I failed to notice that the Sydney Morning Herald summed up its previous Firepower coverage in this feature last Saturday.
There's some new info, too. Useless engine cleaning machines. Naming of the only identifiable active ingredient of the magic pills. The amazing revelation that the proudly trumpeted proof of Firepower's claims from General Motors, Volvo, Russian mining operations and so on does not actually exist.
Oh, and the fact that the principals allege themselves to be Jehovah's Witnesses, and have a glancing association with the extremely delectable Exclusive Brethren, on whose Australian activities the Herald has also been reporting on for some time now.
[This story turned into a whole big thing, which I've given its own category on the blog.]
(I've already got Robert Sapolsky's hair; I could look just like him in not that many months, if I tried. It's been clearly explained to me that I'll abruptly become single again if I do try, though.)
Actually, Firepower's magic fuel pills now seem likely to be the same thing that got another Western Australian company busted and (not very heavily) fined in 2003. And the guy in charge of Firepower was himself exposed as selling a worthless fuel pill in New Zealand back in 1992.
"CATO" can stand for a number of things, but in rocketry it means an explosion very, very early in the flight.
Opinions differ about whether it stands for "Catastrophe At Take-Off" or something else, but whatever the exact term is, everybody agrees that it involves lots of fuel burning much too early, for one reason or another.
CATOs are often very entertaining, for people who do not have to pay for them.
I remember watching an excellent documentary about Peenemünde that included quite a lot of period footage of V2 tests...
...though obviously not with a voice-over nearly as good as this.
On the subject of voice-overs - if you have the choice of using the word "catastrophe" or the word "anomaly" in a situation like this...
...the former is better.
(And how about that dubbing of the World's Oldest Explosion Sound over the real thing, huh? I bet that show was produced by the same people who do the "World's Most Severely Padded Police Videos" series.)
When big (unmanned) rockets blow up, it's got a kind of... corporate... feel to it. You're not personally connected to the action and feeling sorry for whoever's losing his job over it.
When amateur rocketry enters CATO land, though, there's more room for sympathy. Some individual person usually invested considerable time and money in that thing, and wh-BANG, there it all goes to nowhere.
For some reason, though, I find this one quite funny:
This one doesn't have the same comic timing, though:
One kind of rocket malfunction that can segue from CATO status into a general flight problem is the "blow-by", in which in which exhaust gases get out through the top of the motor as well as the bottom.
(Oh, and do try to ignore the YouTube commenters and their d00d-this-is-what-s4ddam-used-to-bring-down-the-WTC theories.)
The clip's from a German show called "Clever!", which has its own video page here.
Any time I see a big-boom TV-show science demonstration these days I can't help but suspect it was faked, thanks to the scumbags at Brainiac, but this one does seem to be genuine.
I mean, forget water. Thermite will explosively boil zinc.
The bit at the end of that video is quite a bad idea if you're not wearing eye protection. And I'd keep my mouth shut, too. Violently heating any stone-like material can result in steam pockets inside it firing chips of hot rock at you at considerable speed.
While we're on a roll, I feel the need for a traditional pyro video, with shaky camerawork and autofocus hunting all over the place while a small thing glows in the middle of the frame.
That's pretty good. But it doesn't have a bunch of whooping drunks.
Ah, there you go.
There's a whole class of thermite reactions. The iron oxide and aluminium one is just cheap and powerful.
Here, for instance, is copper oxide and zinc:
The pros ignite their thermite with super-sparklers made for the purpose, which are easier to light than magnesium ribbon, fatter and hotter than standard sparklers, and very hard to extinguish.
These last two videos are from more Germans, this time netexperimente.de, whose YouTube profile page is here. There's a decent collection of other whooshes, oozes and bangs there, including a simple demonstration of the classic dust explosion (it's noisier if you jam the lid on harder...) that Adam and Jamie failed to perform back in '04. There are plenty of other classics, too, including a nice version of sugar and sulfuric acid - in which, essentially, the concentrated acid is so thirsty for water that it pulls it right out of the sucrose molecules, leaving a frothy mass of black carbon.
And here's someone melting through a rock with a thermal lance...
...and then burning some pennies. As you do.
Modern US one cent coins are copper plated zinc, and zinc burns quite well if you get it hot enough.
If you inhale much of the zinc oxide smoke, though, you'll get ill. "Metal fume fever" has influenza-like symptoms, and zinc fumes are the most common cause (welders, who get it when they breathe the smoke while welding galvanised steel, call it "zinc flu"). It probably won't kill you, but it might.
If you've got a highly questionable investment to sell and are therefore in search of people with a remarkably high ratio of disposable income to intelligence, you really can't go past sportsmen.
And, in a procedure practically diagnostic of pseudoscience all by itself, Firepower have promised lots of really convincing test results that prove their claims but, so far, failed to deliver.
(In case you're wondering, "spruik" is a more-Australian-than-English word meaning "advertise", particularly in the context of making a sales speech to people passing by. Some Australian shops employ "spruikers", traditionally English (sounding...) people, to stand outside with a microphone and a little amplifier and encourage people to come inside. This is a parody, but it's a quite accurate depiction of the species. And it's also aimed at AWB Limited, the previously mentioned scandalously corrupt Australian quasi-governmental organisation that's loosely connected with Firepower.)
Oh, wait - did I forget to mention that Firepower's European chief executive was previously the head of Halliburton in Germany?
Using a roof ventilator as a wind turbine (I think this is the home site of the video creators) is a neat idea. It'd really work, and make a great science fair project - just hook up a little brush motor to the rotor, connect an LED (or several) to it, and see how much wind you need before your LED pops.
This design will not, however, really give the advertised "cheap" power on a dollars per watt basis, since I doubt you could put more than a few watts of generator braking on one of those roof turbines without stalling it in anything short of a gale.
A roof-ventilator turbine could still be useful for charging a battery to run minor stuff occasionally, like a radio and a small light in a shed somewhere where the wind blows but the sun doesn't shine much. Or as a supplemental charger for a system that has a solar panel as well. Plus, you could still use it as a roof ventilator.
There's a reason why you don't see a lot of vertical turbines, though. Yes, they're simple - most importantly, you don't need a mechanism to make them face into the wind, and power take-off is very easy when you've got a simple vertical shaft to work with - but they just don't work very well. This is not just because they don't suck as much energy out of the air as a propeller-type turbine does (see also: Paddle-Wheels, And Why We Don't Use A Lot Of Them Any More), but also because they usually don't turn fast enough.
Slow-turning turbines can be good if you want to direct-drive a pump or something, but generators usually want more RPM, and gearing up a wind turbine is a great way to make it stall.
There are other vertical turbine designs that're very quick to make and have a lot more blade area for the wind to push on. The "Savonius" versions made from oil drums cut in half (technically, roof ventilators are a multi-bladed Savonius turbine) are the price/performance winners for small jobs, I think. But the world is not short of other ideas.
There are also commercial vertical turbine designs, the domestic-sized versions of which have a tendency to bescams.