I have probably mentioned this, but IMHO portal was invented by Terry Pratchett.

Discworld, Book 22, The Last Continent (1998)

The wizards looked at the gently rippling surface. There should have been several feet of solid wood sticking out of it.
“Well, well, well,” said the Archchancellor, going back in out of the cold air. “Do you know, I’ve never actually seen one of these?”
“Anyone remember Archchancellor Bewdley’s boots?” said the Senior Wrangler, helping himself to some cold mutton from the trolley. “He made a mistake and got one of the things opened up in the left boot. Very tricky. You can’t go walking around with one foot in another dimension.”
“Well, no…” said Ridcully, staring at the tropical scene and tapping his chin thoughtfully with the seashell.
“Can’t see what you’re treading in, for one thing,” said the Senior Wrangler.
“One opened up in one of the cellars once, all by itself,” said the Dean. “Just a round black hole. Anything you put in it just disappeared. So old Archchancellor Weatherwax had a privy built over it.”
“Very sensible idea,” said Ridcully, still looking thoughtful.
“We thought so too, until we found the other one that had opened in the attic. Turned out to be the other side of the same hole. I’m sure I don’t need to draw you a picture.”
“I’ve never heard of these!” said Ponder Stibbons. “The possibilities are amazing!”
“Everyone says that when they first hear about them,” said the Senior Wrangler. “But when you’ve been a wizard as long as I have, my boy, you’ll learn that as soon as you find anything that offers amazing possibilities for the improvement of the human condition it’s best to put the lid back on and pretend it never happened.”
“But if you could get one to open above another you could drop something through the bottom hole and it’d come out of the top hole and fall through the bottom hole again…It’d reach meteoritic speed and the amount of power you could generate would be—”
“That’s pretty much what happened between the attic and the cellar,” said the Dean, taking a cold chicken leg. “Thank goodness for air friction, that’s all I’ll say.”
Ponder waved his hand gingerly through the window and felt the sun’s heat.
“And no one’s ever studied them?” he said.

I drove right under the core of this thing going home. I could actually see a tornado being made and I checked all the weather and News outlets and there was nothing, except that NOAA decided to throw a Severe Thunderstorm Warning 10 minutes up AFTER IT PASSED...

It was so crazy to see a tornadic supercell in West Valley City (Salty Lake City, for most Sifters). It was following 2700 West for a bit and then I-215 (nearing the airport) was moving super fast to the NNE, straight to Washington Terrace and Riverdale. The winds were wild and the cloud formations were awesome, they were moving fast enough that I thought a partial nub might be visible where I was at, but I never did see it.

All that I saw was the main vortex with the amazing sight of all the cold air being sucked into the vortex at the SSW corner of the leading edge. Which was twisting more than fast enough to be a "horizontal twister". It was rotating so fast it was amazing; since you could see that sight you knew all it needed was a bit of air to push against it from underneath and stand up some of those vortices around the central core and then, walla, you'd get the tornado (I actually did believe that Ogden or Bountiful would get one since that was where it was heading).

All it needed was to get a little closer to the mountains and you'd have the right ingredients.

Thus, this is what you see happen right here in this video. North of my house, out in the middle of the Great Salt Lake, sits Antelope Island. It got hit by the raining part of this tornadic system but look at this wonderful storm video from it:

https://twitter.com/AntelopeSP/status/779078436568518656

It even had some golf ball hail in it.

Definitely don't try this at home. He has a snorkel so his engine won't ingest water and hydrolock, cracking the cylinders and ruining the engine. A normal car would be done in that much water. Some sports cars with a low cold air intake pipe can't even drive through puddles.

Makes me want to try this out and then pick up the bubble. So cool to see that it doesn't pop on impact. I guess the cold air makes it more difficult to pop because the outside layer is in the middle of freezing? I'm not a science nerd so I'm just assuming that.

Last two winters in Finland have been pretty black. Freezing in the night in to solid ice, melting during the day. There was a tiny sliver of cold air that arrived just days before christmas so it's white now, expecting to melt away before new year. Makes cycling pretty much impossible, they haul gravel on to the pavements, it falls thru the melting ice only to get trapped in it when the night comes and you got clear, solid sheet of ice again in the morning. I have never seen so much gravel in the streets in the spring as i did last year. Good news is that -20C only happens for two, three week tops.

I'm not sure the liner part is all that necessary. It also seemed like having a glass container for the liquid would transfer the cold faster, but if the temperature of the exhaust is at 40 degrees with plastic then that's good enough. Cool idea.

Another thought is that you could decrease the number of exhausts and get a stronger blast of cold air.

>> ^Quboid:

I think it was a joke.
Is it that unreasonable anyway? People seem to be assuming that if it's not a joke, that he means windows that passengers can wind down like a car but obviously they'd be locked except when in an emergency and the plane is less than 10,000 feet up. If the plane is on the runway and it fills with smoke, being able to open the windows might help. Or it might bring in more oxygen and make the fire much worse...


I agree. He was joking, and I actually don't think it's that stupid an idea, either. Sure, as he articulated it, it sounds like a stupid idea. You don't want a hand crank on every window (although I've been in commercial airliner cockpits that DO have such a thing).

But maybe it IS a problem that airliners don't have a way to rapidly vent the cabin and cockpit with fresh (yes, low pressure and cold) air. It won't be comfortable at 15,000 ft, but it could save lives. Smoke in an airplane is a serious issue.

>> ^spoco2:

He did not explain things particularly well.
He said it was a pre-cooler, it showed that it could cool air from +1000C down to -150C in 1/100 sec which is pretty amazing. And he said that this was cooling air going into the engine down to that temp...
However he never explained the problem this was solving. What temperature is air usually going into the engine? Why does it need to be cold? What happens if you don't cool it?
Just a poorly written piece, did not lay out Problem->Solution very well at all.
By the sounds of it, it's pretty amazing tech, just wish this were better at explaining it.


my guess would be cold air is denser, which means the engine can produce more thrust and is therefore more efficient. Just a hunch.

In and of themselves, not a whole lot. The cold winters in Europe and the UK were due to unusual wind currents drawing cold air from the Arctic to the south, while warming the Arctic.

The hot summers don't prove a whole lot either, except that if the 8 of the last 10 summers were hotter than average and spring has been coming earlier every year, you might start to suspect something is up.>> ^marinara:

if hot summers prove GW, then what do record cold winters prove?

>> ^MaxWilder:

Um, let's bring the conversation back down to the level it started at.
This is dumb because anybody who has ever examined an air conditioner will notice that cold air comes out of one side, and hot air comes out of the other.
You don't need to know anything further about the laws of thermodynamics to know why she's an idiot.


And if you don't there's no helping you.

Um, let's bring the conversation back down to the level it started at.

This is dumb because anybody who has ever examined an air conditioner will notice that cold air comes out of one side, and hot air comes out of the other.

You don't need to know anything further about the laws of thermodynamics to know why she's an idiot.

>> ^notarobot:
>> ^obscenesimian
Atomic weight (200.59) should be sufficient to tell you that the density of mercury vapor is much greater than that of nitrogen and oxygen, the largest components of air. If the vapors in the video http://www.videograter.com/video/Mercury-vapor-from-dental-fillings were mercury, the vapors should be falling not rising.
Do you need more details?

^Obscenesimian, You're absolutely right.
The air at surface of the Earth is always the coldest, because warm air rises and cold air falls, so no warmth would ever stay close to ground where people live. These currents of air are NEVER able to push or /a>



Heh,

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/savageplanet/01volcano/01/indexmid.html

And furthermore you tard...... ahh whats the point of this argument!!? We should all be more worried about the asshats we encounter while hurtling at high speed in our mercury vapor spewing carbon monoxide emitting death traps.

>> ^obscenesimian
Atomic weight (200.59) should be sufficient to tell you that the density of mercury vapor is much greater than that of nitrogen and oxygen, the largest components of air. If the vapors in the video http://www.videograter.com/video/Mercury-vapor-from-dental-fillings were mercury, the vapors should be falling not rising.
Do you need more details?


^Obscenesimian, You're absolutely right.

The air at surface of the Earth is always the coldest, because warm air rises and cold air falls, so no warmth would ever stay close to ground where people live. These currents of air are NEVER able to push or pull ANYTHING along with them, not newspapers, kites, hang-gliders, and ESPECIALLY not other diffused particulate matter, such as vapors or fumes. Wind is just your imagination playing tricks on you half the time, and the other half it is Angels playing tricks on you. Toxic vapors and fumes are never a problem for us humans because the molecules that make up paint, gasoline and ESPECIALLY mercury are ALL heavier then nitrogen, oxygen and all the rest the components of the atmosphere which are always arranged in layers from heaviest to lightest particles and never mix. This is why smoke and ash always fall away from combustion sources and never rises. It is simply not plausible why these different particles would ever WANT to mix, and so they NEVER do. DIFFUSION is a myth created by Adolf Fick in 1855 to confuse good Christians into believing his friend, Charles Darwin's hoax of evolution, published four years later.

Do you need more details?

** Spoiler warning **


** Spoiler warning **


Smoke is made from a lot of tiny particles, which are more dense than air but are dragged upwards by the heated air currents. (Warm air being less dense than cold air and so rising above it.)

The paper tube shelters some of the smoke from these air currents, allowing the air which it is suspended in to cool.

In the clip above you can see that some of the smoke is still rising from the lit end of the paper, but the plastic wrapper acts as a visual frame encouraging us to only focus on the smoke which has cooled sufficiently to travel down the tube.


Educational and an excuse to play with fire.
One for the science channel maybe?

As a sweeping generalization coming from my own upbringing and experiences, I think Chinese people (and their government) tend to value aesthetics greatly, and thus a decision like this is upsetting but not very surprising. At the same time, though, this sort of mindset isn't at all an Evil China exclusive; look at magazine photos (where in some magazines, they're more painting than photo now anyway), musician/performer successes, diet trends, fashion trends, the meat of the advertising world ("You're not good enough. Buy this and maybe you'll be less horrible.") etc. And I definitely can't endorse high-and-mighty comments about how evil China is; they're just as evil as everywhere else, but they're not as good at covering it up. You say the Chinese media is state-run like that's uncommon. Did CNN lose its "Joke" status? China's just more transparent about it.

Returning to the topic, I read an article on this earlier in the week (which carried a little more substance to it) and apparently the story is that the girl you SAW was selected early to perform (she IS a singer, and a nice one), but during the last rehearsal a powerful politician decided her voice had to go. Thus the music director scrambled to find another good voice, which he did, but then the owner of that lovely voice was deemed not cute enough to represent China. Both kids and their families say they are okay with it (of course, they might have been instructed to say that), the singer that she's just happy her voice was used to represent China. I think that's a classy way to come off it, and whoever's handling PR for China seems to have done the best they could after the fact (ie not denial). I still don't agree with the decision, as I think both kids were adorable, and I feel confident that if the visible girl made it through auditioning and rehearsals, she was indeed a great singer anyway. It's unfortunate that this one dude with all the power decided otherwise, but hey, that's art.

And finally, to whoever posted that quip about slave labour being related, that's gotta top my personal list of dumbest correlations ever. And further, a country that is known to use slave labour might be a sad thing, but is it much better to be in one of the many countries that quietly but enthusiastically continue to fund said labour?

My overall point is this isn't a good deed by any means, but I suspect that the world is chomping at the bit to cry foul at China, given the one-sided press it gets. And as another poster commented, on the grand scale, who really cares about lip-synching? (Pavarotti lip-synched in the 07 Winters, I think... due to age and cold air?)

PS: Milli Vanilli was AWESOME. Blame it on the Rain was such an awesome song I'm not even upset about the whole lip-synching faking debacle.