Stubborn Idealism
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Amiga
Date: Sun 11 September 2005
Time: 9:47 PM EDT
I was feeling very bored today, having pretty much finished GTA: Vice City, so I downloaded an Amiga emulator and some game disk images. The emulator (UAE) isn't perfect, so a lot of games don't play very well, if at all. But I managed to get Obliterator, The Killing Game Show, and, one of my old favorites, The Faery Tale Adventure working pretty much flawlessly (though the music tends to play a little slowly). I've been playing The Faery Tale Adventure for the last couple of hours.
Even without the games, though, just booting up the virtual Amiga to Workbench 1.3 takes me right back to my childhood.
Down
Date: Sun 4 September 2005
Time: 11:00 PM EDT
Been feeling very down today. If past experience is any guide, this will last for a couple of weeks to a month.
Power From Earth's Rotation
Date: Sat 3 September 2005
Time: 10:27 PM EDT
Lately, I'd been pondering the idea of generating power by tapping the kinetic energy of Earth's rotation using a big gyroscope. The idea is that the gyroscope would act as an object with a fixed orientation in space around which a generator would turn as Earth rotates.
For several weeks, I entertained the notion, but I hadn't sat down to tackle the math involved in analysing it for feasibility. So I had these wonderful fantasies about one day powering my home with a "perpetual motion machine" in my basement.
Today, though, I took a pencil and sheet of paper, drew some diagrams and worked some algebra, and programmed the results into a PHP page. The page takes the desired power output (2000 W would suffice for most homes), the hoop (gyroscope) radius in meters, and the hoop mass in kilograms, and it computes how fast the hoop needs to spin in order to let a generator produce that much power (since the maximum power output is directly proportional to the angular momentum of the hoop).
So I entered some values to get a feel for whether this is practical. I'd like it to fit in a room, so I entered a radius of 1.5 meters. It shouldn't be extremely massive...probably don't want anything heavier than 1000 Kg. Typed them in, along with the 2000 W desired power output, clicked the submit button, and...
200,000,000 revolutions per second?!? No wonder nobody has ever pursued this idea!
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