Ooh, I like that one. Electron Ponzi.
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Iâll gladly pay you, Friday, for some energy today!
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Fortunately the answer to this has been known since the days of Carnot. For any heat engine the maximum thermal efficiency is simply 1 - Tc/Th, where Tc is the temperature of the waste heat and Th is the temperature of the heat source.
Thatâs it. If, say, the waste heat is from bath water at around 308K, and the ambient is around 293K, the most efficiency you could ever get out of such a system is just under 5% - which would never overcome the friction, energy losses, or distribution losses of any practical system. Thatâs why we donât recover energy from waste hot water or warm air.
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This is actually more probable than that the Orbo device really works.
If it did work, by now they would surely have a demonstrator continuously illuminating a lamp or turning a motor that they would be handing out to investors, and once the word got round they would be struggling to keep up with demand. Itâs easy to calculate what the capacity would be of the largest lithium battery they could get in the box, and how long for the light to last; a convincing, simple demonstration.
[edit - itâs just occurred to me - perhaps they are using a pile of zinc-air cells? Big zinc air cells are around 60AH; three of those and it could be a month or more before the mark notices anything. Then a repair under warranty. After another repair under warranty the thing probably goes in a cupboard. Refund to anybody who demands one. Still end up with lots of profit.]
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That sounds really plausible, simple, efficient and doable. Good evil thinking! 
As I see there are probably enough people with not enough basic physic knowledge around, so probably they will pull it of. And make friends in the long run.
I can not believe there is not one person in that company who is secretly laughing there ass off because he/she have payed attention in class. (or later on)
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Imagine how much personal energy use could be imagined by a person from 100 years ago, and how wrong they could be.
Personally I imagine us having to move our planet into interstellar space, terraforming Venus, Mars, Titan and Callisto as farming planets, then spinning them up into a Klemperer_rosette and firing the lot on a trajectory towards the magellanic clouds.
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Kemplerer Klemperer Rosettes arenât stable. Any introduced oscillation compounds itself in a feedback loop. Youâd have to constantly be stationkeeping.
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Good thing youâve got an infinite amount of energy available for the purpose.
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It doesnât of itself. We obtain power on Earth by using the âfreeâ energy of the Sun. However, as I post above, Carnotâs equation implies that a high temperature differential between source and sink is needed to get useful conversion efficiency.
As an example, there are small fans which use Peltier effect devices to generate power from a hot stove. These have a use where there is no electricity available, because a stove provides relatively high temperatures. But they would not work effectively using a hot water convector from a C/H system bec ause the temperature differential between the convector (around 55C) and the room is too small.
I do not rate for Heinlein books which refer to unknown parts of New Zealand called âNorth Islandâ and âSouth Islandâ.
RAH was pretty clear that NZ had split into two countries, just as the US and Canada had both devolved into groups of smaller countries. Christchurch is an okay city but I think he praised it because he was about to get stuck into a small group of its inhabitants.
I think Friday was his last great book. Its genuine cyberpunk, and should be recognized as such.
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Well, if it is true Iâve wasted an awful lot of time learning physics and teaching it to other people, as have all those much more important scientists at CERN, ITER, LL and the rest of them. So I am afraid I continue to be quite sure it is not true.
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Dude says here it depends on the specific masses and arrangement.
Hereâs another Klemperer rosette, of 24 earths this time. 12 to 24 seems to be very stable.
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Does âvery stableâ include moving through lightyears worth of interstellar dust, with regular perturbations from the hundreds of thousands of constantly landing and taking-off space craft, as well as perturbations by, say, an asteroid belt and a couple of Jovian planets in the system.
I mean, by itself, in a completely empty universe, the Klemperer Rosettes are fairly stable, but when you add in the rest of the universe, they seem completely unfeasible unless you have colossal stationkeeping engines on your planets.
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Kinda boring, isnât it? 20 orbits per second. (If you notice the worlds all wobbling, perhaps thatâs because I included a Jupiter in this simulation just to check how stable things really are.)
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Inferior cover is inferior.
For the uninitiated, in the world of Friday, there is an energy monopoly thanks to âShipstone batteriesâ which last forever and are only understood by the manufacturer.
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That is one seriously ugly cover.
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Have any of you people complaining about the credulity of the article read the skeptical article above? Or the authorâs skeptical blog (linked in the article)?
Reading comprehension: itâs not whatâs for lunch.
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Itâs pulp fiction. In pulp fiction future women all have unfeasible brassieres and men have quasi-military uniforms. Because the idea that this might ever change was just too bizarre even for the most speculative science fiction.
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