How far do you think the cruise liner, Queen Elizabeth II, moves for every gallon of diesel fuel that it burns?

The answer is 6 inches.

6 miles?

I'm going to guess 5.5 metres.

6 inches? It's a really big ship and a gallon is pretty small.

I was wondering if it's even measurable. I guess I'll go for 6 inches.
What I would really like to know is the average 'person-miles per gallon' of cars compared to planes, trains, and busses. Which transportation would require the least fuel to send a 100 people from LA to SF? I would think it was a train.

You expect the Queen Mary to get the same gas mileage as a motor-home or old cadillac?

yeah, I was surprised to see the smallest number be as large as 6 inches...

six inches?

damn, I've guessed correctly. I've just picked the lowest number, since i figured she's the "queen dog" of ineffieciency, very demading while the rest of us must serve her at all costs in fuel, time, and enviornment.

In other words, I just guessed correctly, but wrote all this bullcrap to make it look like i figured it out.

You may find she gets better mile per gallon per 100Kg of cargo than a car though.
Here's a link. As one could expect, ship and rail is quite efficient per tonne-km and air travel sucks. .. and yet air travel is the cheapest distance a passenger can buy. There's no good excuse for not having bullet trains connecting our major metropolises.
http://themes.eea.eu.int/Sectors_and_activities/transport/indicators/technology/efficiency/tab_factsheets_ILR

Yeah. I thought about this after I had haphazardly guessed. Good point.

Ignoring momentum? Maybe 15.25cm

It's pretty amazing. Imagine a fusion powered ship! I recently heard that a local power station burns 100 litres of oil per second in order to provide electricity for 300,000 homes.

that little. I find that amazing. sounds like just a drop per kilowatt/hr. If an average home burns 212 kwh (off the top of my head), that's .24 kwh per liter burned every second, or 15 minutes of microwave/blow-dryer per liter. I've see a rough estimate of a 5kw portable generator burning a gallon per hour, or 3.785l/5kwh or .18l/.24kwh making portable generators 5.5 times more economical. Ah, I find now the average (canadian) home uses 860 kwh/mo. = .10kw/l where a gen yields 1.32kw/l or 13 times more efficient than your power station.

6 inches, probably. I'm guessing this is some kind of "look how much fuel we waste" survey.

6 feet?

6 inches?

I guess 6 yards, I know its not very far, it might even be 6 feet, I'm not sure like i said its a guess.

6 inches

I think it's just 6 inches. Quite a waste. You would think they'd find a better way to fuel the thing.

Maybe it was 10 litres. I know it was for only 300,000 homes, and I remember being absolutely shocked at the amount of energy used. I remember last year bushfires melted some high tension lines and the Logan City Council asked my building to use it's own deisel generator so that 500 homes would have power (500 homes at midnight with only fridges and standby appliances, clocks etc). We are currently building a gas pipeline from Papua New Guinea to provide power for a new power station up north because PNG is closer to the north than our own gas fields. Australia has crap-loads of uranium and coal, but the greenies have influeced government enough to force us to import gas. We are self sufficient in oil, but we have to pay world prices. It seems globalisation is yet to force the price of oil down. I believe Canada and the US use the most energy, but your winters would result in a lot of that. Our peak energy usage is in summer. Australia is third in energy use per capita, and obesity . Each new home built in Australia must have solar hot water installed( http://www.solahart.com.au/ if you're interested). I have it and it rules. I've only once run out of hot water when it was cloudy for about 3 days straight. I've decided to try to build a windmill, because it creates AC straight away with no need of an inverter and can be connected right to my power supply and the grid. Most hot afternoons I get a warm wind blowing inland that would be great to supplement my energy use around dinner time. It's not that I think burning oil or coal is bad. I think you know what I think about CO2. It's that I hate paying money to the government for something I should be able to find a way to get for free.

an 'AC' windmill? How does it maintain and synch it's Hz rate with the grid? Sun and wind, how lucky.

6 yards?

I'm guessing this is a trick question and that it doesn't run on diesel at all.

yeah there is: I can think of one. We allready have roads everywhere, and replacing them would mean tearing them down. Thats one of the drawbacks of being technologicly advanaced, which is that eventually new techology will make you obsolete yet you wont be able to make the transition as someone starting from scratch. Another example of this: power lines. We (the West) were to first ones to use elecritcity and bulid powerlines everywhere. Now, as it turns out, a new mode of transfering power came about (well, not quite, but almost) I involves something like lazer shooting power to people's homes or something like that. What is likely to happen is that some 3rd world countries who we are so trying to modernize might skip the step of power lines and go straight to what Ive just said, while we will still be using our crapy powerline system.

But we still continue to tear down railroad tracks and they keep going bankrupt. We bail out air but not rail. GM bought out electrical city street trains in the 40's and drove then into delapidation to sell cars. They say unrestricted land to start rails over again is unavailable and yet we could piggyback rails over the center of interstates.

i dont know if putting rail roads in the median on the interstate is such a good idea.

BTW: the government did bail out Amtrac (even though it sucks).

Your right though, we really do need bullet trains.

so why not bullet trains over the interstate medians?

In LA the rails are in the median of the interstate.

She's right. They're the commute trains, not nearly as nice as the BART in San Francisco. I was thinking more though of express trains like LA to SF, Seattle, Vegas, Phoenix. Chicago, etc. We could certainly use more of the commuter trains down some boulevards, or at least busses that operated unrestricted like trains. We get express busses here and they still stop constantly.

Sorry, it does need an inverter. I read it wrong. Aparently AC travels better through wires since it doesn't lose as much energy. Man, you know a fair bit about power supplies etc. More to teach me. Here's a fairly official site about wind power - http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/yourhome/technical/fs48.htm I did have an amature wind generator clubs site but can't find it. Guys have made windmills from old airplane props.

because if something horrible happends like a major traffic accident or worst, a derailment, the results could be disasturous. And also, specially now, there is always the possiblity of a terriost attack. Now, these events are very unlikly to happen, and the benifits of doing what you just proposed would be a great idea. I guess we would have to weigh in the beneifits and the risks. Also, putting them would mean doing consturction (thus slowing down traffic greatly) and that would piss off a lot of people. Although, we could do a little each day, and phase them in. What I have in mind is an underground subways underneath an interstate (to avoid accidents), and instead, tear down amtrac and replace IT with bullet trains.

I knew most of that stuff 20 years ago. I came up with the hybrid electro-hydrogen vehicle before it became public. Recall, I read the physics library when I was 8. DC only travels a couple miles at 120v.. The higher the voltage (AC or DC) the less it degrades, hence high tension lines at 220,000 v.
What's that about an armature winding club?
I suspect the next generation past generator and alternator will involve super-conductors and field suspension bearings. I've done some crazy crap like replacing live 3phase breakers. When I was a kid I interconnected all my appliances, including the audio (my whole apartments phone went through my PA system), improved radio designs, made chemical power switches. Thor's my name. Lightening's my game. Now that means nanotechnology.

It's occured to me before that the old mmx2 tubes could be applied to such purposes.

I guess that could work.

We have 240V AC. I really want to learn more about electronics and electricity. Know any good sites?

Don't know any sites. Is the residential AC single phase or 3-phase? Until recently invertors were mechanical, but so many adptors now exist for running televisions from cars that I would just do everything myself in 12 or 24vdc, and convert at the last moment, or use a hybrid system. They are really simple. voltage to trasformer (like those in old tv's), to anode and cathode in pressurized potassium-salt water tank, Hydrogen and Oxygen form and self compress through one way valves to tanks in the correct proportions to jet into any combustion intake manifold hooked up to a 12v generator and the inverter for house current. (You could hook your methane into that when not using it for stoves). An air compressor storage driving all mechanical tools on a lathe bench is a great way to store your mechanical energy from wind and water too. Hooking up 10 car batteries in series will give you a solid 120 source (and a place to hook in 120v solar cells), but then you may need an different phase inverter than the car variety.
If you look for basic electronics sites (I'm not sure how much you know already), make sure the terms series, parallel are there, and ohms law, maybe diode rectifiers. Ohms law - I always remember it by reverse engineering numbers for headlight fuses 12v wiring, 200w lamps, requires 17amp fuse. (25a for practical purposes). Basically A=W/V. Hooking up batteries (and conversely appliances) in series (end to end) just adds voltages (resistances too), daisy chaining them in parallel doesn't increase the voltage, but you'll have the amps to do heavy or lasting work. Think of electricity as music, pitch is the voltage, and amperage is the volume. Watts are relative to whatever system you are in. If you do use 3-phase there, you're into equipment beyond the home blacksmith. Oh, also look up 'amperage' and 'length'. 14 guage (smaller) wire may carry voltage 10 feet to your lamp, but you'll need at least 12 guage if not 10 to either run a fridge 10 feet away or run a lamp 300 feet away. Higher voltage systems require less heavy wire. Think of them as plumbing. If amp-hours is the volume of work done, then it can be done with low pressure and lots of water, or a fine tube at very high pressures. AC means pushing back and forth like a teeter-totter, reversing polarity. Three phase is like three guys spinning a merry go-round by each pulling and pushing. It requires motors wound for the purpose. For stove tops, I believe they just tap into a couple of the phases (I guess it averages out around the neighberhood). (Here in the US we have 220 for dryers and ovens), and 220 3-phase in industrial areas to run air-compressors and other heavy machines (it's more efficient; compare to reciprocating loss in piston motors to rotary engines (even though only the electrons are reciprocating)). Electronics are all dc inside. Transistors would go through hell if they had to acommodate reciprocating polarities.
Hope this helps.

My God! I know fudge all. I can understand almost everything as soon as I read it, but I feel like a dislexic with electricity. I need some flash cards I can flick through to at least learn all the terms first. Did you learn at a polytechnic or just out of personal curiosity and love of it? I know you were doing things very young. This really pisses me off. If I don't understand something immediately I start getting angry with myself.

Wow, both government TV stations just went off the air. All the commercial ones are OK. The first thing I thought was terrorism. Ok, they're back on.

I'm going to know this crap. I'm sick of being ignorant about electricity. I've copied your reply and will go over it later. Thanks alot. BTW, I was reading the paper this morning where a politician is talking about harnessing the 12 meter tides off NW Australia to generate Hydrogen which will be piped to major southern cities for use in hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. All new buses bought by Perth City run on hydrogen, and have only water as exhaust.

My step-dad taught me how to build a basic circuit when I was five. At eight I was reading books on tv repair and such (not that I understood most of what I read back then). As a kid I was hooking up things all the time, soldering switches and jacks everywhere. In my early 20 I was building better-than-factory complete wiring harnesses for the citroens I was restoring, and doing a lot of custom work too, like cars that buzzed when you opened a door not in park (this vintner had had two cars roll down the vineyards). I did take physics in college. One of my hobbies when I was a late teen newlywed was designing self-sufficient energy systems (and other home built architecture and motorhome bus conversions (hippie, ya know)).

You might be able to tell I think about all this stuff visually and have to translate back into words and formulas. Calculus and chemistry were like that for me too, I got a++ on tests because I couldn't recall formulas and had to derive my own formulae on the fly.
Get yourself some flashlight batteries and 3, 6, 12v bulbs (and a 6v toy motor) to experiment with series/parallel. Amplifiers are just solenoids/relays. A transistor is a switch; if there's enough juice in a sound to throw the switch, more juice is opened through the larger gate for that part of the larger replicate sound.

The oceans of earth are a giant battery of H2O bonds.
I'm surprised they're thinking to pump raw hydrogen (hopefully with the corresponding oxygen), it's more efficient (and dangerous), but I'd have expected raw electrical. Cars should have their own e to HO convertors for regenerative braking and to plug in the wall anyhow. The petrol aspect is what I feel should be phased out. and yet it took that being an integral part here for the system to sell here. E-transducer lanes on
the highways, battery for in town, H2O combustion (from regenerative braking and overcharging) in combo with petrol combustion for country roads. Incidentally the power required to split water through electrolysis is equivalent to the ideal calories from it's recombustion, it's just a battery. I learned this in highschool chemistry. Either I was lucky in what lessons came my way through life, or was better at applied attention, either way I've ended up with quite a versatile useful education.

¥"Don't forget the ecclipse in Australia"
Losing TV stations happens when I get angry too. ..part of that soundtrack I mentioned. Perception and manifestation fit wiring diagrahms too.
When you love creation, it flows so smoothly you don't have to worry about a thing.
¥"and I saw my reflection in the snow covered hills"
(alaska vacation in six days)
That understanding might turn you into a sorcerer, instead of arranging your antenna, you'll be tuning your mind to get better tv reception. When the laws of physics and society don't go your way, sometimes you have to step in, rearrange the set (or at least the lighting) before the next shoot.

Yeah, I also thought hydrogen was too dangerous for a lot of what they propose, but when i lived in New Zealand most cars there either ran on CNG or LPG with never an explosion. I saw a show called Australias Most Dangerous Vehicles which had a car that some guy had made run on gas only the gas cylinder was one of those giant domestic ones they stand next to houses just lying in the back seat. Conversions to CNG cost arouns $1500, so this guy decided he'd do it. He worked for Energex gas so he might have been ripping the gas off too.

Yeah, the eclipse. I've started to see them as bad omens, like our ancestors did.

It's bad how free energy like water is wasted because oil companies want to keep us buying oil. I guess you've heard of people who managed to run vehicles off water being paid visits by the 'authorities'threatening them to keep their mouth shut in return for them "allowing" them to use their own invention. Using the break energy to reconvert the waste water to H and O is a good idea. The condensation from the car air-con could also supplement after filtering. Brisbane's suburban trains are electric and their break energy is converted back to AC and put on the grid.

I really want to get independant of society soon. I've got to find a way to harness free energy.

Water's more like a spent battery, like a boulder at the bottom of a hill. Electrical energy needs added to separate it into the increased bonds for H & O, and then that same amount energy is removed as heat during combustion. I didn't know there was a main ecclipse, I just quoted the radio which was my reminder to comment on your personal eclipse, the tv stations going out.

Yeah, there was an eclipse that passed right across central Australia. We just launched a satellite that will study the effect of solar radiation variations on Earth communications. It's got a weird orbit, not geostationary, or even orbiting west-east. It's going to go over both poles and orbit that way. My CD burner has just died, right after I read a story about US record industry threatening to sue individual downloaders of music from the internet.

Ah yes. The CD story is the sort of amusement I suggested looking for. The next sort of amusement is actual conversation, followed by choosing your own thoughts to write event that surround you. The CD is more outside=outside. Eventually all the inside equals all the outside, the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm. Keep it as an impartial meaningless amusement though. Throwing gravity into the mix can heavily alter the dynamics. One section of a theater review i just wrote was on all the conversation interactions I noticed the script having with the more active participants in the audience, like people who had to get up, or the kid who talked through it. I wrote it for the teachers sake. The more variety of consciousness she sees going on, the more understanding she can pass to her acting students. It's like my doing free tarot card readings for tarot card readers.