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The Product


A Product that enables anyone, in a most simple fashion, an independent, cheap and mobile solar Potable Water generation from sea water or brackish water on the base of condensation by solar still.

This Invention represents a conical, self-supporting and stackable Unit made from transparent, thermo-formable polycarbonate (same as water dispensers) outfitted with a screw cap spout at the tip and an inward circular collecting trough at the base. Technically speaking it is a solar still.

Function


1.
Pour salty / brackish Water into pan. Then float the Watercone(r) on top. The black pan absorbs the sunlight and heats up the water to support evaporation.. 2.
The evaporated Water condensates in the form of droplets on the inner wall of the cone. These droplets trickle down the inner wall into a circular trough at the inner base of the cone.
3.
By unscrewing the cap at the tip of the cone and turning the cone upside down, one can empty the potable Water gathered in the trough directly into a drinking device.


Watch short version how to use the Watercone:



Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/v/On7gbKIa5zc

If Youtube is blocked by your companies firewall download the Quicktime Movie here




Technical Information

The WATERCONE(r) system can be referred to as a one step water condensation process with a 40% effectiveness degree (GTZ Germany). Based on evaporation levels of 8.8 Liters per square meter (average solar irradiation in Casablanca, Morocco), the WATERCONE(r) (with a base diameter of 60 - 80 cm) yields between 1.0 to 1.7 Liters of condensed water per day (24 hours). The salty / brackish Water evaporates by way of solar irradiation and the condensation from that Water appears in the form of droplets on the inner wall of the cone. These droplets trickle down the inner wall into a circular trough at the inner base of the cone. By unscrewing the cap at the tip of the cone and tur

When your Jeep spins lazily off the mountain road and slams backward into a snowbank, you don't worry immediately about the cold. Your first thought is that you've just dented your bumper. Your second is that you've failed to bring a shovel. Your third is that you'll be late for dinner. Friends are expecting you at their cabin around eight for a moonlight ski, a late dinner, a sauna. Nothing can keep you from that.

Driving out of town, defroster roaring, you barely noted the bank thermometer on the town square: minus 27 degrees at 6:36. The radio weather report warned of a deep mass of arctic air settling over the region. The man who took your money at the Conoco station shook his head at the register and said he wouldn't be going anywhere tonight if he were you. You smiled. A little chill never hurt anybody with enough fleece and a good four-wheel-drive.

But now you're stuck. Jamming the gearshift into low, you try to muscle out of the drift. The tires whine on ice-slicked snow as headlights dance on the curtain of frosted firs across the road. Shoving the lever back into park, you shoulder open the door and step from your heated capsule. Cold slaps your naked face, squeezes tears from your eyes.

You check your watch: 7:18. You consult your map: A thin, switchbacking line snakes up the mountain to the penciled square that marks the cabin.

Breath rolls from you in short frosted puffs. The Jeep lies cocked sideways in the snowbank like an empty turtle shell. You think of firelight and saunas and warm food and wine. You look again at the map. It's maybe five or six miles more to that penciled square. You run that far every day before breakfast. You'll just put on your skis. No problem.

There is no precise core temperature at which the human body perishes from cold. At Dachau's cold-water immersion baths, Nazi doctors calculated death to arrive at around 77 degrees Fahrenheit. The lowest recorded core temperature in a surviving adult is 60.8 degrees. Fo

Why Planes Fly: What They Taught You In School Was Wrong
By Daniel Miessler on October 19th, 2007: Tagged as Physics | Science



So we all know how planes fly, right? The top of the wing is rounded and the bottom of the wing is more straight. Air takes longer to travel over the top of the wing than the bottom, which results in more pressure on the bottom, hence the lift. Right?

As it turns out, no.

This is what I was taught, and it’s what I’ve always believed (it’s even in most lower-level text books), but it’s simply not true. The concept is called the Bernoulli Principle, and it accounts for very little of the lift that makes flight possible.

The main reason planes fly is far simpler: wings force air downward, which in turn pushes the wings upward.

The primary actor here is the the Coanda Effect, with the Bernoulli Principle taking a supporting role. It all starts with the air wrapping downward along the back of the wing (Coanda).




Try this: go to the sink and get a clear drinking glass. Start the water running so that it’s a very thin but steady trickle and bring an outer, rounded part of the glass slowly towards the stream. Watch what happens when you touch it. The glass grabs the stream and forcibly wraps it around itself!

On a plane this equates to grabbing the air going over the top of the wing and pulling it snug to the downward sloping wing surface. This redirects massive amounts of air toward the ground, which results in an upward force, i.e. lift.

The concept is the same as an engine that forces gas backward, which propels the plane forward. This is simply using the wings to do the same thing: forcing air downward, which propels the wings (and plane) upward.




In other words, it all really boils down to Newton’s third law of equal and opposite reactions: *air goes down, wing goes up*.

It’s astounding to me that the truth is so much simpler than accepted wisdom (Beroulli). Anyway, definitely check out this most e

I have said all of this a million times but now that it is too late, a believable source: Martial Law, the Financial Bailout, and War By Prof. Peter Dale Scott
By: jmsjoin Gardner : MA : USA | about 5 hours ago 9 0 Views: 2,312

Global Research, January 8, 2009



Paulson’s Financial Bailout


It is becoming clear that the bailout measures of late 2008 may have consequences at least as grave for an open society as the response to 9/11 in 2001. Many members of Congress felt coerced into voting against their inclinations, and the normal procedures for orderly consideration of a bill were dispensed with.



The excuse for bypassing normal legislative procedures was the existence of an emergency. But one of the most reprehensible features of the legislation, that it allowed Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to permit bailed-out institutions to use public money for exorbitant salaries and bonuses, was inserted by Paulson after the immediate crisis had passed.



According to Congressman Peter Welch (D-Vermont) the bailout bill originally called for a cap on executive salaries, but Paulson changed the requirement at the last minute. Welch and other members of Congress were enraged by “news that banks getting taxpayer-funded bailouts are still paying exorbitant salaries, bonuses, and other benefits.

”1 In addition, as AP reported in October, “Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. questioned allowing banks that accept bailout bucks to continue paying dividends on their common stock. `There are far better uses of taxpayer dollars than continuing dividend payments to shareholders,’ he said.

”2


Even more reprehensible is the fact that since the bailouts, Paulson and the Treasury Department have refused to provide details of the Troubled Assets Relief Program spending of hundreds of billions of dollars, while the New York Federal Reserve has refused to provide information about its own bail-out (using government-backed loans) that amounts to trillions. T

Home / Globe / Ideas How the city hurts your brain
...And what you can do about it
By Jonah Lehrer
January 2, 2009
Email| Print| Single Page| Yahoo! Buzz| ShareThisText size – + THE CITY HAS always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 18th-century coffeehouses of London, where citizens gathered to discuss chemistry and radical politics, to the Left Bank bars of modern Paris, where Pablo Picasso held forth on modern art. Without the metropolis, we might not have had the great art of Shakespeare or James Joyce; even Einstein was inspired by commuter trains.

(Yuko Shimizu for the Boston Globe) And yet, city life isn't easy. The same London cafes that stimulated Ben Franklin also helped spread cholera; Picasso eventually bought an estate in quiet Provence. While the modern city might be a haven for playwrights, poets, and physicists, it's also a deeply unnatural and overwhelming place.

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it's long been recognized that city life is exhausting -- that's why Picasso left Paris -- this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

"The mind is a limited machine,"says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. "And we're beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations."

One of the main forces at work is a stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in pub

In his first interview since the world financial crisis, Gao Xiqing, the man who oversees $200 billion of China’s $2 trillion in dollar holdings, explains why he’s betting against the dollar, praises American pragmatism, and wonders about enormous Wall Street paychecks. And he has a friendly piece of advice:

by James Fallows

“Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money”

Image credit: Nelson Ching/Bloomberg News/Landov

Americans know that China has financed much of their nation’s public and private debt. During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama and John McCain generally agreed on the peril of borrowing so heavily from this one foreign source. For instance, in their final debate, McCain warned about the “$10 trillion debt we’re giving to our kids, a half a trillion dollars we owe China,” and Obama said, “Nothing is more important than us no longer borrowing $700billion or more from China and sending it to Saudi Arabia.” Their numbers on the debt differed, and both were way low. One year ago, when I wrote about China’s U.S. dollar holdings, the article was called “The $1.4 trillion Question.” When Barack Obama takes office, the figure will be well over $2 trillion.

During the late stages of this year’s campaign, I had several chances to talk with the man who oversees many of China’s American holdings. He is Gao Xiqing, president of the China Investment Corporation, which manages “only” about $200billion of the country’s foreign assets but makes most of the high-visibility investments, like buying stakes in Blackstone and Morgan Stanley, as opposed to just holding Treasury notes.

Gao, whom I mentioned in my article, would fit no American’s preexisting idea of a Communist Chinese official. He speaks accented but fully colloquial and very high-speed English. He has a law degree from Duke, which he earned in the 1980s after working as a lawyer and professor in China, and he was an associate in Richard Nixon’s former Wall Street law firm. His off

Theodore Gray, Co-founder, Director of User Interfaces
It’s been possible since Version 6 of Mathematica to embed images directly into lines of code, allowing such stupid code tricks as expanding a polynomial of plots.



But is this really good for anything?

As with many extremely nifty technologies, this feature of Mathematica had to wait a while before the killer app for it was discovered. And that killer app is image processing.

Mathematica 7 adds a suite of image processing functions from trivial to highly sophisticated. To apply them to images, you don’t need to use any form of import command or file name references. Just type the command you want to use, then drag and drop the image from your desktop or browser right into the input line.

Here’s an undersaturated mandrill, and a command to increase the contrast. When you surround an image with textual input the image is automatically displayed at an icon size, but the input line still contains the full data of the image. That means if you save the notebook containing the input, the image is saved with it: the input line is completely self-contained.



Is that too much contrast? An obvious thing to want is a slider that lets you adjust the contrast. The general-purpose Manipulate command lets you make just about anything interactive, including the contrast parameter in this example.



OK, but you could just do that in Photoshop, right? Oh shush, let’s do something you definitely can’t.

Here’s a clown fish, and a command that breaks it into 40-pixel squares.



By the way, we’re seeing another neat thing about the integration of images with Mathematica’s typeset input/output system. This result isn’t an image, it’s a list of images. Lists are general things in Mathematica, and lists of images are no exception. For example, here are the image patches in reverse order.



And here they are sorted by average pixel value (roughly by brightness):



And here are the images sort

This post takes a look at the speed - latency and throughput - of various subsystems in a modern commodity PC, an Intel Core 2 Duo at 3.0GHz. I hope to give a feel for the relative speed of each component and a cheatsheet for back-of-the-envelope performance calculations. I’ve tried to show real-world throughputs (the sources are posted as a comment) rather than theoretical maximums. Time units are nanoseconds (ns, 10-9 seconds), milliseconds (ms, 10-3 seconds), and seconds (s). Throughput units are in megabytes and gigabytes per second. Let’s start with CPU and memory, the north of the northbridge:

EDITOR'S NOTE: When it comes to the topic of caffeine in tea, there is no end to the generating of myth and indeed of science fiction. Perhaps the most persistent canard is the one that alleges that tea can be 'mostly' decaffeinated (80% is, I think, the number most often quoted) by a quick preliminary infusion in hot water (30 seconds is the duration typically recommended). While one cannot hope to dispel so-called 'common wisdom' overnight, even by the demonstration of clear scientific fact, it is surely a step in the right direction to put the data into public circulation. That is why I have asked Nigel Melican, founder and Managing Director of Teacraft Ltd, to offer us a post on this and other aspects of caffeine in tea. Nigel is, quite simply, one of the world's leading authorities on tea; readers of CHA DAO will recall with pleasure the massive work of bibliography that he contributed to this blog in an earlier post; today's entry is, I think, destined to become a standard compendium of information on the topic.

I. DECAFFEINATING TEA

Tea contains two physiologically active compounds: caffeine and theanine. Moderate caffeine consumption is perceived by some in western countries to border on the dangerous, and many consumers, rather than abstaining entirely from drinking tea, maté, or coffee, demand a decaffeinated version. In the case of tea, this is provided commercially by a process that uses organic solvents to remove most of the offending caffeine (along with other compounds); the result, unfortunately, is at best an indifferent product. (Ironically, the very caffeine so removed is a valuable by-product eagerly sought by soft-drink manufacturers to enhance their sugary beverages.)

As well as reducing product quality, commercial decaffeination is an expensive process that takes hours of production time and doubles the raw material price of a pound of tea. How likely is it therefore that the accountants at Lipton and similar packers would have overl