Toyota didn't do it, AC Propulsion did it.

Toyota got a lot of green PR for the Prius. But that's caused a lot of people to overlook the fact that Toyota has been one of the least supportive of major automakers for pure EVs. Probably only Honda is less supportive, directing its future-car resources toward hydrogen.

You don't have to liquidy helium to isolate it; you have to liquify everything else. That said, helium is often desired in liquid form, since its largest use is cryogenics.

Citation needed

Okay, if you want to go there, here you go: The Hindenburg Fire: Hydrogen or Incendiary Paint? (Dessler, Overs, & Appleby, 2005). And here's a more detailed writeup on the same thing.

To go into the particular aspects you mentioned:

1) "Rocket fuel" when not contained is actually not particularly intense-burning on its own. It only burns "like a rocket" when the pressure is confined.
2) Even rocket fuels would burn only a tiny fraction as fast as the Hindenburg burned.
3) The mix is not at all correct for a rocket fuel or for thermite; the ratios are all wrong.
4) The discharge Bain used to ignite the fabric is many orders of magnitude more intense than the method he theorized to produce it, and could ignite almost anything.
5) Any spark produced by his proposed method would jump in the wrong direction, a direction he says wouldn't work, and would nonetheless be three orders of magnitude too weak to ignite the skin.
6) The chemicals used are rated as self-extingishing, and in fact, countless fabrics of hindenburg skin did self-extingish.
7) Even in Bain's burn, driven by his powerful ignition source, for the skin to have burned fast enough to represent the Hindenburg burn, his sample would have had to be consumed in a mere 2 milliseconds, like flash paper. At the rate his sample burned, the Hindenburg would have taken 40 hours to be consumed.
8) The skin of the Hindenburg, and many other airships, were struck by lightning many times without ignition. Airship disasters tended only to happen when the ships were venting hydrogen (as the Hindenburg was).
9) The claim that helium airships burned the same is false. Bain cited the Macon, but the Macon crashed into the pacific with no fire; late while floating on the water, gasoline from the control car burned part of the wreckage in a small, relatively insignficant fire. The Navy blimp also had a gasoline fire, and the damage was both slow and confied only to where the gasoline fires were hitting.

No, helium exists even at the surface. But only at about 5 parts per million. But hey, we recover neon at 18ppm (it's rare for the same reason as helium - it escapes). Neon costs about $2k USD per kg. So to extrapolate linearly, you'd get about $7k per kg. Helium used to be cheaper, but today it's about $500/kg.

On the other hand, you'd be using much larger volume production, and there may be some tricks to recover it more cheaply than just a linear difference would suggest, so perhaps more like $4k USD per kg would be achieved. One can hope that it won't be too dear.

Probably the ultimate solution for party balloons will be to use lighter membranes so that you can use weaker lifting gas mixes - a small amount H2 or CH4 plus a couple percent H2O and the rest N2. H2 burns at 4% concentration in air and CH4 at 5%, but of course they'll dilute from whatever ratio they're at in the balloons when air gets mixed in, so you could probably have several times that amount without risking a burn. And a small burn is probably acceptable anyways, just not a rapid, powerful conflagration. I bet you could deal with something like 20% CH4 or 14% H2 safely.

Of course, using much lighter membranes would probably mandate the use of CH4 instead of H2. Balloons already have enough trouble stopping He from escaping even with current, heavier membranes, and H2 escapes much more readily than helium.

Where does this stereotype that efficient cars can't go fast come from? Especially anything with a modern electric motor in it tends to have tons of power (think Tesla Roadster, although that's far from as fast as they get!). Even the consumer-grade stuff using older brushed motors like the older-style hybrids - remember when Wozniak was arrested going over 100mph in his Prius?

Depends on what you call a "big boom". I remember pure hydrogen balloon ignition from high school chemistry and it was no trivial burn. When the mythbusters tried it out on their Hindenburg special, they found that they couldn't use pure hydrogen on their model because it'd just rip the whole model instantly into shreds, contrary to their desire to present it as a steady burn (so they switched to just feeding-in hydrogen).

But yes, of course a ready-mixed fuel-air mixture gives a much more satisfying thud ;)

This guy is living in a fantasy world. Helium use as a lifting gas in *all forms* is only 7% of helium use. Of that, party balloons are just a fraction. MRIs, on the other hand, use up 28% of helium consumption. And how could they possibly use so much? Because they do essentially nothing to recover it as it boils off.

Perhaps they should clean up their glass house before they start throwing stones?

Also, it's not like helium will become unavailable as we use up current stocks. It'll just increase in price by 1-2 orders of magnitude as we have to switch to getting it from chilling it out of the atmosphere in tiny quantities, the same way we recover other nobel gasses (but requiring more concentration). Now, of course that sucks, but it means that people who run MRI machines and do other such tasks will be forced to clean up their acts concerning helium recovery instead of simply casting blame on others.

It was not coated in explosives. It was not coated in thermite, either. These are myths. Which should be obvious given the number of pieces of Hindenburg skin that were recovered and sold as souveniers; they self-extinguished as they fell.

When the Mythbusters tested this out, they got "a" skin reaction, but nothing like when they used actual thermite - and on top of that, they had to totally bias the test in terms of a skin reaction, including having orders of magnitude higher of a skin/fuel ratio than the actual Hindenberg and only slowly feeding in the hydrogen to give the skin a chance to burn instead of just being ripped part almost instantaneously.

One thing that this article isn't really consistent on is whether this is 15% of the Carnot efficiency for a given temperature gradient or 15% of the total difference in temperature between the two thermal reservoirs. Also, its performance under different temperature conditions can be very important for some applications, but that's not made clear.

And for anyone saying "it's not an engine, Carnot doesn't come into account".... wrong. It amazes me how many people think this. Carnot's law applies to any generation of work from heat, period. If you can break Carnot's law, no matter with what sort of device, you can create a perpetual motion machine - that is, you could have your work generated from heat run a high-COP heat pump to pump heat back up against the gradient to keep your machine running. Remember that heat pumps can have COP notably greater than 1.0 - that is, they often can move several times more energy against the gradient than goes into running them. To put it another way, a heat engine will never be able to harness more work from a given temperature gradient than the maximal-efficient heat pump for the same temperature differential.

You can do all sorts of crazy things if you start allowing random theoretically-possible particles to exist in your systems. For example, tether a charged ball of negative inertial mass to a same-charged one of positive inertial mass, and they both take off accelerating indefinitely toward c with no energy input ;) The negative inertial mass ball experiences an attraction toward the positive ball, while the positive one experiences a repulsion.

The sort of craziness that comes out of most imaginary particles is, to me, highly suggestive of their nonexistence. Most seem like the sort of thing that could end up destroying the universe or at least leaving some pretty darned big signs of their existence. And given that the universe has built some pretty massive particle colliders on its own...

I didn't, I probably should have. And it was only six months ago.

The EAW charge is:

4. On 17th August 2010, in the home of the injured party [name given] in Enkoping, Assange deliberately consummated sexual intercourse with her by improperly exploiting that she, due to sleep, was in a helpless state. It is an aggravating circumstance that Assange, who was aware that it was the expressed wish of the injured party and a prerequisite of sexual intercourse that a condom be used, still consummated unprotected sexual intercourse with her. The sexual act was designed to violate the injured party’s sexual integrity.

Her statement is (skilling past the background details and the whole night of him trying to have unprotected sex with her and her refusing, and him agreeing reluctantly a few times to protected sex and ordering her around; also skipping the aftermath):

They dozed off and she awoke and felt him penetrating her. She immediately asked, “Are you wearing anything?”, to which he replied, “You”. She said to him: “You better not have HIV”, and he replied, “Of course not”. “She felt that it was too late. He was already inside her and she let him continue. She didn’t have the energy to tell him one more time. She had gone on and on about condoms all night long. She has never had unprotected sex before.

Not only does the Assange team not dispute that she had been spending all night refusing unprotected sex with him, but she has a "paper trail" a mile long to prove it, including her ex boyfriend of 2 1/2 years who testified that she was so paranoid of unprotected sex that not only did she not once allow it in their entire relationship, but she even had him get STD tested before *protected* sex.

Oh, I'm sorry, "crikey.com.au" is so much better of a source than the actual police statements and the actual arrest warrant.

Beyond that, you're jumbling everything else up. That was a totally different woman at the party, AA instead of SW. The party was planned in advance. The charges in regards to AA are not rape. At the party she described to one friend the "violent" sex with Assange. This is all straight from the police interviews, including witnes testimony. And please don't get me started on the "how a victim has to behave afterwards for something to be rape". I've known multiple rape victims who *dated* their rapist afterwards to try to make it feel less like rape. I let mine walk me back to my car and even waited for him while he peed in the street. Why? Hell if I know, I was in shock. I didn't exactly have "get raped" on my TODO list for that evening.

Which has nothing to do with whether or not he hacked a company. Just like whether Wikileaks is awesome has nothing to do with whether or not Assange waited until a girl was asleep to have unprotected sex with her when she had spent the evening refusing to do.

This guy didn't just earn his nerd card, he earned a nerd obelisk in his front yard.