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July 1998 Newsbyte | |
EDITOR'S
CORNER
Summertime!!! My favorite time of the year!! Only don't like the humid hot days
as well as the fresh cool ones of spring and fall. Can't be toooo choosy I guess. I've
gotten Joe Luster to help me get my computer room up to par. Got rid of a bunch of
stuff, and shifted a lot more around. Now, I'm happy! And Mitzi says about time. Not
much new here in the woods. All the little furry and feathered people are doing their
thing, scurrying around collecting seeds, sunflower seeds, and anything else edible. It
is so much fun watching a Chipmunk try to carry off a buckeye that just almost won't fit
in her mouth. Try half dozen times, and finally gets it and scampers off to her
burrough.
Well, I must confess to being very tired. Have barely enough energy to eat, and
always want to sleep. Don't think I'll even be alive for the August issue to be published,
which is already completed. I have already typed in my final editorial section, and only
hope by then Brian Powell wil be the Editor, or if he refuses, hope someone else has
steppped forward by then.. I have really enjoyed the last eight years of being Editor.
Scared to death that the declining membership was my fault. But then I hear others say
that that couldn't be the reason. Thanks. And thank all of you for your good remarks,
helpful suggestions, and the hell that Ruth gave me for using #8 type -- no-one could
read it.
Thanks again!!
| President | Willis Troyer | 669-3925 |
| Vice Presidents | Brian Powell | 828-8365 |
| Tom Zimmerman | 264-5521 | |
| Secretary-Treasurer | Pat Johnston | 264-8726 |
| Librarians | Joe Luster | 682-7815 |
| Phillip Crosby | 264-1444 | |
| Editor | Harry Geiser | 682-7486 |
| Magnetic Cooling | PAGE 2 |
| Fuel of the Future | PAGE 2 |
| Spinning Your Own | PAGE 3 |
| Cranking It Up | PAGE 3 |
| Monopoly's Math | PAGE 3 |
| 40 Hours Pay/30 Hours Work | PAGE 3 |
Los Angeles, CA -
Magnetic cooling may become the heart of air conditioners and refrigerators of
the future that are more efficient and environmentally safe.
Researchers are also exploring the same system as a means of producing
inexpensive liquid hydrogen to fuel future cars.
At a meeting of the American Physical Society in Los Angeles, physicists say the
new system exploits the rare earth element gadolinium that heats up when exposed to
a magnetic field and cools down when the field is removed, enabling it to absorb heat
from its surroundings.
Refrigeration systems which utilize the "magnetocaloric effect" will require less
energy than conventional units. In addition, the heat transfer fluids are environmentally
friendly, ranging from water at higher temperatures to helium gas for reaching
extremely low temperatures.
Conventional refrigerators remove heat by compressing and expanding a
gas.
Vitalij K. Pecharsky, an associate scientist from the Department of Energy's
Ames Laboratory, said the key to the new systems is a new alloy of gadolinium
developed by his team of researchers at Ames. They found that by combining
gadolinium with silicon and germanium produced a material with twice the
magnetocaloric effect of pure gadolinium.
Moreover, varying the amount of germanium allows the cooling effect to be
"tuned" to produce various ranges of cooling. By using layered beds of gadolinium
compounds gases can be cooled from room temperature to the supercold temperature
required to liquefy hydrogen at minus 425 degrees F (minus 253 degrees C) in one
simple apparatus.
The Ames scientist said that the new process would make it possible to
efficiently manufacture small quantities of liquid hydrogen, which many call the "fuel of
the future" because hydrogen burns cleanly, producing only water. Present hydrogen
plants, which use a gas compression system similar to the home refrigerator, are
extremely costly to operate and cannot economically produce less than five tons of
liquefied hydrogen a day.
A small company, Astronautics Corporation in Madison, Wisc., is collaborating
with Ames to develop the new technology.
Its goal is to design small scale systems that can be used to cool food, homes
and automobiles. Carl Zimm of Astronautics told the physicists that his company has a
system in operation for more than a year that utilizes water and antifreeze as
coolant.
Astronautics, which holds licensees to magnetic cooling patents originally
obtained by Los Alamos National Laboratory, plans to have a prototype system ready
to demonstrate to refrigeration and air conditioning companies by the end of the
year.
Contacted at the company, Leonard Komorowski, project engineer, says interest
in the system is high because manufacturers were forced to sacrifice efficiency when
chlorinated fluorocarbon coolants were recently banned because they contribute to the
destruction of the Earth's protective ozone layer.
"We are aggressively pursuing commercial applications," he said. There are still
many technical obstacles to be overcome but in the future magnetic cooling may be
producing the fuel for your car, cooling your house or automobile-and maybe even
chilling the beer.
Says Komorowski, "We thought about making a beer cooler." --by Alan Hall
The once-fanciful notion of creating your own CD-ROM discs is beginning to
look more like a do-it- yourself project.
Cost is one reason. Prices of compact disc recordable (CD-R) drives for PCs
have plunged dramatically in recent months, to as little as $350. Hi-Val, JVC, Mitsumi,
Ricoh, Smart & Friendly, Sony, and Yamaha are among those making inexpensive
CD-R drives. Most of these drives now also include software such as Adaptec's
Easy-CD Creator, which walks you through the process of putting data, music, pictures,
or video onto a disc. And blank CD-R discs have fallen to a price of $1 to $2 per
disc.
Why spin your own CD-ROM discs? For one thing, CD-R discs make for very
cheap storage. Capable of holding as much as 650MB per disc, CD-R can archive your
files for a fraction of a penny per megabyte. CD-R is also an easy, inexpensive way to
exchange large picture, audio, or video files with friends and family, since CD-R discs
can be read by any CD-ROM player (though not by some early DVD-ROM drives). You
can also use most CD-R drives to copy music CDs (for personal use), or transfer music
from tapes and records to CDs.
CD-R's primary limitation is that it enables you to record information to a disc
only once-you can't erase. But newer CD-rewritable (CD-RW) drives, which let you
record and erase as needed, now sell for between $500 and $800. The big drawback is
that blank CD-RW discs still cost $10 to $15 apiece.
-- -- Chris O'Malley
Even as PCs get cheaper, the speed of their microprocessors keeps right on
getting faster. And new chips from Intel, AMD, and IBM make it clear that trend will
continue.
By summer, Intel plans to be delivering two new, low-cost versions of its Pentium
II processor to PC makers. The first, code-named Covington, will be a 266MHz version
with no onboard memory, or cache, to help speed things along. It will be used mainly in
PCs costing less than $1,000. The second, code-named Mendocino, will run at
300MHz and will have some onboard cache for slightly faster performance. It's bound
for PCs costing $1,000 to $1,500.
AMD, meanwhile, is shipping a 266MHz version of its Pentium-compatible K6
chip, also intended for low-cost PCs. Its first customers include Compaq and IBM.
Cyrix, another maker of Pentium-class chips, says it has similar plans for faster,
cheaper chips.
The megahertz keep coming for Macintosh fans, too. IBM recently shipped a
275MHz version of its PowerPC 750 chip, and the company says it has prototypes of
the 750 that run at speeds as high as 480MHz, with the capability to push the PowerPC
to 1 gigahertz (about 1,000MHz) or more in the near future. -- Suzanne Kantra
Kirschner
Like many people, Thomas Friddell, a Boeing aerospace engineer, likes to play
Monopoly. But unlike most, Friddell spends his lunch breaks at his computer, working
out winning strategies for the game.
Using a math program called Mathcad, sold by MathSoft, Friddell has calculated
the board game's probabilities, including the odds of landing on various Monopoly
squares. Among his conclusions: Illinois Avenue sees the heaviest traffic. Players are
least likely to land on Baltic Avenue. Three houses on a property, rather than four
houses or a hotel, brings in the fastest return on your investment. Players roll sevens
more often than any other dice combination, so wait until your opponents are roughly
that close before buying houses. Friddell's next task is to analyze an even more
confrontational real estate game, Risk.-- -- Dawn Stover
Activist and one-man think-tank Jeremy Rifkin was in Saint Paul last week to
address a Cities at Work Forum, and his talk was about the future that computer
technology has in store for us. Those familiar with previous Rifkin predictions
(extinction, toxification, famine, and genetic havoc), will be heartened to hear that we
can add worldwide unemployment to the list -- thanks to our computers.
Here's the scenario laid out in his talk and The End of Work (Tarcher-Putnam,
$15.95 paperback):
The cheapest labor today, Rifkin said, is much more expensive than computer
technologies now coming online. People not only cost more, but they are inconsistent,
they get sick and die, they want all sorts of attention, and some of them are complete
idiots. Therefore, the downsizing we have seen over the past five years will continue
over the next couple of decades.