Mains power voltage drop to reduce usage? (2023 Update)

"Nothing" comes to mind, that is, a vacuum can be used as an insulator.

That's Stark effect; an imposed E-field changes the electron orbitals. In theory, you could identify a nuclear perturbation, too.

Surely the drivers would be stuck with the stranded locos in the first place? Plus, engineers is not really a term used for British train drivers, it is more an American term.

It's impossible to live entirely on uncooked food. People try it, and get rather sick after a time.

Only in America. In the UK engineer doesn't have a particularly clear meaning but in this context it means someone qualified to service rolling stock prior to an ordinary driver taking it out on the track.

The train drivers were already in the cab when the power went down and the trains all ground to a halt. Like their passengers they were unable to leave until someone came and rescued them.

Indeed. In this case the software seemed particularly silly.

However, it didn't get noticed or dealt with until it caused utter chaos. I can't believe that nobody had pointed it out as a serious potential defect before it actually caused so much disruption.

It is exactly the sort of thing that design reviews are supposed to find - What happens if the mains power fails? How do we restart again safely?

Maybe they did and with the mechanical constraints of the motors mean that the only way is to have a qualified systems engineer manually tweak it into a safe condition where it can be restarted.

Oh I think its possible to live on it, but fire was one of man's earliest technologies.

I think even the most stone age of existing peoples - Rwandan pygmies, S American rain forest dwellers, bushman and australian aborigines all know fire and cooking.

Raw meat and fruit is perfectly OK and probably very healthy until the worms kick in and then you fast.

Till they die

I did a summer job working with microwave spectroscopy, at the University of New Orleans. There was a long, 30 foot maybe, waveguide with some gas inside and a metal electrode right down the middle. We applied kilovolt-level square waves to the sceptum and that split the spectral absorption lines. It was enormously educational: HV square wave generators, transmission lines, xmitting tubes, thyratrons, Tektronix scopes, klystrons, mixers, lockin amps, liquid nitrogen, better than a couple of years in EE school.

I personally bought a non-inductive wirewould power resistor ($3 at Radio Parts on the former Jackson Circle) that happened to match the txline impedance of the sceptum in the waveguide, and resolution leaped. Dr B was shocked. I think the traveling wave of the HV steps might have matched the prop delay of the microwaves, or at least we killed a lot of ringing. Cool stuff for a high-school junior.

It was Dr Beeson's project. He was working on the atomic structure of some organic molecule which I can't remember, but I do remember getting a gigantic super-resolution Stark spectrum from OCS.

Stinky. Big dipole moment. Big dipole moments seem to be associated with lethal gasses.

SF6, used to fill circuit breakers and eyeballs, is non-toxic and has zero dipole moment.

Not being a student, UNO couldn't pay me. So they created a fake student ID number, 20,000, and then they paid me 85 cents per hour. That must have got confusing some years later when there was a real student number 20,000. I got to use their library too and read the entire MIT RadLab series.

I recall that there is some case where an electric or magnetic field manages to change some nuclear property, maybe half-life. In NMR, nuclear precession frequency is of course proportional to mag field strength, 4 KHz/gauss for hydrogen.

We've been cooking food for, perhaps, 100,000 years; plenty of time for our digestive system to be simplified.

Of course you can eat /some/ raw food; quite a lot in fact, including meat and fish; but not /just/ raw food.

Parasites in food are a different matter, and are /one/ reason for cooking.

Emergency-stored food can be cooked. There are some quite good beans and such in cartons. We can also cook long-stored pasta on the BBQ.

In the 1989 earthquake, we first had a neighborhood ice cream party, then cooked stuff from the freezer before it went bad, but that was just a couple of days without power.

Jacks are quite good.

I'm a red beans purist, and when Mo made a batch from Jack's, I was shocked to find it to be pretty good.

BULLSHIT.

More bullshit. The Masai did fine on just milk and cattle blood.

Bizarre what humans can do fine on.

In Northern Scandinavia a few years ago, the temperature dropped to

-50 C and the power failed. It was considered to evacuate elderly people but the power was restored in a few hours.

I have been sleeping in a tent in the winter, but it was quite uncomfortable despite having a stove in the tent. There is a risk of burning your feet and your head could freeze to the ground :-). The outside temperature was not severe, only -20 C.

But the Masai prove that out digestive system didnt simplify.

You don't get enough parasites that matter with fruit and veg and it is perfectly possible to do fine on those alone.

But that is because some of them would be too stupid to just go to bed till the power came back.

It took longer than that when the main feed from SE australia was taken out by a massive storm which brought down the

330KV line and South Australia couldn't do a black start because it had so much 'renewable' power generation.

And when Canada lost some of its main distribution system in a massive ice storm which also brought the main lines down.

The antarctic explorers didnt have any stove in their tents and only died because they ran out of food.

Gets a lot colder than that in the antarctic.

This goes across a lot more than just the rail industry.

Elsewhere there's a discussion that the NHS restricts prescriptions to one month's supply, in case the patient loses them.

Some of the prescriptions are for drugs costing a couple of pounds. Which is dwarfed by the cost of prescribing them every month.

Andy

That's health and softy bullshit, if they lose them someone else might take them and er.... feel better, I mean die.

The quantum computers are what's meant to revolutionise.

Bubble memory, too. And memristors.

We're getting there. By frequency alone, ignoring the improvements in instruction sets, one of my 24 core 4GHz CPUs is 6000 times faster than the 16MHz single core CPU I had in 1991, but it doesn't use 6000 times more electricity.

And Windows takes about 20 times longer to start than DOS did on an

8088.