Bruce

Storchy, nobody is saying that expenditure like expensive cars etc for the kids is off-limits. But a billionaire has a thousand MILLION dollars. Thats not just being rich, its way beyond that. It's giving quite a lot of the countries resources to a single individual. I had a mate who was Australia's main rocket scientist. He took a year off and actually wore a tie to try and get finance for Australia to launch its own small satellites. He said that this could be done for about 50 million ( 5 percent of a billion dollars), use off the shelf components and make money in 2 years or so. So Bob visited all our billionaires and got nothing. The richest of them spent more each year on his polo horses.

Octave, my r/c electric "free flight" models use the motor to climb and then you shut it down to glide. ( My favourite models are the Dixielander and the Playboy, converted to r/c and electric ) The motor can windmill when you shut it down at the top of the climb and then it makes more drag than a stopped prop. Yes there would be energy available for regeneration from the windmilling prop, but not that much unless you did a shallow dive to keep the airspeed up. I don't think any r/c system does regeneration. Regarding the electric trainer, I reckon its great. Students will be able to experience the "power-out" situation better. I reckon that a hitherto unknown sound of silence can and has caused pilots to panic and crash.

It just occurred to me that the flaps could be used on downhill grades too...

Nev is right on regen. My new electric bike doesn't have it and it would hardly help. It would only cut in during braking, if the motor could be made to work as a generator then. With suitable electronics, energy sure could be fed back to the battery but it would be very little because the time spent braking is very little. With the Jabiru, the descents are usually shallow and take place at reduced but positive power. Maybe just at the very last moment, the prop thrust becomes negative and some negligible power would be available for regeneration. There was once a proposal to extract energy from road traffic by having hinged flaps with hydraulic rams. The cars pushed the flaps down and made hydraulic power as they drove along. I think the proposer thought that this would give free energy. He wrote to the paper with this idea. Mind you, if these flaps were deployed where a red light was stopping traffic anyway, the drivers would save on brakes and everybody would be happy I guess... Maybe not those who paid for the system because I bet the energy would be very expensive.

Most native deaths were the result of germs brought in by the colonists. There is a great book " Guns Germs and Steel" explaining how it happened. An example being how when whites arrived at the mississipi, instead of meeting a chiefdom which could have fielded an army of thousands , they found some shattered survivors of a smallpox epidemic. A similar thing on a much smaller scale happened in Australia. Nobody knows what the aboriginal population would have been without the germs.

Once somebody at the club bar opined " love is grand" to which I replied " divorce is 50 grand". This recently divorced third guy started crying in his beer... "and the bloody rest" he said.

Thats interesting wille, I read that Russia's military spending was less than Australia's and found it hard to believe. But at 36 billion for Australia, that may well be the case on your figures.

Phil, what is the significance of that sum? Is it what Britain pays the EU each year?

At the Adelaide wine show, many years ago, they tested the identical wine from cork and screw bottles. The first few years gave identical scores, after which the screw tops performed better.

This is a new idea I just read about. The argument is that billionaires are irredemiably corrupted by their obscene wealth and no good for anybody comes from failing to tax then down to a more reasonable level of great wealth. I like the argument. How can you have democracy with billionaires around? But how much wealth should be the limit?

Irrigation can be done smart or stupid. Smart means controlling the saline water table somehow. I think that in Australia we have the ability to do it smart, as long as the political will is there. Those ancient Babylonians didn't have the knowledge to do it smart.

Jerry, in those days, operations were done by barbers. Their red and white striped poles represent bandaged and bleeding limbs. It was not until after 1900 or so that it became a good idea to go near a doctor if you were sick. They could bleed you or kill you in many other ways. George Washington was a victim of this. Charles Darwin, as a 16 year-old apprentice doctor, "treated" poor people for awhile in Shropshire. But that was then, and I thank my lucky stars that I live here and now. If anything they are too good at keeping people alive too long, but how can you complain about a profession being too good?

Adelaide was the first city in the world to have a modern sewerage system, where the poo is separated from the stormwater. Sewage engineers are more important than the medical profession in saving lives . Just thought you guys should know some facts.

Why is it that governments everywhere pay too much for most things? Is there any jurisdiction inn the world where taxpayers money is treated with respect? Even our local council pays fat cats too much and you would think the ratepayers would object, but they seem numb and just accept paying over $360,000 to the chief fat cat. And the council is small potatoes compared to the military.

Why is there nobody on this forum who will stick up for religion? I want to make fun of them.

For most of my life, the US outspent the rest of the world put together on its military. Strange huh that it is only in recent years that this has become generally known. It would have been in the interests of the pentagon etc for people to think that Russia, for example, was spending nearly as much. Well it worked for me, I would have said Russia was as big, when they were in fact much smaller.

You would use the gates to spread out the peak as much as you could. This would mean not opening them fully all at the same time.

I wish we stopped supporting their stupid wars and instead gave NASA the money.

Space, the liquid nitrogen at the doctor's surgery is stored VENTED and BOILING. The rate of boiling depends on the insulation of the container and the ambient temperature of the flask's surroundings. Sorry octave but I wrote this before looking at your links which I am sure will agree. On the compressed air storage, I reckon the lifted weight system looks better but they are all expensive. My guess is that sodium-based batteries might win out. At least the pollies are beginning to understand that storage really matters.

nomad, I always thought that compressed air was too inefficient because when you compress air, you heat it. And then it cools in storage and a lot of energy is lost. Compressing a really big volume to a low pressure minimizes the losses, but you need special caves and stuff to do this. I'd really like to be wrong, and that 80% figure is impressive... how did that happen?

Once in Melbourne I went to buy a paper with enough money to buy an Adelaide Advertiser. Alas it wasn't enough for a Melbourne paper, and when I complained, the girl said " well nothing much happens in Adelaide so of course its cheaper"

Wow that Seattle letter was wise. And more scientifically correct than you might think. Thanks for posting it.

Old K, you might like the Gaia theory which says the earth acts a bit like an organism itself. Thus global warming is like a fever which will cause the parasites causing problems to die off.

Nev, there is a serious argument that JC was not a real person. When I was a kid, they thought that the dead sea scrolls would undermine religion. Why? Because the Jesus parables predated the Jesus character by 400 years. And because there are no cross-references to validate Jesus. No tax records or court records. AND there was a local Jerusalem guy who kept a diary through those times who never mentions Jesus.

Yep the pumping cost would be a bugger huh. But what a good use for excess natural energy on windy days I reckon. Or a big nuclear power station There is a costed plan for 9 billion dollars which seems a lot but when you compare it with 8 billion for water buy-backs or 36 billion for our military every year, it is actually cheap and would earn money by selling water which is presently running out to sea. In South Australia, we are used to pumped Murray water, at exorbitant cost I admit.