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NASA's space pen

Tuesday 21st January 2020 10:30 am

The truth behind NASA’s ‘billion dollar’ space pen.

The end of the internal combustion engine?

Friday 25th October 4:25 pm

Marcel Dayan: Hi Dr Karl, As always, a very interesting talk on the subject. However, there is a practical aspect of the wholesale change to electric cars that I think has been overlooked. It is very well explained in this email that I received recently from a friend. It is an eye opener. Charging Electric Cars.. A friend recently did some work for the body corporate at the Dock 5 Apartment Building in Docklands in Melbourne to see if they could install a small number of electric charging points for owners to charge their electric vehicles. Following the first three applications, they discovered the following: Our building has no non- allocated parking spaces ie public ones. This is typical of most apartment buildings so we cannot provide shared outlets. The power supply in the building was designed for the loads in the building with virtually no spare capacity. Only 5 or 6 chargers could be installed in total in a building with 188 apartments!! How do you allocate them as they would add value to any apartment owning one. The shit fight started on day one with about 20 applications received 1st day and many more following. The car park sub-boards cannot carry the extra loads of even one charger and would have to be upgraded on any floors with a charger as would the supply mains to each sub board. The main switch board would then have to be upgraded to add the heavier circuit breakers for the sub mains upgrade and furthermore: When Docklands was designed a limit was put on the number of apartments in each precinct and the mains and transformers in the streets designed accordingly. This means there is no capacity in the Docklands street grid for any significant quantity of car chargers in any building in the area. It gets better. The whole CBD (Hoddle Grid, Docklands) and Southbank is fed by two sub stations. One in Port Melbourne and one in West Melbourne. This was done to have two alternate feeds in case one failed or was down for maintenance. Because of the growth in the city /Docklands and Southbank now neither one is capable of supplying the full requirement of Melbourne zone at peak usage in mid- summer if the other is out of action. The Port Melbourne 66,000 volt feeder runs on 50 or 60 year old wooden power poles above ground along Dorcas Street South Melbourne. One pole is located 40 cm from the corner kerb at the incredibly busy Ferrars /St Dorcas St Intersection and is very vulnerable to being wiped out by a wayward vehicle. The infrastructure expenditure required would dwarf the NBN cost excluding the new power stations required. These advocates of electric vehicles only by 2040 are completely bonkers. It takes 5-8 years to design and build a large coal fired power station like Loy Yang and even longer for a Nuclear one (That’s after you get the political will, permits and legislative changes needed ). Wind and solar just can`t produce enough. Tidal power might but that’s further away than nuclear It's just a greenies dream in the foreseeable future other than in small wealthy countries. It will no doubt ultimately come but not in the next 20 years.

Dark matter

Thursday 10th October 1:28 pm

Lars Andersson: It appears the Dark Matter theory is primarily (if not totally) created as an explanation to problems to do with gravity. Perhaps, then, the actual problem is our way of conceptualising/understanding gravity. Maybe it's time for a reboot of our understanding of gravity. Which may then also lead to a formulation of the elusive Grand Theory, which seems to be obstructed by gravity as the one "force" that refuses to play according to the 'rules'.

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NASA’s space pen

NASA's space pen

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NASA's space pen

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