It feels like the aluminum is being consumed as fuel, like gasoline, but it's not.

Recycling the aluminum oxide back into aluminum is done using the same electrolytic process that is used when smelting aluminum (which is also oxide.)

It requires a great deal of electricity to do it. In that sense, the aluminum is just being used as a storage medium for electrical power, just like a regular battery, and can be expected to put the same kind of burden on the electrical supply.

I don't know how much energy ends up being wasted in this cycle either.

Similarly, hydrogen is best viewed as an energy storage medium, not as a alternative fuel.

That's one of the interesting properties of the aluminum-air battery. The aluminum plates can be replaced quickly and easily. Just pop out the spent plate, drop in a new one, and off you go.

The reaction products (aluminum oxide) can also be captured and recycled into new aluminum.

A nifty idea, but there are assorted problems that have to be solved before it can be practical.

Suppose you sent your wife to Best Buy to get you a computer, and she came back with a router. Are you satisfied? It does store, process and transmit information. But somehow, something seems to be missing...

So, I can recharge my phone by doing yoga?

And that's on the high-pressure side too.

I think modern propane tanks have some kind of fancy valve that closes if the flow-rate gets too high. But how much do you trust it?

There's an app for that!

This "weakness" seems a little silly.

You typically make your backups on your office desktop PC, and leave them there. But all the sensitive data in the backup file was already there on that same PC, in your corporate mailbox, completely unencrypted.

Cracking a Blackberry backup file would be the hardest way to get access to that data.

They've been doing this for four years?

Perhaps Mr. Williams is starting to think he really is Swan, the evil record producer he played in Phantom of the Paradise.

A shame really, that he's revealing himself to be such a tool, because I do like his music.

It's the bad guy that draws first. The good guy only shoots in self-defense.

WHOIS privacy was created in the first place to protect us from spammers (the WHOIS database being ripe for email address scraping). Then the spammers took advantage of it to protect themselves from justice.

It seems like there's some kind of insightful point to be made here, but I'm not sure what it is.

The "safety factor of three" was something that NASA management claimed. The O-rings would supposedly fail catastrophically if they eroded half-way through (one radius). In previous launches, the O rings had eroded only 1/3 of a radius. NASA management claimed this represented a "safety factor of three".

Feynman was very critical of that assertion. The design did not expect the O rings to erode at all. The presence of erosion meant that they had already failed, and there was no safety factor at all. It just dumb luck that there had been no disasters before Challenger.

Those O-rings had a safety factor of three!

I remember seeing, hearing or reading something, a long time ago, from one of the effects guys on the Buck Rogers TV series (the Gil Gerrard one.) He was describing an effect in which they needed a 3-D wireframe model of a spaceship rotating on a computer monitor (much like you see here.)

He said that he spent a fair bit of time trying to program a computer to do it, but couldn't get it to work (not really a math or computer guy at all). In the end, he fell back on what he knew best: mechanical effects. He whipped up a wireframe model using actual wire, painted it day-glo orange, mounted it on a gimbal, and stuck the whole thing inside a hollowed-out computer monitor with the insides painted black.

Sometimes the old ways are the best ways...