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How many pogo hops from London to New York?
The "ask a silly question, get a sensible answer" thread
- Thread starter Curio
- Start date
Venom either kills or it doesn't. There's no evolutionary necessity for it to be 'just right'.
It used to be the norm everywhere, predating vehicles.
Imagine you're someone some way into the past, travelling from one town to another. There's some degree of risk involved and you can't be sure of peaceful intentions from everyone you meet on the road. A murder in the wilds between settlements may well be unsolved, quite possibly even unnoticed, and there's hardly any chance of anything like the police being around to protect you from being robbed and/or murdered. So you're armed with a hand to hand weapon to protect yourself. Sword, club, dagger...something you can carry conveniently enough, a one-handed weapon.
Most people are right-handed and would carry a one-handed weapon either in their right hand or held in some way on their left side where they can quickly draw it with their right hand.
Now imagine you're attacked by someone who got within attacking distance without putting you on guard by simply travelling on the road in the opposite direction.
If that someone is to your right, you can draw your weapon and use it immediately as a continuation of the act of drawing it, either to parry their attack or to stab/slash/club them.
If that someone is to your left, you have to draw your weapon and then turn to bring it to bear against their attack. That extra time might well cost you your life.
So you travel on the left side of the road in order to ensure that anyone approaching you will be on your right.
That is being done on an experimental level.
The reason why it isn't being done more often and on a larger scale is a combination of the following:
There are various methods of doing it. None of them are very well tested and people are reluctant to spend the resources on what might well turn out to be a less efficient method.
Direct solar desalination is pretty limited in the amount of drinkable water it can supply and that seems to be inherent in the process. It's great if you need to rig something up to produce a few litres for your own survival, but not so great if you need millions of litres to supply a city.
The methods that aren't of very marginal use are expensive. Really expensive. More expensive than running a desalination plant on electricity generated by burning fossil fuels.
Salt water is quite corrosive, so it's not a good idea to have boiling salt water in your expensive, fairly delicate experimental solar power/desalination station.
With current technology, it's less impractical to have a solar power station providing some of the electricity to power a seperate desalination plant.
The "mirrors focused on a tank of liquid" idea is being used to generate electricity, though. A liquid that can be heated to a much higher temperature is used in the tank. Water is boiled by heat transfer from the tank and drives a turbine in the same way as a conventional power station (it's efficient, so no need to change that part). The problem is getting enough area focused on the tank - you need the tank to be elevated so that rows of mirrors can be focused on it without blocking each other, and that means a tower that can take a very large weight at the top...and that's expensive.
As a side benefit, you can make a rather pretty power station that way. The photo at the bottom of this page is not 'shopped. That glow and those beams are genuine:
http://www.abengoasolar.com/web/en/...S10_la_primera_torre_comercial_del_mundo.html
But look also at the photos at the top and the numbers. 148 acres used to generate 11MW, and that's the best there is and it's in a very sunny area.
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Depends completely on the frame of reference. If the frame of reference is the chair then the universe is turning. If it's the larger then than the chair then it's you
