Hello. I was going to help test out the new ability for a submitter to mark their own video *dupeof= however I ran into a new "feature" while testing.

In my dupe video you asked me to try again, but now that the video is killed all the comments have vanished. See here http://videosift.com/video/Kinetic-toothpick-sculpture-of-San-Francisco-took-35-years?noredirect

There is a talk thread about comments vanishing on killed videos http://videosift.com/talk/No-longer-able-to-view-comments-on-killed-videos-2


Secondly I tried to run the *isdupe on another of my videos and got the error from siftbot that I am not privileged. See here http://videosift.com/video/Beyonces-Single-Ladies-Dance-by-7-year-olds

Thank you for trying to get these changes in place. It may not seem like much but at least for me as a regular user I would feel a little less powerless

I can confirm this is broken

There was a discussion going on a dupe video, where I was going to help troubleshoot if the changes to allow a submitter mark a video as a duplicate and now I cant see the comments!
http://videosift.com/video/Kinetic-toothpick-sculpture-of-San-Francisco-took-35-years?noredirect

15 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

The wikipedia article on magnets is a good place to start. Magnets can lose their magnetism, but that's not the same as saying they have energy in them that's being used up like a battery.

If you stand next to a large lump of clay and then step onto the clay you've gained some potential energy. The taller the lump of clay the more potential energy you've gained. However, this energy hasn't come from the clay, you've had to use energy to gain it. It took you more energy to step onto the clay than you gained in potential energy so this couldn't be the basis for a perpetual motor.

Next to the lump of clay is a large bellows attached to a balloon. You step off the clay onto the bellows. You drop down to ground level and pump up the balloon a bit. You can repeat this process over and over until the balloon is pumped up. However, each time you step onto the clay it sags a bit and you're not so high up. After a while if you do this for long enough the clay will be well trodden down and each time you step off the clay onto the bellows it will have hardly any effect. The clay has lost it's ability to help you pump up the balloon. It's lost it's height. But at no point did it give you any energy to pump up the balloon. You used your own energy to step up onto the clay to give yourself the potential energy, which you then converted to kinetic energy by stepping onto the bellows and pumping up the balloon.

This is exactly the same as a magnet losing it's magnetism. It's not like a battery losing power by powering something else. There's no energy in a magnet. It never gives energy to anything else. Like a drive shaft doesn't power a car, it just helps move the energy from the engine to the wheels.

Magnets fool everyone by working at a distance. Everything else we deal with in a physical way has to touch something else to affect it. You can't get a nail into wood without physically hitting it with a hammer. Magnets confuse us and that makes it easy for scammers with their perpetual motion devices to make us believe things that aren't true. We don't have the right wiring to easily figure out what's going on intuitively.

Magnets simply don't work how you think they do, or how the maker of this video wants you to believe they do.

One day he's going to do this to the wrong kind of squirrel, and while he's standing there cackling and congratulating himself on another of man's triumphs over nature, the squirrel is going to unfurl her little arm flaps, perform a graceful 180 degree bank and enter a steep high-speed dive, razor-sharp incisors leading, and screaming death from above as she homes in on her new found nutty prey.

Kinetic energy is their ally. Never forget.

yes i'm not saying the roads are consistent, only more consistent than the shoulders.
Roads are generally no less than the width of 2 cars. Some consistency cuts manufacturing costs which will eventually be a factor in EOREI (energy returned on energy invested). Can it work....uhhh dunno. Many roads are created sectionally as it is. which is good. but yeah i have to worry about chains, rocks, studded tires....
Legally you wouldn't have any "takings" issues.

But IMHO, most technical solutions are further away than the more immediate solution - education, family planning, and worldwide contraception programs. the real problem is that there are too many people on the planet. We are consuming more of the ecosystem than we replenish. we need to USE less, but that necessarily means less people...which = more resources available per person, and less emissions.
Meanwhile keep working on the tech side to create efficiency.
Conceptually however, it is interesting to look at roads in energetic terms. They do produce all sorts of heat (and friction) and kinetic energy.

I had more or less this idea like this 15 to 20 years ago, though I didn't add the solar panel aspect until about 10 years ago, and kinetic energy soon after the solar aspect. I wanted to make roads out of a strong plastic with lights for the edge lines. There would be quick swap panels to make it quick and easy to fix broken sections.

The issues I figured would be making them strong enough and cheap enough. Never carried the idea past my head. My main goal initially was to make edge lines easier to see at night in the rain, the idea went from lite up edges to why not make the whole road out of a plastic, and add groves to help water fall to sides better than conventional roadways. Then I eventually thought, why not make all that surface useful and make them capture solar as well, and eventually decided that since each panel is suspended on the base anyhow, why not capture the kinetic energy of the traffic pushing down on it and springing back up (was never sure if the limited motion that you could safely allow on a freeway would be enough to harness or not). I figured it would be too expensive and eventually decided the better solution would be to bury roads and make them all tunnels then turn the overhead areas (where the freeways are now) into green ways with solar roof collection areas as well, or just put roofs over the freeways and skip the green way effect... regular roads would still be the panel type... nice to see I was onto an idea anyhow.

>> ^chingalera:

>> ^SevenFingers:
If that truck was going a bit slower the driver probably wouldn't have walked away!

Can't really say who's gonna live or die when that much kinetic energy manifests..That guy is one lucky, non-water-truck-driving-job-havin' MOFO!!


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_truck

http://www.badgerinc.com/

>> ^SevenFingers:

If that truck was going a bit slower the driver probably wouldn't have walked away!


Can't really say who's gonna live or die when that much kinetic energy manifests..That guy is one lucky, non-water-truck-driving-job-havin' MOFO!!

>> ^Barbar:

Applying the oversimplified version of laws that you learned in early physics classes to reality can often leave you in stunned silence when reality seems to defy them. Things like the dimples on golf balls or sailing ships moving upwind are classic examples of things that you wouldn't expect to even be conceivable unless you saw it in action.


Conceivable or not, none of the things you mentioned break the first law of thermodynamics.

One situation where the system could work would be if the car was driving into a strong headwind. This would give an energy input into the system. It could be perhaps developed to extend the blades if there is a strong enough headwind, and retract them if there isn't, but if there is no breeze, there will be a net loss from using the blades.

If the car is driving through stationary air then the air it's passing through will have no kinetic energy. After passing over the blades the air will be moving, it will have gained kinetic energy. That energy will have been taken from the car. It's as simple as that. No complicated equations needed. You'd need the complicated equations if you wanted to calculate exactly how much energy is lost, but you don't need them to see that energy would be lost.

If wind is factored into it then the air already has kinetic energy, which would be extracted by the fan, but the wind would be and external source of energy (in the same way that a wind turbine isn't in any way a perpetual motion device, it's obvious where the energy is coming from).

I imagine it's a result of various forces and circumstances (I don't think it's a coincidence that the droplets were soapy water which would increase it's surface tension/bubble strength).

Also keep in mind that a droplets surface would be a mesh of the outermost water molecules held together by their polar attraction. As the sphere bounces and moves its surface would have mini waves and ripples along it that would push against and then move away from the molecules on the water surface below it as the kinetic and polar forces acted.

If you imagine that every sphere of water had portions of its surface moving away from the water surface below and then oscillating back towards the surface while the molecules on the spheres surface that had been touching the water surface below would begin to oscillate back into the sphere.

This would create many points of contact oscillating against and away from the water surface below and thus there might not be enough contact/pressure between the 2 surfaces for it to coalesce at any given time. Imagine bugs whose feet are tiny enough for them to "stand" on water due to surface tension and the principle would be the same. It'd be like an infinite number of these bugs legs jumping up and down on the water at a microscopic level.

Also I'm not familiar enough with how water molecules align themselves while at the surface of something so perhaps the alignment of their atoms helps as well?

Thats all a guess though I'm sure you could google the real answer.

>> ^jqpublick:

I think it's more likely that this system extends the drive time of whatever battery cells he has installed in the thing. It's not that he's getting free energy, it's just that at 40 the system is going fast enough that even though there's a net loss, the additional energy stored in the batteries gives a longer running time. I think that's just about all that there is here.
>> ^rkone:
>> ^Drachen_Jager:
That is the dumbest thing I've ever seen.

Agreed. I'd downvote the video if I could. People, if you're in doubt, think of it this way - if the fan could generate more power than the loss of pushing it, then you could just keep adding more fans until it becomes a perpetual motion machine..



Problem, nothing happens at 40 miles an hour in physics for a decrease wind resistance and drag. If anything, the faster you go, the more of a problem wind becomes. There is no possible way that this is extending his drive time. This is exactly equal to holding your hand out the window. If you could turn that blockage into electricity, it will always be less energy than the amount of momentum it sapped via drag. Or else ALL CARS WOULD ALREADY DO THIS! The reason you don't is because it doesn't work.

A simple instance where something like this IS used is the emergency ram air turbine for jumbo jets. When there is a complete loss of power, a ram air turbine drops down to generate emergency power for the hydraulic systems. This increases drag, but it is so small that it isn't a problem. But it is also why air planes don't have windmills on them, anything you use to block the wind is slowing you down more than any recoverable amount of energy via electric conservation of kinetic energy. This is physics 101, entropy, it's a bitch!

Now, if he compressed the incoming air, added a combustion chamber with kerosene or gasoline, then he would have himself a turbine engine for his car, but now, he just has a lesson in why physics is hard.

*promote

The potential and that wasted of kinetic/elastic energy here..the sheer mechanical energy stored in this hound's configuration and the lost work performed through distortion of shape and form excites and confounds?!! How does this not engage anyone watching it?!...Oh I know... It's because they want to learn something "new" or otherwise be distracted by, "punditos'!"

Damn dudes!? Take some time off to watch ants or some shit, really!??

Thanks for the promote
In reply to this comment by Boise_Lib:
*promote