In Gaza, cars are cooking with gas

I love this! Always there is a way around idiots trying to make it harder for people to just live.

“Enterprising mechanics convert autos because Israeli sanctions have choked off gasoline supply. “We are under siege,” says Ali Awad, 48, an automobile mechanic who is especially adept at a certain procedure ideally suited to the strapped circumstances that nowadays prevail in the Gaza Strip, where punitive sanctions imposed by Israel have crippled an already stumbling economy. “We have to survive. We cannot just go out and steal.” “As far as I’m concerned, the residents of Gaza can walk,” Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said last month, “and they will not get gasoline because they have a murderous, terrorist regime that does not allow the residents of southern Israel to live in peace.” As a result, almost all of Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants should probably have blisters on their feet by now from so much walking. But they have been at least partly spared that particular hardship, thanks in no small measure to mechanics like Awad, men who have mastered the trick of converting cars to run on a pressurized and flammable concoction that still manages to find its way into Gaza, albeit in diminished quantities. It is called cooking gas. For 1,000 shekels – about $275 – Awad can convert an automobile to operate on a combustible source of energy better known for its role in the preparation of dinner. He does an average of one conversion a day. The job takes about eight hours to complete and involves running a fuel line from the trunk or back seat to the engine, where a specially designed pump is installed near the radiator. When the job is done, the vehicle’s operator can choose to burn conventional gasoline or the cooking stuff by flicking a switch on the dashboard.” – Source

Brain waves pattern themselves after rhythms of nature

This gives an entirely new meaning to the term ‘brain freeze’.

“Structures built from a very large number of units can exhibit sharp transitions from one state to another state, which physicists call phase transitions,” said Cowan, a Professor in Mathematics and Neurology at Chicago. “Strange and interesting things happen in the neighborhood of a phase transition.” When liquids undergo phase transitions, they evaporate into gas or freeze into ice. When the brain undergoes a phase transition, it moves from random to patterned activity. “The brain at rest produces random activity,” Cowan said, or what physicists call “Brownian motion.” An article in a Japanese journal that described a statistical physics approach to chemical reaction networks. “It took me years to understand how to use these tools for biological networks,” he said. “It so happens that there is an analogy between the behavior of chemical reaction networks and neural networks.” – Source

A world united on water

“Every litre of petrol requires up to 2.5litres of water to produce it. On average, crops grown for their bio-energy need at least 1000 litres of water to make one litre of biofuel. It takes about 2700 litres of water to make one cotton T-shirt, up to 4000litres of water to produce 1kg of wheat and up to 16,000 litres to produce 1kg of beef. The statistics are equally surprising for hundreds of other products that we all take for granted, such as milk, juice, coffee, fruit, pizza, detergents, carpets, paint, electrical appliances, cosmetics and so on. On average, wealthier people consume upwards of 3000 litres of water every day. Even to produce the much more basic things our economy needs, such as cement, steel, chemicals, mining or power generation, requires tonnes of water. We have seen how a combination of crop switch for biofuels and drought can have an inflationary impact on food. Water is the bigger problem behind this issue. It has the potential for a much more profound impact on consumers and voters. In the breadbasket areas of the world, which help feed our fast-growing urban populations, we are heading for painful trade-offs or even conflict. Water is local. Water basins will become the flashpoints. These are the large areas that drain into the world’s major rivers and eventually into the sea. They contain millions of people, farmland, forests, cities, industry and coastline, and often straddle multiple political boundaries. The sector that will get the most attention will be the water used by agriculture for food and textile production: 70 per cent of all our freshwater withdrawals are in this sector. Savings made here can help elsewhere in the water basin.” – Source

Britain’s Invisible Tank

Predator lives!

“A soldier who’s seen it first-hand says: “This technology is incredible. If I hadn’t been present I wouldn’t have believed it. I looked across the fields and just saw grass and trees – but in reality I was staring down the barrel of a tank gun.” As we understand it, the technology involves a whole bunch of cameras and projectors. The surrounding area is filmed, then projected onto the tank’s other side. It seems then, that ‘invisible’ may not be the right word. Perhaps ‘perfectly camouflaged’ would suit things better. We don’t care though, the headline stays. If a camera breaks mid-battle, or a projector just fails, that’s it. The competitive edge provided by an invisible tank is all but lost. The man behind this all, one Professor Sir John Pendry, knows this and he has a plan: “The next stage is to make the tank invisible without [the cameras and projectors] – which is intricate and complicated, but possible.” What’s more – the same technology could be used to make jackets for the soldier himself. This of course means an invisible soldier could emerge from an invisible tank and wreak absolute havoc on the guy with the war-donkey we talked about earlier.” – Source

Tech firm pays workers to dream

I wish more companies would adapt this idea. In my work history, I have made many suggestions and implemented them which saved the company tens of thousands of dollars per year.

What did I get? A pat on the back, no vacation time, no raise, no bonus, period. So please do reward your workers when they save money or come up with ideas to better carry out an operation.
With one company there was a contest to see who could come up with the most ideas that were USED and of the over 1,000 ideas I came up with, some 230 were put into operation, what did I get? Boxes and boxes of company logo items such as duffle bags, coffee cups, teeshirts, caps, most of which I gave away. But money? Not a dime.

The reason I came up with so many ideas was because I was the senior maintenance tech so saw all aspects and operation of the building, so it was easy for me to find errors which could be repaired to maximize production and increase overall efficiency as well as make many people’s jobs easier.

“Oceanit is a company that’s always learning and growing because its people are curious,” said Ian Kitajima, the company’s marketing director. “When we hire, we hire people who are Oceanit-like …. At Oceanit, you’ve got to be smart, in some cases brilliant.” The company, which specializes in the aerospace, engineering, life sciences and information technology fields, has innovation right in its name: the “it” in Oceanit stands for “innovative thinking.” To further promote a work culture based on creativity, Oceanit two years ago launched an internal research and development fund to help pay for projects and inventions its staff of 150 might come up with. To date, the company has funded eight internal invention ideas, including flame-retardant concrete, a “smart” electrical socket and Waters’ idea to convert incinerator ash into building material. Oceanit says the program, which awards up to $50,000 twice a year for internal projects, helps create an environment where its workers can get excited about their work, and tell other potential employees about it.” – Source

Liquid Oxygen runs Amazing Auto (Aug, 1930)

Reminds me of the idea of exploding dynamite in an enclosed tank that could expand and repressurize to run an engine.

“Blast furnace and refrigerator in one was the remarkable car that they built. One of its two tanks (refilled when necessary from a special “thermos bottle” truck) held oxygen chilled to many hundred degrees below zero to keep it a liquid. Another tank held the fuel—gasoline, benzine, oil, or methylated spirits. When the driver opened a valve, oxygen and fuel flowed through separate pipes to the “motor,” a hollow tube little larger than a ginger ale bottle. Here the gases were ignited, and a flame six feet long shot out of the tube with a deafening roar. Its recoil propelled the car forward with a force estimated at more than 200 horsepower. An ominous event in the preliminary trial occurred when Valier got too hot a mixture of the gases. Instantly the “motor,” of hardest steel, melted away. Valier replaced it, and one night the car was ready for its first test. On this first attempt, the car circled the Tempelhof airport, near Berlin, seven times at a ninety-mile-an-hour clip. Valier showed that he could slow it, bring it to a stop, and start off again—stunts that were impossible with his previous rocket cars, which had to keep on going until the rockets burned up. While Valier was preparing the car for a run with oil fuel, something went wrong. Probably fumes of the gases escaped from their separate tanks and mixed, causing an explosion that hurled Valier twenty feet. He died while being rushed, unconscious, to the hospital. Yet the risky experiment proved, Doctor Heylandt said, the scientific possibility of driving vehicles this new way.” – Source

the Truth about teleportation

This makes a lot of sense…

“Scientific American: What’s the biggest misconception about teleportation? – Jeff Kimble: That the object itself is being sent. We’re not sending around material stuff. If I wanted to send you a Boeing 757, I could send you all the parts, or I could send you a blueprint showing all the parts, and it’s much easier to send a blueprint. Teleportation is a protocol about how to send a quantum state—a wave function—from one place to another. / As Minkel sums it up, the phenomenon “turns out to be more relevant to computing than to commuting.” – Source