Many animals live in Pasadena. I’ve encountered lots of cats, squirrels and racoons. One raccoon and one squirrel in particular seem to love the wooden fence in our area. They act as sorts of guardians. Sometimes, when I want to go to the gym at night, they stare at me. Maybe they are waiting for the “all clear” and that’s just how raccoons communicate safety knowledge (by staring contests).
Overall it is very nice having animal neighbors. They add a great deal of randomness and interactivity to what may normally be a predictable day. That’s the beauty of not living in a vacuum.
Here’s a little video showing one of the squirrels in our area.
"Home of Our Own" is probably going to be the next hit single on the radio!
Everybody knows about the bank foreclosure situation. It is serious but it also is causing many people to re-think their lives. This can be a very good thing because it puts the individual back into a place where they feel they are less “weighted down” by possessions and responsibilities.
In the video below, you will see people from the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS) do a sit in at a bank. They are singing a song, “We need a home…home of our own…” and it is sung with an uplifting sense of ironic humor that it sticks into one’s mind like chewing gum to a car seat.
The lady who is the employee at the bank looks so perturbed by the men and women participating in the sit in. Yet at the same time she is almost ready to bust out laughing. The juxtaposition of the couch, carpet and even a table top strategy game gives the whole environment that “Living Room” feel.
What makes the video even funnier is how the faux living room that the occupiers set up actually attracts more customers into the bank. They probably had record numbers of new checking account sign-ups that day because the OWS people seemed to add a sense of fresh energy to the bank.
Check out the video below, it is serious too funny.
This is an example of a large Stirling Engine - It is very complicated but the video below will show a much smaller and simpler device:
Have you ever compressed something until you crushed it? This could have been when you first squeezed a box of Nerds after finishing the last of the strawberry candies. Or maybe you crushed an egg with your bare hands just to test to see if it was possible.
Depending on the structure of an enclosure, an interesting thing happens before the box or object is crushed…it has the ability to perform work.
Not all enclosures are as capable of performing work as efficiently as others, but the ones that can withstand significant amounts of internal pressure make for good cores for a device called a “Stirling Engine.”
In the video below, you will see a homemade Sterling Engine which uses a tuna can as the core. The tuna can has the function of containing pressure differences. As the air inside the cleaned tuna can gets pressurized, it is able to translate the change in heat and pressure into work. In this case, the work is spinning the CDR which is attached to the device.
The spinning CDR is a simplified representation of an important piece of technology known as a flywheel. Flywheels are intriguing because they can store energy without needing batteries or liquid fuel. The mere fact that the CDR is spinning rapidly means that the energy contained by its rotation allows it to channeled at a later time.
That’s actually one of the fun tricks about controlled spinning objects: As long as you can decrease the controlled rotation of an object, you can turn that rotation energy (think kinetics) into either electricity or some other form of power.
What I like most about this Homemade Sterling Engine is how it was made from very small, Do It Yourself parts. It was built from a guide by someone who read a Russian forum which you can see for yourself by clicking HERE.
The tuna can is so funny. Talk about taking advantage of anything of value in one’s home!
As mentioned in the title of this article, the tiny source of energy is just a little oil-looking lamp. And look at all the work that single source of heat is doing, it is simply mind boggling to see this engine get moving for so long with such a simple heat source. Truly impressive.
