEAVILY to the left at reasonable temperatures
Water only dissociates to 3% hydrogen 97 % water at 2000 C . The water has to react with something to generate significant amounts of hydrogen This would seem to be zirconium in the fuel rod casings by all accounts
Posted in Threat to third Fukushima nuke reactor
why they overheated? → #
The primary reaction has shutdown but highly radioactive waste products with very short-half-lives generate a considerable amount of heat as they decay. Without cooling, depending on the reactor design this can lead to overheating and potentially melting
Ditto
Been running it since the early SuSe distros. Rock solid - running on 6 machines at the moment on 11.2
Posted in Threat to third Fukushima nuke reactor
It's not just dissocation of water.
The equilibrium even at 2000 C is ~3% hydrogen 97 % water. Catalysts don't affect equilibria only rate. The hydrogen is being produced in a chemical reaction - probably zirconium fuel rod components reacting at high temperatures with water/steam
Re : Garbage? #
He's quite correct water doesn't break down appreciably even at 2000 C. Even then it's in equilibrium with only a small percentage of free hydrogen/oxygen.
The only way of generating sig. free hydrogen is to react the water with some material such as zirconium as others have mentioned
yellow/orange flame
Every time you heat dust it gives a yellow flame due yto the amounts of sodium salts around. Anyone who has banged a lab bench with a bunsen burner running will have seen that.
No it's not.
Thermolysis of water proceeds to only a small percentage even at ~2000 C.
The hydrogen is coming from something, probably metal, reacting with the steam/water at high temp.
As I understand it
You don't !
where is the Hydrogen coming from?
I'd guess it's some component of the fuel rod assembly reacting at high temperature with steam
Posted in Japanese nuke meltdown may be underway
solar has the side effect of trying to give us all skin cancer.
What !!!!!
The BBC are reporting..
that they did have diesel generators but these failed after (?) hours.
What make you think ..
That filing a patent is easy. In the UK & EU patent filings are examined. The documents are detailed and extremely tedious and take a large chunk out of ones working life.
Just a guess..
'cos I'm an organic chemist but maybe it forms a plasma more readily. Its ionisation potential is quite low whilst having reasonable mass.
On the other hand maybe it's the blue glow that makes your spaceship look like a 'proper' spaceship
Let me fix that
The quote is : ""matter can be neither created or destroyed in a CHEMICAL reaction"
I have a netbook (Eee 1000HE)
Mine is flawless also
Posted in Honey I shrunk the chip ... now what?
There seems little that can be done conventionally.
Reach a certain size and quantum effects will take over. Already quantum tunneling is a problem - get much smaller and it will be dominant. Time to rethink the paradigm.
"running OpenVMS and still got infected."
Nonsense.
To quote from your ref.
"The Trojans came via a PDF attachment in an e-mail."
It was a PDF in an email. I don't know about OpenVMS biut the Linuxes I run wouldn't have got infected AND I doubt if OpenVMS would either
Posted in HP to put a WebOS in every PC
It depends
It could dual boot just as Windows & Linux can now or it could run WebOS in WIndows (or Linux) using VirtualBox just as either can now. WebOS in any case is just basically Linux
Posted in Spaniards bemoan 'joke' speed limit cut
Re : What !
What cross-grained moron downvoted this.
It's a FACT - my wife's TOURAN is the same - for that matter every car I've ever owned has been better than 20 mph /1000 revs (since 1969). My motorhome at 3.5 tonnes does ~30 mph/1000 revs.
For goodness sake disagree with an OPINION but this info. is available on VW's website
Posted in Spaniards bemoan 'joke' speed limit cut
Hence, double speed requires 8 x power.
But you'd only travel for half the time so the fuel consumed would be 4 times as much
Posted in Security agency calls time on botnet FUD
"I seldom see junk mail these days"
Certainly I use Plusnet, have had my email address for years, and my experience is that very little spam gets through (1-2 /month compared with 10+ a day a few years ago)
What !!!!
You must be out of your mind !
(One of my mates invented Arimidex)
"working with browser manufacturers"
You can just see the scene : a grimy factory, belching smoke, grim-faced workers enduring noise, soot and low-wages bashing out, probably with steam hammers, countless billion browsers a shift.
"how much is this like a magnox reactor then"
No at all. This governs the working fluid in the turbine stage - which will be steam in any conventional nuclear plant
Posted in Spaniards bemoan 'joke' speed limit cut
From the BBC
"They point to studies suggesting that a 10km/h reduction in speed saves closer to 5% on fuel rather than 15%. The government's own figures suggest it could forfeit large sums in tax revenue due to the fuel savings. And the bill for changing the road signs for just four months runs to 250,000 euros."
Mind this is the same BBC that has 130kph translating as 75 mph or 81 mph on two adjacent lines
"That's something for Linux users to think about,"
I thought about it - a long time ago - Microsoft's cr*p doesn't go near my systems.
Problem is ..
Anywhere outside the solar system is such a dickens of a long way away that the chances of a very fast chunk of rock arriving here, finding the Earth, surviving entry AND containing signs of life seem pretty remote
"..and could be the origin of life on Earth."
I've heard this several times but it just seems to push back the origin to somewhere else it doesn't explain how life began
Posted in Sinclair ZX81: 30 years old
For all who loved messing with the MK14....
Get yourselves a handful of 18F PICs (http://www.microchip.com/) and a programmer. It's easy to set one up to do all sorts of jobs and hook it up to a PC via a serial or serial/USB converter. One of mine is providing me with info about my house (temperatures etc.) via a small server program on my fileserver even though I'm 800 miles away in Switzerland.
Another is emulating a serial port chip on my homebrew FORTH 6809 system.
Cheap, robust, versatile and available in 0.1" pin spacings so PCBs can be made using laser printers by printing the mirror image onto photo paper, ironing that onto clean copper board, soaking off the paper and etching the board.
Posted in Sinclair ZX81: 30 years old
MK14
Still have mine. 256 bytes of memory
Programmed it in raw machine code. Nothing like it for building character or driving you insane
So grateful for an 6502 assembler on my next machine ( UK101 )
poisonous
Chronically poisonous, not acutely, so rather a slow assault weapon
Posted in Yanks outweigh Canucks: Official
Not exactly
but it's certainly rather poor. Very fit, muscular athletes are often rather high BMI but low body fat
4 points.
It's better to be the 'correct ' weight AND fit, but it seems better for health to be fit and rather overweight than unfit and 'correct' weight.
There seem to be better measures of weight, BMI is just the easiest to measure but studies have shown that % of body fat or even just waist measurement are better predictors of poor health outcomes. Very fit, muscular athletes are often rather high BMI but low body fat
Exercise does seem to be VERY important for long-term good health.
Because of chance & biological variation lots of people will experience different outcomes.
