Regruntled.com

Arthur Ganson’s sculpture, moving at one end, fixed at the other:

This machine was inspired by dreaming about gear ratios and considering the unexpected implications of exponential powers.

Each worm/worm gear pair reduces the speed of the motor by 1/50th. Since there are 12 pairs of gears, the final speed reduction is calculated by (1/50)12. The implications are quite large. With the motor turning around 200 revolutions per minute, it will take well over two trillion years before the final gear makes but one turn. Given the truth of this situation, it is possible to do anything at all with the final gear, even embed it in concrete.

Last year’s post on the Cool Surge scam has had a lot of comments this week.  Apparently the Cool Surge people are running the same misleading ads again with the new warm season.  It’s good to see that so many people are googling the product after reading the ads, and I’m happy to play my small part in debunking the thing.

June 28th update: this post originally claimed that the Cool Surge was not technically a swamp cooler.  Wrong!  It turns out that there is a water reservoir not mentioned in the full-page ad.  I apologize for my error.

Green Homes America has a good analysis.  Also see the writeup at Consumer Reports.  Finally, a video of the test Consumer Reports ran:

A paste of cornstarch and water, on top of a speaker.

A little more information is available. Here is a PDF from Los Alamos. A Green Freedom plant producing a million gallons of gasoline a day would cost about $5 billion to build, half of which is the nuke. The carbon dioxide in the air (about one part in 3,000) combines with potassium carbonate and water to produce potassium bicarbonate:

CO2 + H2O + K2CO3 –> 2(KHCO3)

Then the potassium bicarbonate is electrolyzed to extract the carbon dioxide, now concentrated. along with some hydrogen. The carbon dioxide and hydrogen are combined to make methanol, and the methanol is used to make gasoline. None of this is rocket science, and most of the pieces are available off the shelf. What is new here is the combination of the pieces of technology in a financially practical way.

Climate Progress calls it a new way to waste energy, and suggests that it would be much more efficient to use the nuclear power plants to run electric cars. Which is true, but the point of liquid fuels is not energy efficiency, but energy density, ease of refueling, and the existence of infrastructure.

Another criticism is that Green Freedom is too expensive… not true at all. That’s like saying if gas is worth $5 a gallon, we can’t afford to make it for $4.60 a gallon. The $4.60 already includes the cost of capital.

Green Freedom just might be part of the energy solution, maybe not here, but in countries less squeamish about nukes.

See also:

• Greenhouse gasoline

Cognitive Daily has an article about the “contrast asynchrony illusion”. It looks like the donut holes are out of phase with each other, but they’re not.