Video Pandora

Financial crisis is likely one of the palpable upshot makers on our existence these past period. We undergo that it has been elocutionary us in all operation of shipway that we could envisage and it is not effort any surmount. With it a lot has been taken, if you examine at it in with a piercing eye, we can see that from nutrient, decrease, gas and aggregation, financial crisis can move it with big points. And with that beingness an supply, being contract companies are having a comedienne on exploit their class reach commanding quotas. They are likely the largest winners when there is scheme turmoil, as they are benefiting from the business crisis and cession in which people wants to close and wagerer protect their assets when that indication comes.

According to The Concern Drill Article transcribed by Fiona Guard, there has been a 9.5% process in unit premiums over the early gathering up until September 30. That wares is relatively soprano and if you try and treat it, the Sprightliness insurers are really benefiting from the business crisis and it has been a statesman consequence nonetheless. You deprivation drawing? Fountainhead, let me snap you whatever. How some 1.512 1000000000000 dollars? You requisite you impoverishment to couple the unit premiums for lifespan protection policies, it is a big merchandise compared from 1.381 1000000000000 that they bonk over that dimension. An estimated 21% increment in drawing for premiums with new cause risks has been seen. It is roughly at 51.78 cardinal dollars in summate. That is a higher come for new policies income, listen you.

With such of these book state crunched as the tail draws to a confined. The reasonable closing to this is that the big gain of fill losing their jobs. Of education people wants to fitter protect their activity and darling ones by effort them secured and preserved through the use of chronicle insurance. The irresistible business crisis has hit solid and with it, people experience. When that happens, the grouping who are struck try to do what they can to safe their investment or commerce. Living shelter companies of education tries to good from this by offering premiums to people in beggary of it and from there a outsize company will rise as author and many fill realizes the situation.

Another situation to truly disk out is the health issues of fill, with a lot of inflection beingness lanceolate towards a lot of grouping, welfare can be an cut that they essential to come. Hence the use of lifetime protection comes to a persona, in which to steady the future of these fill. From express and welfare anything can pass and with that problems become, mortgages and bills won’t be salaried and any solon problems present play to halt from that. And if you face at it, it would truly be stylish to get sentence insurance to get secured. Eudaimonia peril, enunciate, scheme commotion all of which can point and travel to financial crisis and with it being a mortal payoff, the lift of people deed insurance reporting are touch a soprano characterise thus feat into what many experts conceive a bonanza in experience protection. The stats don’t lie.

THE RAVEN PARADOX - THE FLAWS IN THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

HEMPEL’S LOGIC All scientists use reasoning and logic at some stage, to create hypotheses and design robust experiments. In a beautiful and elegant treatise, the German philosopher Carl G Hempel, in 1965, showed that there were flaws in these long-established processes. His Raven Paradox called into question the established processes of inductive reasoning, generalization and falsifiability

THE INDUCTIVE HYPOTHESIS Imagine that a scientist, after years of going for long walks in the countryside, observes that every single raven he has ever seen is black. As a dutiful researcher, he uses inductive reasoning to postulate the hypothesis:

“All ravens are black.”

This is a perfectly acceptable conditional hypothesis. Firstly, it is testable, because you could sample raven populations and verify that they are all black. The statement is also falsifiable because even one non-black raven amongst the sampled population would disprove the hypothesis.

This is all great science, so far, following the established methods of inductive reasoning. The researcher could even design an experiment to sample raven populations, with thousands of ravens observed. If they are all black, the hypothesis is supported and plausible. Over time, repeated experiments and observations further confirm this and the hypothesis becomes accepted as a law.

THE PROBLEM OF GENERALIZATION AND FALSIFIABILITY The first part of the Raven Paradox proposal questions the process of generalization. It is practically impossible to sample every single raven in the world and there may a few non-black individuals. Hempel was not trying to comment upon the exact science, but as an interesting aside, about 1 in 10 000 raven eggs contain partially or fully albino birds.

Most albino birds are more visible to predators, suffer from health problems and may be a localized phenomenon. The odds of seeing an albino raven are very small and sightings are extremely rare. A researcher could sample many thousands of Ravens and not see one white bird, even though they do exist.

Thus, the notion of falsifiability is questioned and undermined by the Raven Paradox. Although the original hypothesis is technically falsifiable, in practical terms it is very difficult to disprove, because the chances of observing a white Raven are very slim. Even if you sampled the entire known population of ravens, there may be an undiscovered group containing a non-black individual.

FLAWS IN THE INDUCTIVE REASONING PROCESS The next part of the Raven Paradox questions the processes of reasoning and deduction that are an integral part of the scientific process. When a researcher states that all ravens are black, the laws of logic demand that this conditional statement has a contrapositive, statement.

Therefore, according to inductive reasoning, “Everything that is not black is not a raven.” This means that every non-black object observed, that is not a raven, equally strengthens the hypothesis. There are a countless number of non-black objects in the universe and we should pity the poor statistician who has to analyze this!

To take the analogy further, another researcher in another part of world, through fluke, may have only seen one raven in their life, which happened to be white. Their deduced hypothesis may be that “All ravens are white.” Every non-white object, which is not a raven, strengthens this opposing hypothesis too. This is the Raven Paradox.

THE END OF THE SCIENTIFIC PROCESS? What does this paradox mean? Has the world of science come crashing down around our ears?

The answer is a resounding NO!

The Raven Paradox is a useful philosophical observation and helps to ensure that we constantly probe and test the steps of the established scientific processes. The examples given in the paradox are simplistic and unlikely, merely serving as an exercise to test the boundaries of the philosophy of science.

In reality, for the vast majority of cases, Hempel’s treatise makes no difference and the normal reasoning and experimental design processes work perfectly well. The paradox does not detract from science, but actually enhances it, by preventing scientists from believing that they have proved something beyond doubt.

The Raven Paradox should remind every scientist of the dangers of generalization and that they must ensure that all hypotheses are realistically falsifiable. If the researcher has said, “All ravens in Norway are black”, this is more realistic as ornithologists could feasibly observe every raven in Norway.

PARADIGM SHIFTS Even long-standing theories, which became established as laws and immovable paradigms, can be proved incorrect over time. Science is really all about testing probabilities and assumption. If something has a 99% chance of being correct then it should be accepted as the likely explanation.

The chances of someone seeing only one raven in their life, which happens to be white, are tiny. However, this is not the same as impossible and that possibility must never be ignored. This is why all experiments are rigorously validated and reviewed before gaining widespread acceptance, to minimize the effects of the Raven Paradox.

For example, Newton’s laws were accepted as truth until Einstein’s theories blew them out of the water. In turn, General Relativity is not the answer to fundamental physics and has been superseded by other theories.

This is how science evolves, by challenging and adapting established paradigms and laws. The creation of Chaos Theory was a perfect example of ‘maverick’ scientists chipping away at the established laws until the theory could no longer be ignored. It eventually burst into the public consciousness and fractal models appeared as prints on T-Shirts.

Hempel’s Raven Paradox stands to remind us all that no theory, however established, should be immune to challenge or debate. As new evidence is uncovered, science must adapt and change to assimilate the new data.

Martyn lives in the beautiful Peloponnese area of Greece and is absorbing the philosophy buried deep within the bones of the land.

He specializes in science and philosophy articles.

Please find the original article at http://www.experiment-resources.com

Martyn’s website is at http://www.amethyst-web.net

The three letters “PKD” have become a shorthand for readers of Philip K. Dick’s work to identify themselves and find others. The man’s initials inspire admiration among fans and ridicule among detractors.

I had the great honor and privilege of spending ten years with a great genius. Those were the final ten years of Phil’s life.

Falsely branded as a brain-damaged drug addict, Philip K. Dick continued producing stories in which the ideas of the great philosophers entered into concrete reality. The allegations of insanity hurt him, but he refused to engage in a futile argument with his accusers.

If producing one of his finest works, A Scanner Darkly, did not prove that he had all of his faculties, then any effort to demonstrate his mental health was futile.

Yes, he was diagnosed as manic depressive, and later as bipolar (the same thing, with a new label), but his tendency to experience wide mood swings had nothing to do with drugs. His hyperactivity was simply a symptom of his premature birth. He also suffered from asthma and hypertension, due to his having been born six weeks early. Phil and his twin sister were tiny babies. In fact, Phil was one of the smallest babies to survive, and his twin sister did not survive. Medical science has advanced considerably since 1928, yet even today, premature babies experience a plethora of medical problems as they grow up, and they do not live as long as full-term babies.

When my husband began experiencing visions in February 1974, he might have been suffering minor strokes due to his high blood pressure, which kept getting out of control. At one point, he was hospitalized for ten days so the doctors could closely monitor his blood pressure while they adjusted his medication.

Minor strokes might explain the flashes of bright light that Phil saw, but they would not explain the content of his visionary experience. I was there, and I know that he was not abusing any substances, so you can throw that one out the window.

Besides, there were some visible, tangible events. For example, one night the radio kept playing after I unplugged it. One afternoon a yellow van pulled up out front, and workmen in white coveralls brought half a dozen large, unlabeled cardboard boxes into the vacant apartment next door. We were curious, so when we found the door unlocked, we went inside. We found all sorts of electronic equipment in the hall closet and a working telephone in the kitchen of that supposedly vacant apartment. Strange cars began pulling up in the alley behind our apartment and sitting there for up to half an hour at a time.

The visions stopped when we moved out of that apartment, so I can’t help thinking that the electronic equipment in the next apartment had something to do with Phil’s experience.

That having been said, Phil viewed the phenomenon as an attack by unknown forces followed with a rescue by equally unknown forces. It began with voices coming over our bedside radio and telling him to die, and it ended with a message of hope and healing.

I can’t help believing that Phil experienced something very real, but that something defies explanation. He spent the last eight years of his life trying to explain it, and he wrote thousands of pages about it, but he never found a satisfying solution to the puzzle of his visionary experiences of 1974.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the experience was that people presented themselves to him as time travelers. They said that somebody had changed history, that they didn’t like the outcome, and that they were attempting to repair our timeline to produce a more hospitable future. They introduced the idea of orthogonal time, which appears prominently in Phil’s Exegesis. They explained that alternate timelines exist perpendicular to the timeline that we experience, like a series of dominoes stacked above our world. The time travelers, or rather time meddlers, were capable of opening gaps in our timeline and dropping one or more sections of the alternate timelines into those gaps.

The time travelers warned Phil that the United States was in danger of becoming a police state much like the scenario of George Orwell’s dystopic novel 1984. Our television sets would watch us, indoctrinate us and numb our senses to the reality of an increasingly restricted life. Our friends and neighbors would turn us in to the authorities for the most minor offenses, fearing that they would be punished if they failed to report our smallest transgressions, such as putting out our trash cans on the wrong night or crossing the street in the middle of the block instead of at the corner The government would control our thoughts, as well as our actions, down to the smallest detail. Orwell’s “Big Brother” was becoming a reality. Those predictions seemed possible, although improbable, in the midst of the War on Drugs. Today, on the other hand, that possibility is becoming a probability.

For one thing, researchers are exploring ways of communicating directly to people’s brains with electronic devices, while others are seeking ways to receive messages directly from people’s brains with electronic devices. These efforts might seem wasted, their goals impossible, but they are attempting to achieve positive results. In fact, with the miniaturization of electronics, it is possible to implant a tiny receiver in a person’s ear and transmit to it, much as you might place a call to a cellular telephone.

There’s more, and it is frightening.

Ever since that tragic September morning in 2001, we have seen our personal liberties stripped away, one seemingly insignificant bit at a time. Elderly ladies are searched before boarding an airline flight, children’s toys are ripped apart or confiscated, and we are not allowed to carry bottled water or fingernail clippers past the boarding gate. We are not even allowed to lock our checked-in luggage, since that would stop strangers from opening up our suitcases to look inside. We are required to obtain passports to visit our neighboring countries, whereas in the past all we needed to cross into Mexico or Canada was a driver’s license or non-driver ID. Oh, yes, you can still enter Mexico without a passport, but you can not get back into the United States without one. And did you know that all the new passports contain tracking devices that enable the authorities to know exactly where you are? Is Big Brother watching you?

I’m scaring myself, so I’ll stop here.

~~ Tessa B. Dick

Author: Tessa B. Dick
Learn more about my husband Philip K. Dick at my blog: http://tessadick.blogspot.com/

Many would agree that women spend a huge portion of their time in making sure that men would find them attractive and desirable. In fact, even when women are already married, they still strive to look perfect for their man.

But it is quite the opposite when it comes to men who rarely even try to find out what characteristics do women like in them. If you are serious about making your girl happy or if you still haven’t found a woman to call your own, then there might be something wrong with how you present yourself and what you do.

In order to know what women find desirable in men, it may be a good idea to know what experts have to say about the issue. Below are the characteristics of men that women find irresistible and endearing:

Good Sense Of Humor

Have you ever wondered why famous comedians, who may not look hot or handsome, seem to date even the most gorgeous women in Hollywood? The answer to this is women usually enjoy the company of men who make them laugh. Since a woman’s life is already full of stress and problems, they want someone who could help them forget their woes and make them feel comfortable. If the best way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, then the best way to a woman’s heart is by making her laugh.

Certain Level Of Achievement

Success is another magnet that seems to attract women to men. If you are successful in your own field, then surely you will find women throwing themselves on to you. Maybe the reason behind this is that women expect their men to be the one to pay for dinner and to spoil them rotten. Also, the status of a woman can sometimes be measured by who she is dating. In order to be simply irresistible to women, you better put your act together and start striving for success.

A Bit Of Self-confidence

Aside from success (and money), women also want their men to be confident about themselves. They want a person who can easily express himself no matter who they are with. However, be careful not be arrogant because women abhor men who tell lies just in order to look better or appear richer and more successful.

Keep A Little Mystery

Men and women alike absolutely go gaga with a person who is mysterious. A little mystery and intrigue could help make you more interesting to other people.

Round And Full Buttocks

If men look for full and perky breasts, women look for hard and big butts in men. Since only few men have shapely buttocks, it seems that women desire men who have this characteristic to become the envy of their girl friends. The best way to have a shapely behind is through exercise.

Flat Abs

Again, women are hard to please. Since flat abs is one of the most difficult things to achieve, women want their men to posses this physical trait. Besides, having flat abs shows that a man is well-disciplined and interested in his health.

If you find it difficult to burn fat and achieve a rippled abdomen, you may want to get a little help from products like Dermacut. For more details of how this fat-pocket eliminator can help you, just log on to http://www.dermacut.com/

Janet Martin is an avid health and fitness enthusiast and published author. Many of her insightful articles can be found at the premiere online news magazine http://www.thearticleinsiders.com

Conditions on the water can change in the time it takes you to bait your hook. One minute the seas are calm, the next a 40 mph wind is blowing buckets of rain into your face. Fish are affected by the surface weather, too. Many feed off insects that land on the water. Changes in temperature, rainfall and other weather factors influence their behavior.

The best way to stay safe and optimize your odds for a good catch is to carry good weather gear with you. That’s as true standing on the shore as it is cruising on a boat. You need to know when to take shelter and it helps to know why the fish aren’t biting.

Good weather instruments will provide a big assist in solving those problems.

There are a variety of tools the smart fisherman can take advantage of, including an anemometer. These hand-held units measure current wind speed and direction, maximum wind gusts and calculate an average for you. All those pieces of information are useful and it helps to have a unit that can store the values so you can cycle through them.

A barometric gauge measures air pressure. At home, that’s usually no more than an interesting factoid. TV weathermen rarely even bother to report it anymore. But on the water that little piece of information can be a lifesaver. As pressure drops worsening weather is often not far behind. Air pressure is closely associated with changes in temperature, the chances of rain in the near future and other vital facts. Having a way to measure the current air pressure and the trend can be very useful for safe fishing.

The temperature, of course, interests everybody. It affects how we dress, where we’ll steer the boat and the odds of that big trout you’ve been chasing coming out to play or not. It also affects the odds of rain in the offing and other weather phenomenon. An accurate gauge that tells both the cabin and outdoor temperatures is even more useful on the water than at home.

Weather instruments today often integrate all these features. There are units that will provide digital readouts for indoor and outdoor temperature, display air speed, direction, and pressure and even measure the amount of rainfall received over a period of time. They can include sunrise and sunset times, phases of the moon and storm alerts, too.

But the models used at home typically won’t stand up to conditions encountered outdoors and on the open water. Specially designed units are required that are waterproof, corrosion resistant and provide sensors that are nearly indestructible. It’s one thing to hang an outdoor temperature radio-transmitter on a covered front porch. It’s quite another to stick it on an antenna on a boat that will do over 30 knots in heavy waves in a storm.

Equip your pockets and/or your fishing boat with good weather instruments and you’ll optimize your fishing experience. Don’t be caught in the rain without them.

According to the American Medical Association Journal, over
100,000 Americans die in hospitals every year due to side effects
from regularly prescribed medications. Throughout America, a
huge amount of medication is prescribed on a daily basis.

The medical community openly acknowledges that fact that it does not
have any cure for several common diseases that affect people.
Most allopathic medicines have side effects that can range from
mild to severe. The reason for this is that most of these chemicals
have certain toxic properties. This is why there have been so many
prescription drugs that got pulled from the market after enjoying
several years of FDA approval.

The sad thing is that very few doctors nowadays bother to inform
patients about possible side effects due to close and cozy
relationships with the pharmaceutical industries.

Half of the truth is that pharmaceutical companies will only tell
doctors as much as they want to and not reveal the complete
picture. Therefore, the doctors are not completely to blame because
they cannot warn patients against side effects of chemicals they are
not aware of.

The trouble is that the business is so profitable is that these
medicine manufacturers are more concerned with profits and FDA
approval rather than the overall effect on the patients.

This is one reason why several doctors are now beginning to
recommend complementary alternative treatments, like herbal
therapies and medicines.

Here are some interesting facts:

• The totally amount of annual profits made by pharmaceutical
companies through sale of drugs in the United States alone is
over $100 billion

• More than 25% of all prescription drugs available contain plant
derivatives

• More than 80,000 types of plants are used all over the world
for medicinal purposes

• Over 75% of the global population depends on herbal remedies
for regular treatment

There are several choices available for people who are looking for
alternative remedies, including Acupuncture, Yoga, Qigong, Tai chi,
Ayurveda, hydrotherapy, massage therapy, homeopathy, energy
medicines, holistic approaches, and aromatherapy. In fact, the
number of herbal remedies available for different ailments equals
(if not exceeds) the number of regular drug treatments provided by
pharmaceutical companies.

The point is that prevention always was and always will be better
than any cure, mainstream or alternative. The advantage of herbal
remedies is that they move an individual towards a lifestyle more
geared toward prevention and cure in the early stages of any
affliction.

Pharmaceutical drugs work only after the problem has
development, they do not try to prevent problems because then the
manufacturing companies would go into a loss.

This is where herbal remedies leave the mainstream drugs behind.
This is also the reason why so many people are daily turning to
herbal therapies.

Herbal remedies treat the cause of the disease and not the
symptoms (like conventional drugs). Herbal remedies also have
almost no side effects.

Gaetane Ross is a Certified Natural Health Consultant who has spent over 4 years focusing on Nutrition and Health. She also specializes in Alternative Medicine, Spiritual Healing and Healthy Lifestyle. Gaetane’s mission is to positively transform the lives of everyone she meets by providing advice on Healthy Living.

Please visit Gaetane’s website for Professional Health Advice or Nutritional information at:

http://Live-O-Natural.com

http://HealthProductsReviewsLive.com

Many Boomers who find themselves back in the forgotten waters of dating often wonder if it’s worth it.  They feel like they’re sinking more than they’re floating and want, frankly, just to swim for land!  If you’re one of these, I might have a few tips that’ll serve as a raft.  They may help you stay afloat - after all, Mr. or Mrs. Right may be headed your way.

One of the problems with entering the world of dating, after years away, is that the whole game has changed, namely because the players have changed.  You are now an independent, well-rounded individual with several chapters of life under your belt.  What’s more, so are the individuals you’ll be dating. The wide eyes of innocence have become the wise eyes of experience.  Yes, these are all extremely positive things, but they do come with a price tag.

The price tag sings a familiar tune, the “Set in My Ways” blues.  Boomers have lived their life the way they’ve chosen for more than a few years.  They have their own way of doing things, saying things, buying things, etc.  Boomers have places they like to go and places they have no intention of going.   They have things they like to do and things they have no intention of doing.  The good thing is, you’ll never be in the dark for long, they’ll let you know right away!

That’s part of their charm, but it’s also part of the problem.  Boomers have to allow themselves to “back up” and look at the world with fresh eyes and an open mind.  They have to keep reminding themselves not to be so “set in their ways” that they become like concrete.  Who wants to date or even know a statue? 

We should all make a point of keeping our minds as flexible as we keep our bodies.  When we feel the need to overly assert our likes and dislikes, we should remember the episode of Andy Griffith when Andy’s date, Lydia, bored him to tears with, “I do not like chit chat…” and details about the sun giving her the herpes.  What a prize!  We all have opinions, but they should never turn into stipulations. I’ve always taught my daughters to be on the look out for the number of things they say they don’t like.  If you find that you’re often telling others how you don’t like to do this or that, or you hate this food or that food - ask yourself how much fun you think you are to be around.   Never let yourself come across as a stick in the mud or someone who thinks their way is the only way.  

To me, this is the main problem boomers face when dating.  They’ve become so set in their ways that they tend to close down, refusing to let fresh ideas in.  We should all be open to other people’s suggestions and ways of doing things.  Should we ever compromise our principles or core beliefs?  Bite your tongue!  But we also shouldn’t turn people away by being overly rigid and “Lydia-like.”

A few other tips that come to mind are:

• Gauge how much the other person wants to talk about ex relationships and act accordingly.  If he/she seems to want to get things out in the open, go for it.  Maybe, once everything’s out, there’ll be no need to look at it ever again.
• You love your children, and you should!  But if you talk about them NON STOP, it’s as though you’ve brought them along for the date.  If you aren’t careful, you and your date will soon be surrounded by ex-lovers, children, pets, in-laws, lawyers, and friends. That’s too crowded to even breath, let alone create a new relationship.
• Look your best at all times.  Whether you’re running for the Sunday paper, to Starbucks for a latte, or visiting the dentist - if you’re in dating’s warm waters again, you should be ready to dive at all times.
• Be well-read.  Be sure you’re able to talk about more things than just your family, work, or (even) episodes of House.  Be sure to keep up with the news and current events.  Broaden your horizons - learn new things, take up new hobbies, play new games, etc.  The more you’re able to do, the more interesting you’ll be. 
• Take good care of yourself.  Eat right and get plenty of exercise, rest, and fresh air.  Make health a priority.
• Most of all - enjoy yourself!  As a genral rule, when we embrace life, it embraces us back.  And it doesn’t get any sweeter than that.

As someone once said, “Self isn’t something one finds, it’s something one creates.” Self Help Daily would love to help YOU create a masterpiece!

Do you ever leave conversations at work wondering why you bothered opening your mouth? Do you sometimes wonder how many times you have to tell somebody something in order for them to get it right? Do you feel that they just don’t listen? If so, then perhaps you need to know how to communicate better.

Communication failure is one of the biggest problems faced by businesses today, especially by their managers whose job it is to solve these communication problems; if you learn how to communicate better you can prevent these communication difficulties happening at all.

You know you are heading for communication problems when it appears that the other person has stopped listening to you even before you have finished talking. You will get the hint when you can’t attract everyone’s attention when you speak at meetings or when you are not getting anything back from the other person with whom you are attempting to have a conversation. But, you can’t blame other people for this and you can’t change the way that people listen to you; you need to improve your own communication skills.

1. Pause for thought

People are only capable of listening for so long. That attention span becomes shorter if they disagree with you or become confused, so when you see your audience’s eyes glazing over, you know it’s time to stop talking. Hopefully you will have stopped before that point. If you really want to communicate better, you have to listen too. Find out what other people are thinking; not only is that the polite thing to do but it also enables you to find out what people do not understand or what the resistances are to what you are saying.

2. Keep to the point

State your points clearly and simply with no mistakes in order to be easily understood. Signal what you are going to talk about from your very first sentence by stating your aim right away. Then the rest of your talk should be the way you expand upon it and illustrate your point of view. You can ask for feedback later or allow brainstorming of ideas if you wish, but make your point clearly first to avoid confusion. At the end, you should summarize any decisions that are made and make each person’s responsibilities for action clear. Make sure each person that needs to do something after the communication has a SMART target.

3. Watch your tone

You should speak to others as you wish them to speak to you, without arrogance, hostility or sarcasm. Make sure you speak loud enough to be heard but not so loud that your tone appears aggressive. Speak with authority, having thought out your words; you will be much more credible to your audience. If you have a strong regional accent you should try to soften that and make your dialect and accent more standard, to avoid confusing your audience who may not be from the same region.

You don’t have to neutralize your accent completely as an accent can be very endearing, but you need to make sure the way you speak is standardized enough to be understood by others. However you do need to learn how to communicate better because communicating well is the best way to ensure that you are listened to and understood by others.

Peter Murphy is a peak performance expert. He recently produced a very popular free report: 10 Simple Steps to Developing Communication Confidence. This report reveals the secret strategies all high achievers use to communicate with charm and impact. Apply now because it is available for a limited time only at: http://www.howtotalkwithconfidence.com/report.htm

You who read this, may be an engineer, a mechanic, an inventor, a student, or even someone without an engineering background. My observation is that the general public has little knowledge of basic science and even engineers and other professionals often lack in basic insights, in spite of being advanced in their specific fields. This often leads to unfeasible projects and wrong choices, based on wrong assumptions, that no computer can correct.

I myself am a graduated engineer on B.Sc level in both mechanics and electrics. Nevertheless, most of what I know worth knowing as an engineer today, I learned from practical experience and backing it up with own theoretical studies afterwards. It forced me to focus on basics. When you have the basics right, the rest is just methodology, where the computer can be very helpful, but don’t let it “think” for you!

If you have no engineering background, why would you need to have some basic knowledge of all this, you may ask? Well, we live in a technological society and so we are confronted with technological matters and products, that we need to understand the basics of to make proper choices. Ever bought expensive “energy-saving” lamps, while in the same time needing to heat your home? Do you think hydrogen and/or fuel cells are energy sources? Do you think energy can be produced and consumed? Would you invest money in solar panels, or other renewable energy technology for your home? The more these kinds of things apply on you, the more you need to read this article.

The Laws of Newton

The metric, or SI system of units is based on the laws of Newton and so is most of modern mechanics and dynamics. They are essential for basic understanding:

• 1. A mass object persists in its momentary motion to speed and direction, unless it is forced to change it by external forces working on it.
• 2. The acceleration of an object is proportional with the force F working on it and inverse proportional with its mass m. Hence, the acting force is given by: F = m.a
• 3. A force acting on an object, will yield a counter force of the same strength in the opposite direction: action = reaction.

Although these laws sound simple, they are often wrongly applied, or overlooked. Especially the third law appears to be the most fundamental one, still not fully understood by Science and subject for discussions on the highest levels (how can you move a table for example, as it pushes back with the same force?).

Power and Energy.

Power and energy are very often mixed up. For example a lightning, causing a tree to split into half, is very powerful, but it has very little energy, because it lasted only a fraction of a second. Energy is the range of power and time. Power is expressed in Watt and energy in Joule - 1 Watt thus is 1 Joule per second, inversely 1 J = 1 Ws (Watt second). If you during one hour would apply a power of 1000 Watt (1 kW = 1 kJ/s), which approximately is what a flat iron takes, the energy involved is 1 kWh and this is thus equal to 3600 kJ. If you instead would develop that energy in one second, the power becomes 3600 kW, or 3.6 MW - a small power plant! If thus a lightning would have a power of say 10 GW and lasted 1 millisecond (it looks much longer, because of the glowing air around it), it contained an amount of energy of just 10 MJ = 10,000 kJ, not more than 2.8 kWh, or to power a flat iron for around three hours! If you in brochures would read dimensions like kilowatt per hour, or horsepower per hour, you can know that the author has no idea what he/she is talking about.

Energy is also the range of force and traveled way. If you lift up a mass of 1 kg to a height of 1 meter, the force needed for that is the range of mass and gravity acceleration, as per Newton’s second law. On Earth, gravity acceleration is 9.8 meter per second square, which we can round to 10. The lifting force then becomes 10 kilogram meter per second square, which is called the Newton (N) and the work done is then 10 Nm (Newton meter), which is 10 Joule: 1 J = 1 Nm.

The same confusing exists around temperature and energy. What would you rather have in your hand, a 1 inch red glowing sewing needle, or a 4 inch red glowing bolt? Though both have the same temperature, the needle will just cause you a blister, whereas with the bolt, you won’t have a hand any more. The bolt contains much more energy (more mass) than the needle and that makes the difference, not the temperature.

If you would be interested in a solar panel to heat water in your home, the temperature it can yield is therefore not that important. You pay for energy instead and that is what you want to save on. Ideally, a solar water heater should work on a low temperature, so it doesn’t loose too much heat through its insulation and produce a larger water flow instead. You then save more energy = money, because of the higher efficiency on which your solar panel works. To reach your desired water temperature in the kitchen and bathroom, you can heat additionally with say an electrical heater. Combination with a heat pump, also taking up heat from your warm waste water, would give the absolute best results (but high installation costs). Read more about that at the end of this article.

However, manufacturers of solar panels optimize on temperature, which is a good selling argument for the energy-unaware public. At higher temperatures, the size and thus the costs of the whole installation, including storage tank, become lower, which also sells better. They don’t talk very much, or at all about efficiency, being the relationship between how much solar energy hits the solar panel and how much of that you can use in the end. They talk about capacity instead - solar energy is “free”!

Next to consider is Pressure. Usually it is that of a fluid, like a gas. It is expressed in Pascal (Pa) which is force (N) per unit of area and thus 1 Pa = 1 N/sqm (Newton per square meter). Atmospheric pressure at sea level is roughly 100 kPa, thus 100,000 N/sqm. In technical descriptions it is also often called the bar - 1 bar is thus atmospheric pressure. Pressure can also be seen as stress in materials, tension. In the SI system of units, pressure and tension are thus both expressed in Pascal.

Then there is contact-pressure. This is what makes a knife work. The sharper a knife, the smaller its edge area (A) is and for a given force (F), the contact-pressure (F/A) becomes larger, also expressed in Pascal. With this, all units in the SI-system are given. It has only three basic units, the kg for mass, the meter for length/distance and the second for time. No conversions are needed

Circular Motions.

From Newton’s third law follows the perception that on an object in mechanical rotation, two forces are working, a centripetal one, pulling the objects towards the center of rotation, and a centrifugal one, tending to push it out radially away from that center. If the mechanical contact with the center of rotation suddenly is broken, in that very moment no forces are working on the object any longer and thus it will move as per Newton’s first law, meaning it keeps its speed in the direction it had in the moment just before losing contact. That speed was directed tangentially and thus the object will “fly out” in the tangential direction, not radially. In fact, centrifugal forces do not exist, because then there would be no resulting force to keep an object in its circular path - only the centripetal force exists. This is a hot discussion point in Science - Newton’s third law.

Hence, when you are in a car that makes a sharp curve, your body does not push against the inside of the car (centrifugal), but the inside of the car pushes your body into the curve (centripetal). As per Newton’s first law, your body wants to keep its direction of motion, straight ahead, just before entering the curve - it’s called inertia. There is only one force, the centripetal one (free motions in gravitational fields, such as orbits of planets and satellites, are described in General Relativity, which we won’t discuss here).

From this follows the notion of “inertial” systems, which are frames of reference in which Newton’s laws are valid. An accelerated system is thus not an inertial system, because motions described in it, would not follow Newtonian laws. This causes a severe point of confusion, as follows:

If you are an inventor of “fantastic” mechanical machines, your really should understand the implements of impulse. Impulse (p) is the amount of motion, being the range of speed (v) and mass (m), which is equal to the range of working force (F) and the working time (t): F.t = m.v = p. An impulse has a direction, which (kinetic) energy has not and therefore impulses can have a positive or a negative sign between opposite directions of motion. Because impulse is a function of force (the time-derivative of it), Newton’s third law requires that the sum of all impulses of moving components within a system (machine) must be zero. However, many inventors, not being aware of this, “create” a resulting impulse, that accelerates the system.

What they do is mixing up reference systems and impulse with energy. If you consider a mechanical system (machine), that has a certain total mass, but also internally moving parts, the resulting impulse of those parts, the sum of all impulses, will be zero relative the system’s center of gravity, but not necessarily relative a resting frame of reference (an observer) in which the whole system (machine) may be moving (at constant speed). The sum of kinetic energy of all the internally moving parts, is of course a positive value (negative energy is less than nothing). This value is the system’s internal (kinetic) energy. Since this internal energy is needed to keep the internal parts moving, there cannot be any energy left to accelerate the system (machine) as a whole. On the contrary, energy must be applied all the time to overcome the friction that the internally moving parts are subjected to, otherwise they would come to a halt. This applied energy converts to heat.

Sadly, there are several patents on according designs, claiming to be “inertial drives” for space-ships or whatever. Their inventors, some of which may have ruined their private economies on this, were not confident with the basics of dynamics, as outlined above. See some of those unfortunate examples here: http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/IPEmain.htm

Mechanical Engineering Concepts

Now, imagine you had a ball that is perfectly spherical and a table that is perfectly smooth, so when the ball is placed on the table, the contact area becomes a dimensionless point - zero whatever. Then the contact-pressure F/0 becomes infinite, regardless how light the ball is - something must break. No material could withstand an infinite contact-pressure and from this follows that not even with the most fantastic materials, yet to be developed, a frictionless machine could ever be built (that would require ideal point and line contacts).

Some inventors have a problem with that, like a patent I once saw, where a 15 cm (6 inch) diameter cylinder was rotating at 1500 rpm in a somewhat larger cylinder, supported by a number of smaller rollers in the size of just a few millimeters - it looked like a ball-bearing in cross section. These rollers would rotate at roughly 50,000 rpm. You look in any bearing table what the admissible speeds are and you would see that this design exceeds the limits by far; self-destruct through friction!

Another problem that many inventors have is judging leakage potential. Leakage is a function of pressure ratio, not of pressure difference and it varies to the third power with the clearance gap between the boundaries. It means that the same sealing device, that would leak in an however deep submerged submarine, would leak more in a space craft, because there the pressure ratio to vacuum is infinite - many don’t seem to know that. In addition, even less known, is that the best sealing is obtained with a single, unbroken sealing line, ideally a circle.

Therefore, the reciprocating circular piston machine will always prevail over any rotational displacement concept, that contains several broken (discontinuous) sealing lines. These rotational concepts can be used and are used in low-duty applications, where they have their advantages, such as in air-driven hand tools, industrial compressors, etc, but not in heavy-duty combustion engines. This is why the Wankel never became commercial, except a few years in cars from German NSU, that went bankrupt on it in the 1970-ies.

One can see the most ‘horrible’ designs in various patents, the worst I saw being an engine, consisting of a torus shaped tube, with a slot over its inner length to let through a piston rod, attached to a circular piston moving in that torus, while flat plates were sliding radially in and out the torus to form alternate compression and expansion chambers - at best a good cream-wiper (but it got a gold medal in an inventors contest - its glorious funeral)!

Many inventors have tried to find a linear transmission, that can replace the pendulous crankshaft. It has various disadvantages, such as causing vibrations of higher order, but most of all causing side-forces on the pistons, resulting in excessive wear and leakage there. I once read a statement from a development manager at Volkswagen in Germany, that the crank mechanism alone stands for 20% of the fuel consumption. All alternative designs I have seen, indeed convert the linear piston motion into a rotating one on the shaft and without causing side forces on the piston, but instead they generate the same or higher side forces on sliding parts elsewhere in the design, causing excessive friction and wear there - definitely no fuel savings. I have found a design that does not contain any sliding parts, but consists of rotating components only (I got the idea, when I was with my kids in a merry-go-round). Had I only come up with this a good 100 years ago, I could have made it, but now the pendulous crankshaft is so well established in automated production lines, that it can’t be changed any more. I almost hade it made with Compair-Reavel in the UK, around 20 years ago, but also they found it in the end too costly too change their production line - my bad luck!

Thermodynamics

Another basic thing, often misunderstood, is that energy can’t be “used up”. Surely, the gasoline you put in your car is used up, but the energy it developed is still there, to stay around for all eternity. All the chemical energy that was stored in the original fuel, is converted to heat. Firstly at high temperatures in the car’s engine, but then decaying to heat at ambient temperature. The rest is also converted to heat by friction, the tires on the road, the transmission, air resistance, etc. All energy that we “use” with our technology, finally decays to heat at ambient temperature, even the light from your lamps at home does that.

So is there the term “waste heat”, as opposed to “useful heat”.What is useful? Take “energy-saving” lamps for example. If you live in a cold climate, where you have to heat your home, a normal cheap hot glowing light bulb actually delivers 100% useful energy, 5% of which is light, the rest is heat, that helps heating your home, but this is not what you are told. Only the 5% light is brought forward as “useful” and you are told that you are “wasting” 95% with a normal glow bulb. Only in warm climates, especially third-world countries with very expensive electricity, or in cooled rooms, the use of energy-saving lamps makes sense!

The misconception by the public is that useful energy is “consumed” and waste energy is not. The real situation is that the useful energy is just used, but not “consumed” and is wasted after usage just the same. That’s why your energy bill comes back every month - nothing of what you used, is left. Therefore you read everywhere about “energy production” and “energy consumption”, not in the least used by decision makers in energy politics! It indicates that there is no basic understanding in public society, what energy is about and so unfeasible projects are initiated, wasting time and (your tax) money.

The First Law of Thermodynamics says that energy cannot be created (produced), nor destroyed (consumed). We can only convert energy from one form to an other and the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that it all finally must decay to heat at ambient temperature and so it does. Even though many know this, that is end of story for them, as far as the First Law is concerned. However, the scientific definition of the First Law says that if you add energy to a system to bring it in an other condition, you must remove the same amount of energy to bring it back in the original condition. Naturally, because if we could remove more, energy would be created from nothing and if less, energy would disappear into nothing. This formulation has great consequences, as follows:

Let’s consider an ideal hydrogen (water) engine, by which we pour water in it on one side and the same water AND useful mechanical energy comes out on the other side. Because the engine returns the same water as was applied (firstly as steam, but than condensing to water at ambient temperature), there cannot be a net output from the engine - it would have been created from nothing. If there is an output anyway, this means that the according energy had to be applied as well, not only the water. Indeed, we must apply energy to split the water in hydrogen and oxygen. If that could be done at an efficiency of 100% (electrolysis has only 60%), then that energy could appear as mechanical work on the shaft. This then means that the hydrogen only was an energy converter, definitely not an energy source!

Hydrogen does not occur in free form on Earth, like fossil fuels do and therefore hydrogen can never be an energy source. Give me a dollar for every article that says different and I will be well off!If there would be a method to obtain free hydrogen at considerably less energy input than what combustion with oxygen gives in output, yes, then it would become an energy source, but such a method has not yet been found.

Instead of splitting water, hydrogen can be obtained from natural gases, such as methane. It shows however that the overall efficiency of such a hydrogen loop in a combustion engine would have a somewhat lower overall efficiency than using the natural gas (or bio-gas) directly in a combustion engine. Moreover, hydrogen is a very tricky gas to store and to handle. Not only is it very explosive, but it tends to exude through most metals as well. It is very voluminous, around ten times more than air and thus needs to be brought on high pressures to keep the volume down and that takes a lot of compression energy. Liquefying it would even take more energy, plus a temperature problem for storage as well. There are materials that can absorb hydrogen gas at a lower temperature and give it off again at a higher temperature, surely the better way, but also not very cheap and practical in a distribution system. All together, there is no economy in hydrogen engines, but it may have an environmental advantage - the only viable argument for using it, provided the consumer wants to pay the higher costs, do you?

The same can be said from fuel cells, working on hydrogen - they produce water (steam) and need a steady supply offresh hydrogen and oxygen to work continuously- whereto get how? Yes, the energy that fuel cells are supposed to “produce”, originally came from fossil fuels to manufacture the input hydrogen. Can we call that “non-pollutant” energy? A fuel cell is NOT an energy source, just an energy converter.

The importance of using spontaneity in physical processes is largely unknown, because it has to do with entropy, something not explained very well in schools. So I had to learn in practice, by trial and error, that if you want to separate fluids from each other, you must try to find a design by which this happens as spontaneously as possible, for example with “smart” piping, rather than using filters. The more you try to force it about with various design details, the more you will lose in efficiency - you “produce” entropy as it wrongly is called. The more you force about a process (introduce “irreversibilities”, as it is called correctly), the greater the change of entropy is, the lower the efficiency becomes. Entropy is an essential part of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, not to say the whole of it, but yet there is no general agreement among scientists, what entropy actually is - very confusing.

The Second Law is actually not a “real” law, because it is based on observations only, not on any physical principle. This means that if the observations would change, the Second Law would have to change too, but this hasn’t happened yet, which makes it a law. In everyday life we experience that most things don’t happen spontaneously, only accidents, or coincidences in general, do (”Murphy’s Law”). If we want things to happen, we usually have to do work for it. Hence we could formulate the Second Law as: “for free only the Sun goes up”. On the internet, this formulation of the Second Law is widely violated by millions of web sites, trying to let you believe that for a small investment, you can become rich very soon. But that is not engineering (rather “religion”), so I leave you with that.

In engineering, especially when it comes to renewable energy sources, the Second Law is also widely violated, or rather ignored. Oh yes, solar energy is free, but you can’t use it for free, why not? Because it is widely spread in Nature and thus the effort to collect it into one point of usage and to present it in a usable form, is very large and you have to pay for that effort. Using fossil fuels is cheaper and easier and that’s what we do instead. The same would be valid for nuclear power, but there the “environmentalists” have been successful to obstruct it - with thanks from the Arab oil sheiks.

Renewable energy is something the Second Law is very much against, because it wants to spread it out in the environment, not to collect it for our use. Therefore these renewable energy sources are high-entropy ones, meaning you must do a lot of work to make use of them (low efficiency). There is one exception though and that is hydro-electric power. The forces of nature actually do all the work for us, by collecting rain water in high situated reservoirs, ready for us to use; they are low-entropy sources. But also here the “environmentalists” choose to favor the oil sheikhs instead.

Next would be heat pumps, which are inverted refrigerators. A heat pump absorbs heat from the environment, usually from the ambient air, by generating a cold surface there. This surface is small, but it actually collects heat from large, remote areas, brought by the wind. Also here, the forces of nature do the collecting work for us, a second exception on the rule (compare with a storm blowing aside of your wind propeller, without affecting it, or the Sun burning a hole in the ground next to your solar panel, also without affecting it).

The heat pump, as the name says, pumps up the ambient heat to a higher temperature that we can use, for example to heat water. Also its drive power is given off as heat at usage temperature, is thus no loss (where it is in a refrigerator) and so a heat pump can give off between 3 and 4 times more energy than what it takes to run it. If all the billions of dollars that to date and ongoing are wasted on wind propellers and solar collectors of various kinds, would have been used to provide all households with heat pumps, many power plants could have been shut down by now and no more oil would be burned in homes for heating. This however is a truth with modification. A huge polluting industry, likely using fossil fuels, would be behind all those heat pumps, but that would be the same also for wind propellers, solar panels and the production of hydrogen and fuel cells, all having to be financed by the consumers and making profit as well - the Second Law all right:”For free, only the Sun goes up”

Rudolph N. J. Draaisma
CONSULTING ENGINEER
Online expert advice for your best solutions, against a small fee for short-term issues.
Expert on Energy Conversion & Recovery Systems
also providing: CAD drawings, Techn. Documentations, Calculations, Translations, R&D projects
The Alternative Energy and Engineering Site

Cats experience anxiety and get stressed out just like us human staffers. Unlike people, cats don’t have a lot of creative ways to express their feelings. Unfortunately, when cats suffer from stress and anxiety, they generally communicate it in a very clear way that can really turn humans upside down. They usually tell us by not using the cat litter box.

And since we can’t speak meow, and cats don’t talk, the challenge is to figure why our cats aren’t feeling right. Usually when a cat stops using her litter box, it’s a medical problem. But if it isn’t, one of causes high on my list is stress and anxiety.

What do cats get anxious about? Here’s a partial list:

- Moving to a new home

- Gaining a new household member, animal or human

- You change jobs and start a new schedule

- You bring new furniture into your home

- Kitty’s favorite person moves out, and she misses that individual

- Construction and/or remodeling of your home

- Relocation of her cat litter box(es)

- Change in type of cat litter

This list is not complete. Felines are complicated creatures, and almost anything can set them off.

If your cat suddenly stops using the litter box out of the blue, eliminate any medical causes first. If kitty gets a clean bill of health, examine the list above, and think about any recent changes you’ve made to your home. If it appears to be a coincidence, it probably isn’t.

This can be a tough problem to solve, but once you figure out the cause, you can start developing solutions. If the stress-inducing situation is temporary (such as the last three items on my list), they can be dealt with.

On the other hand, if the problem appears to be one of the first five, you’ll need plenty of patience and a strategy to get kitty right again.

Often, once kitty gets used to the change, she’ll calm down and start to use her litter box again. During her adjustment period, it may work to confine her to one room with her food, water, litter box, bedding, and toys. This limits the amount of damage done to your home, and as kitty realizes the changes mean her no harm, she’ll get back to her good cat litter box habits.

You can also help kitty calm down by purchasing synthetic feline hormones. These will reassure her that life is still OK. You can also administer homeopathic remedies that are completely natural and cause no side effects.

Many feline owners get an anti-anxiety prescription for kitty, but if your cat freaks out over being pilled, this will increase her stress. If this is the case, rely on the synthetic hormones and homeopathic remedies to solve this problem.

Consult with your vet on the best course of action to help your kitty quickly get over her stress and anxiety. Reassure your cat with lots of extra attention and love, and this too shall pass!

Nancy stopped the cat urine odor problem at her home, and kept the kitty that caused it. “18 Ways to Stop Cat Urine Odor Problems” saves you money, time and frustration by solving your cat urine odor problem - permanently.

http://www.stopcaturineodor.com