Water Powered Cars Will Never Work

EcoGeek went live more than two years ago with no fanfare and no traffic. We had a readership of about five people. Three days later, I received the first notice of a breakthrough water-powered car that would solve our energy problems. Those emails have not stopped since.

We wrote a while back about why getting power from water is entirely impossible. But we didn't apply it directly to cars...so here we go again.

The advertisements you almost certainly are seeing from google on the sidebar are scams, we've tried to block them, but they just come back with different URLs. This story at Reuters, which claims that hydrogen is "extracted" from water to power a car is a big steaming pile. I don't know how these things slip through the cracks. I guess we'd all love for there to be a simple solution. Solutions exist, but this isn't one of them.

Generally these things are picked up on local news stations who have poor fact checking and (obviously) no knowledge of the laws of physics. But the fact that Reuters did a whole story on one of these bogus machines, and then it traveled undeterred around the blogosphere, is simply inexcusable.

"Water Powered Cars" generally work like this: Energy stored in a battery or generated by an on-board gasoline powered generator, splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. The two are then recombined, either in an internal combustion engine or in a fuel cell. Energy from the fuel cell or the engine then drives the car.

So, simplifying this, they're breaking water into hydrogen and oxygen and then burning hydrogen and oxygen to create water. This is, of course, possible, but you can't get more energy out of the system than you put in. Otherwise, it's simply a perpetual motion machine.

If it worked, it could sit on the driveway and make energy all day every day and power the entire world without you ever needing to put anything in it. In short, if it worked, it would break the laws of physics, and we would never need to burn another piece of coal again. This would be an extraordinarily easy thing to prove. Too bad none of these people who make these wonderful devices are too busy talking to the local news to actually build one.

There are a lot of variations on the water powered car, but they're all bogus. People who say that adding gasoline-generated hydrogen to gasoline increases your gas mileage by 30% are full of it. It doesn't matter if they call it HHO or H20 or Brown's gas. It doesn't matter if they're creating it with a battery or a flywheel. It doesn't matter if they've postulated a sixth dimension from which flows seemingly endless amounts of energy.

Until someone puts a box on their driveway and it generates more power than goes into it...everyone who says you can power a car with water is either a fool or trying to take someone else's money.

Original here

What Will Be Manly In Ten Years?

Written by Ryan Zeinert

Predicting the future is a rough gig. In fact, it’s pretty much impossible. Psychics, Tarot Card readers, Sylvia Browne and your local weatherman have been more or less swindling people into believing that tomorrow can be forecasted beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Even Nostradamus, widely considered to be the greatest prophet in recorded history, was only right two times out of about a billion random guesses; you’d have a better success rate with a Magic 8 Ball. In recent times, John Titor claimed to have been a mystical visitor from the future, but that turned out to be nothing more than a basement-dwelling virgin who wanted to take pictures of his make-believe Time Machine. Hey, I can relate.

Trends, social behavior and marketing, on the other hand, can be predicted with a far greater success rate as world events, catastrophes and when the Cubs plan to inevitably whiz the season down their leg this year (a good guess would be ‘soon’). From the ebb and flow of what’s currently and previously popular, we can somehow chart the picky, superficial and sometimes baffling patterns between what is quintessentially cool and what is not.

Last week, I went on a veritable historical crusade of masculinity, in order to chart the path of what will be considered manly in 2018. I looked into the past 100 years of unabashed, American manhood; every Clint Eastwood movie, every Super Bowl, every beer brewed in Milwaukee, the Industrial Revolution and every illegal fireworks store in the Tri-State area, in a quest to find out where this freight train of non-stop awesome is heading come the next decade.

My findings were stunningly banal. As it turns out, what is considered ‘manly’ hasn’t changed very much at all in the last century. Certain trends, styles and appearances may come and go, but when it comes to men, things seem to stay in vogue for a significantly longer time, presumably because we hate having to buy new crap to impress people.

The main thing that I learned was that to properly look into our future, we must first look into the past. What will be manly in 2018? The same stuff that was manly in 1918. Take a look:

1. People that have stainless steel hooks where there used to be appendages (hand, leg, tooth, ween, etc.); presumably lost while doing something either unspeakably heroic, or whilst monumentally plastered.

2. Moonshine. Preferably the kind that cannot even be looked at without feeling the urge to call your ex-girlfriend. I recently received some moonshine that expelled a puff of thin smoke every time it was opened. If drinking poison isn’t manly, I don’t know what is.

3. Curly, old-timey moustaches. Those things freaking rule, specifically if they’re accompanied by a top hat.

4. Professional boxers or mixed-martial artists nicknamed ‘Gentleman.’

5. Industrial tools and equipment that lack safety features (See #1).

Apart from looking into our past, there are a few modern things that just feel as if they’ve always been manly and cool, and will never go out of style. They are as follows:

6. Explosions. Even if your own home was vaporized, it would be worth it just to view it from a respectable distance. I sometimes sit at work and think to myself, “Man, I hope I accidentally left the gas stove on today.”

7. Leather, but be warned. There is a very fine line between looking like an absolute badass in leather, and looking like a Glory Hole operator. Be sparing.

8. Johnny Cash. The only country artist that everyone can agree on. I don’t necessarily believe in Heaven and Hell, but if they do exist, the Man in Black is in currently charge of one of them. I have yet to determine which one.

9. Hammers. I’ve lived independently for ten years now, and there has never been a time where I couldn’t fix something in my house with the right size hammer. Hole not big enough? Sink won’t stop leaking? Cat won’t stop pooping in the sink?

10. Punching someone in the face for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

And if you want me to make a few wild predictions for what 2018 will hold, here are few futuristic nuggets of manliness I’ve been kicking around:

11. Filtering your own whiz for drinking water. Trust me, you’re going to need this one, and people will look up to you for that ability.

12. An automobile that’s fueled solely by your hatred of the Duke Blue Devils. The day this is invented, I’ll know that I’ve spent my last penny on gasoline, which is kind of an ironic shame, because Christian Laettner pumps my gas for me.

13. Deep-fried, batter-dipped, deep-fried batter with batter-dipped dipping sauce.

14. Three words: Zombie President Lincoln.

Original here

Out of this world soap bubble photos

Behind the scenes of Jason Tozer’s soap bubble photos via NOTCOT. Mark writes -

Our recent post on photographer Jason Tozer’s images of bubbles prompted a fair few calls of “how did he do that?” Well, we were in his studio on the day of the shoot and can reveal all here…

The shoot came about after Sony approached Creative Review looking for a way in which to demon­strate the capabilities of its new Alpha 350 D-SLR camera. Having seen his wonderful images in last month’s Monograph, we suggested commiss­ioning photographer Jason Tozer to create a suite of images around the theme of bubbles, thus tying in with the overall campaign idea for the camera.

As Tozer mentioned in a reply to the comments on the initial post, despite the prevalence for filters and post effects in photography these days, his bubbles series was created completely in-camera.

While some of the final shots resembled vast gas planets, others – like the more amorphous blob shown above – seemed even further removed from the humble equipment Tozer used to bring his subjects into being: namely, washing up liquid and a coat hanger bent into a hoop.

Original here