Tesla secures a supply of graphite battery anode material from Syrah Ltd., An Australian company which is building a plant in Vidalia, Louisiana.
2021-12-22 Crushed Rocks Absorb Enough CO2?
Should we try to do geoengineering?
https://biznewspost.com/health/could-crushed-rocks-absorb-enough-carbon-to-curb-global-warming/
2021-12-21 RS-232 Sharing Box, RS-485, Poll-Select, Etc.
I had hundreds of CRT terminals around campus, connected to 16 RS-232 ports on the mainframe computer, back in the ’80s and ’90s. The protocol was Burroughs poll-select. Each of a dozen or so terminals was given its own address by dip switch. They were all running at 9600 bps over telephone lines driven by line driver boxes, which cost hundreds each. So once a line driver box was installed in a department, we tried to share one with multiple terminals.
So I found that Black Box, Inc had a RS-232 sharing box. I could buy a 6 port one for a few hundred and replace several line driver boxes. They worked great. I could make up RS-232 cables and run them to the black box and line driver box.
But some locations didn’t have but 2 or 3 terminals. So I opened up the black box and saw how simple they were. Just some signal diodes on the transmit data (pin 2) and request to send (pin 4) of the DB-25 connectors and the remaining pins passed through. Each diode had a 15k resistor across it, to allow a small amount of current to pull the two pins negative.
So I built up some of my own for a lot less than $150 or so for the black boxes.
This one omitted the 15k resistors, and it worked okay. Just took some connectors, a pin crimper and wire. And some 1N4148 signal diodes. The left connector goes to the modem or LD box (DCE), the other connectors to the terminals (DTE).
This also allows more than one PC to share a modem or print to a serial printer. The old way was to buy a serial switch box allowing the PCs to share. As long as the users can communicate to see if the shared device is in use then this box eliminates having to manually switch the shared device.
Dan Kolis
Said, “This improvising is a deal with the devil.”
When the FNP (front end Network processor) for a mainframe costs an additional 10 grand for every rs232 port, it behooves one to take as much advantage of each individual port as possible, putting as many terminals as possible on each port. At a one to one ratio of port to terminal, 200 terminals would cost $2 million dollars!! It saved us nearly 2 million by using only 16 ports!
Second, RS-232 with four-wire, full duplex and line driver boxes is better than RS-485 because it’s not requiring any adapters or those special 37 pin connectors for RS-422. I have seldom seen any equipment with those.
I have never had any problems with errors, dropped characters or “computer sleeping sickness.” The system used standard ASCII with 7 bits, even parity for error checking. The line driver boxes were good for more than 2000 feet. The modems were 202 compatible.
Dan Kolis
Said, “I hate RS-232 a little, really.”
Well, that was all we had, or needed at the time. We had to live with it.
For multiple remote sites, we had them connected with four-wire, full duplex telephone lines from Pacific Bell, better known as Pacific Hell. The mainframe modem’s transmit signal went to the the CO (central office), and fanned out in a star configuration to all the other’s sites around town. This was the most affordable way of connecting several high schools or education centers. There were “HI-CAP” T1 circuits from point to point, but they cost thousands per month. And by the way, all this RS-232 stuff was due to Ma Bell and their 202 ‘datasets’ AKA modems that were ridiculously expensive to lease. So we (AKA just about everyone) had to ‘go with the flow’ and use what Ma Bell required.
Our EMS (energy management system) that connected bldgs on campus with the telephone cabling used RS-485 over a single pair, at 9600 bps. But the problem was that RS-485 is a BUS topology, but the telephone cabling is a STAR topology. So a single controller port would go from the controller, out to one bldg, then back to the controller and out to another bldg, etc. Zig-zagging back and forth. So the hundreds of feet between bldgs added up to thousands of feet – more than 2000. So if I put the 100 ohm terminating resistor on the far end, the furthest bldgs wouldn’t receive enough signal. So the solution was to leave the terminating resistor disconnected. 😱😧
2021-12-21 Wind Turbine Blades Recycled
This article gives a fair assessment of recycling wind turbine blades. They are being recycled but there is not enough incentive; some countries are mandating that they must be recycled.
https://news.yahoo.com/fact-check-wind-turbine-blades-235853274.html
2021-12-20 Key Largo Under Water – NYT
Some climate change denier said he lived in the Florida Keys and he didn’t see any sea level rise. Here is proof that sea level rise is already causing flooding. And it’s dated more than 2 years ago.
2021-12-20 R.F.K. Jr. Antivax Propaganda Organization
This story verifies what I said about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. He is an antivax advocate because he makes a lot of money peddling false narratives to victims, especially to the minorities.
2021-12-19 Rolls Royce Small Modular Reactors
My comments to Dave Borlace’s JHAT
Plus a chart of levelized costs of energy for both conventional and renewable energy.
<< Thanks, Dave, for the informative video.
Nuclear reactors are safe *per TWh* while in operation. The real issues are at the beginning and the end.
The beginnings, as you stated, are the huge cost overruns and construction delays that have plagued the new NPPs. You said the SMRs would cost about $2 billion, but that’s for 450 MW, so for a 3 reactor NPP, equal to a 1400 MW full size NPP, it would cost about $6 billion. The costs of decommissioning NPPs is $2 billion or so. Then there are the costs of transmission lines at about $4 million per mile, so for 500 miles that’s another $2 billion (see reasons below). So we add that up and it comes to $10 billion. But because the NPP is required to have an exclusion zone around it, and it has to be far away from populated areas (which requires long transmission lines and cheap land) so the hundreds of millions for land must be included. (Cont’d below.) >>
<< Part 2 Cont’d
There is one huge issue regarding thermal power plants: they use a huge amount of water. I’ve read that about 40% of total water draw is used by thermal power plants. This obviously is not environmentally friendly. >>
<< Part 3
The video showed a bar chart showing how safe the nuclear power plants are *per TWh*. But that’s the way the shills for nuclear power industry keep people from knowing the big secret.
In The Myths of August by S. Udall, he tells us of the suffering and deaths that uranium miners went through, from lung cancer caused by radon. And this still doesn’t count the deaths that were caused by radiation in the processing plants. If all these were added up they would cause that 0.07% bar to be considerably bigger. >>
One issue that was not discussed is the sources and costs of nuclear fuel. This seems to be very secret information. The sources of nuclear fuel are controlled by the government. The costs are subsidized by the taxpayers.
In the following article, the author states that multiple layers of security costs over $50 million per reactor per year. Over the 50 year lifetime of a reactor, that is more than $2.5 billion.
A quote from this article…
<< The other major reason gets back to renewables as well. 15 years ago it was an arguable position to hold that renewables were too expensive, would cause grid reliability issues and that nuclear in large amounts was necessary. That’s been disproven by both 15 years of failures of nuclear deployments, but more importantly plummeting costs and proven grid reliability with renewable generation. Now almost every serious analyst agrees that renewables can economically deliver 80% of required grid energy, but there is still debate from credible analysts about the remaining 20%. >>
2021-12-18 20 Drawbacks of EVs – Some Are False!
There are several ‘drawbacks’ that are false or only partly true. I especially disagree with #16.
https://motor-junkie.com/20-drawback-of-electric-vehicles-drivers-commonly-overlook/31416/13/
2021-12-18 Gold Is The Barbaric Standard
Gold is the barbaric standard by which all other currencies are related.
<< Dima Bloom
You failed to understand. An ounce of gold is the standard by which all other currencies are related. That’s the reason you said, “if it takes 1700 to buy an ounce of gold, then that is what it is worth atm.”
That’s why it’s “worth at the moment.” As inflation eats away at the dollar, it could take 2000 dollars to buy an ounce of gold.
But you fail to get it through your thick skull: an ounce of gold will *always* be an ounce of gold, no matter where or when – it is always the barbaric standard. >>
You go to Europe and a European will tell you that it takes 1500 Euros to buy an ounce of gold. He doesn’t even care about dollars US. The Euro is related to gold, not to dollars! Gold is what they care about.
