Microvoltage array

Nevermind goto it:

Should have started here first ;-)

A cracker you put Lavosh on.

Yeah, let's design a wind-powered electrostatic generator.

(Actually, just a nicely insulated vertical cable with a cluster of needles at the top! How much power can we get from that?)

John

It would probably have a wide variation. Not much most of the time, but occasionally way too much.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

The field averages about 120 volts per meter, more positive as you go up, so a few hundred meters of well-insulated conductor with some sort of collector array at the top should transport kilovolts down to the surface. Why didn't they make the Eiffel tower out of plastic?

John

You'll never get over the fact that you can't get more energy out of the wind than is in there. It's a constant times the square of the diameter times the cube of the windspeed. The result is that small turbines will probably never recover the costs (financial or environmental, however you like to measure it) of their production.

The British DIY chain B&Q have taken to selling small wind turbines for about £1500- over $2500

And that's not counting the cost of the whole caboodle , generator, chimney stack and TV aerial coming down through the roof when it gets blowy.

Paul Burke

Caboodles are not only outrageously expensive when full burden accounted, but their costs can also be expected to go up sharply in the future.

A $10 windmill with a 44 inch blade makes no economic sense where I live. In other areas of the country, it would have to retail for $10 to make economic sense. Including, of course, the regulator, gridtie, and synchronous inverter.

Detailed analysis at

McDonald's tries to patent sandwich-making McDonald's has filed a patent application in Europe and the US for making sandwiches:

The burger company says owning the 'intellectual property rights' would help its hot deli sandwiches look and taste the same at all of its restaurants.

It also wants to cut down on the time needed to put together a sandwich, thought to have been dreamt up by the Earl of Sandwich in

The 55-page patent, which has been filed in the US and Europe, covers the 'simultaneous toasting of a bread component'.

Garnishes of lettuce, onions and tomatoes, as well as salt, pepper and ketchup, are inserted into a cavity in a 'sandwich delivery tool'.

The 'bread component' is placed over the cavity and the assembly tool is inverted to tip out the contents. Finally, the filling is placed in the 'bread component'.

It explains: 'Often the sandwich filling is the source of the name of the sandwich; for example, ham sandwich.'

martin

A bunch of these with pager motors and no wings?

Cheers! Rich

Wasn't there a Earl of Sandwich that beat them to this by three centuries?

Doenst matter if he's your identical siamese twin and he's paying you instead of vice-versa.

And you really should learn about volts, amps, watts, scaling, and economics. Thinking about patents or rights before you have something practical is doing things completely backwards.

yes, you have an IDEA, but as Don pointed out, ideas are less than a dime a hogshead. When I was 8 years old I thought of the idea of hooking a motor shaft to a generator shaft, then taking the output of the generator to feed the motor. That was an IDEA. A year later I realized there might be some friction so the pair would slow down over time. But I was very smart, I quickly figured out you could use a

Trust us, thousands if not millions of people have daydrams like yours and mine every day. Unfortunately the strict laws of thermodynamics, scale, and economics get in the way.

On a sunny day (Tue, 28 Nov 2006 00:51:25 +0100) it happened martin griffith wrote in :

sigh

And I have evidences of publicly making sandwiches at a ham feast too, thus disclosing prior art.

Except at the ham feast, people kept screaming "Seek you de exit".

I recently saw an analysis of human power, in the context of bicycle riding. It was a net negative, even compared to driving a car the same distance. There is a lot of energy used in making food.

How about the car with back wheels bigger than the front? It=3Fs always going down hill! ;-)

Who comes up with these dumb laws, anyway!

Please document. Almost certainly totally bogus.

See

About the only thing that beats out bicycle efficiency in energy per mile is a fish.

Treehugger.com certainly seems like a reliable source of such scientific information ;-)

...Jim Thompson

A documented source is ALWAYS better than a rumored one.