If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.
Announcement
Collapse
Welcome to Moorcock's Miscellany
Dear reader,
Many people have given their valuable time to create a website for the pleasure of posing questions to Michael Moorcock, meeting people from around the world, and mining the site for information. Please follow one of the links above to learn more about the site.
I don't recall any news about a successful fusion reaction, but there was a story recently about a company called Steorn that claimed to have come up with a machine capable of perpetual motion. You can watch a video about it here (via BoingBoing).
Of course, the first law of thermodynamics makes Perpetual Motion impossible, but that doesn't stop people from trying to accomplish it. As always, though, the experimenter arrives at the same inevitable conclusion:
When I was a teen, I thought I had come up with a perpetual motion machine which relied on magnetic fields like this one does. The ring that moves around is a magnet on a wheel with the outside all of one polarity. It is attracted to one pole of a horseshoe magnet, as magnets of opposite polarity are, then repelled by the other pole as it moves past. The idea is that the attraction and repulsion of the magnets allow it to spin forever, and could allow a little energy to be drawn off to use for something else. The problem is the magnet on the wheel will instead come to rest caught between magnetic fields. It doesn't work unless the horseshoe magnets are electric so they can be turned on and off, and that takes more energy than can be extracted. My Dad, a physicist, let me build my machine and see the problem for myself. Nice to see I wasn't the only one fooled by the idea.
So it's a hoax, or what?
Sure to attract market attention.
Theres alot of weird talk going on about fuel cells nowadays. I'm not really that interested either. I'm 30 years old, and I don't have a drivers license or a car. Driving classes are just too expensive, and too difficult (too many rules which no driver really adheres to when they are on the road). Fuel and insurance really takes chunks out of a singel guys economy too.
But I have no immediate need for a car...
I think there are incentive programs here in Sweden to use ethanol and hybrid cars.
It gets my brother, who's really an amatuer expert on cars, really steamed up (i.e. angry) when I try to talk about it. I don't know why? Maybe its just petrolium addiction.
So I don't know much about it really.
It's a strange thing that modern world production habits originate from automobile production trends. From Ford to the Toyota, from the production floors to the office building to society. Weird world..
The only 'fusion' I've heard of recently is this one:
_"For an eternity Allard was alone in an icy limbo where all the colours were bright and sharp and comfortless. _For another eternity Allard swam through seas without end, all green and cool and deep, where distorted creatures drifted, sometimes attacking him. _And then, at last, he had reached the real world – the world he had created, where he was God and could create or destroy whatever he wished. _He was supremely powerful. He told planets to destroy themselves, and they did. He created suns. Beautiful women flocked to be his. Of all men, he was the mightiest. Of all gods, he was the greatest."
The only 'fusion' I've heard of recently is this one:
The company I work at supplies Gillette with the steel for their razors.
We are one of their main suppliers.
I work at a Cold Roller Mill at a stripped steel plant.
Comment