Testing the TK Tar Baby

[markdansie]

@Milehigh
SA has not been kind to me over the years. I wish I could report on the 99% of things that never work out but they always slap NDA's on me.
Lutec never was viable.
I have a soft spot for Wayne. Its a real community effort and he has some clever people there. I like the story behind the story and sometimes its about the journey. As you know i wont sign off until it can run for two days which will account for initial start up inputs.
i will say tis on my last visit there all the pressures all maintained, even if I start or stopped it and left it overnight.
They have installed a lot of sensing a data accumulation equipment. After my sign off a team of very highly qualified engineers and scientists will be doing the full evaluation, Those results will be made available.
i can say they are nearing the time for my visit, last week it ran for several hours until they stopped it. They have stopped trying to fine tune it. How this all pans out I have no idea but sometimes I like to encourage people.
i always enjoy your comments on the various forums I follow over the years. you have a lot more technical and scientific skills. I am fortunate I have access to very good engineers and physicists.
@TK
I was could feel you cringe and half expected to hear a scream carry around the world at my suggestion. I remembered he film well.
I have followed your work for a long time and enjoy your humor and have learned a lot from you. Sometime it is good to let people know there are quite a few of us who appreciate your efforts even though we do not comment.
Well enough of the back slapping I have a few more myths to bust.
Kind Regards
Mark

[TinselKoala]

They won't touch each other and there is no 'open' door so they won't go anywhere because there is no pressure to 'push' them? Equally spaced apart and moving very little is my final answer...

Yes... equally spaced apart and, because they are taking no chances whatsoever of being touched.... they will be maximally far apart, too. Which means they will be located..... exactly..... where?  Can you pin them down more precisely? ( the room is roughly square, I forgot to mention that, sorry)
In fact, please imagine several different perimeter shapes.  A circular room, a star-shaped room, etc.. Where will all the mutually repelling unit charges wind up, if they are left to their own tendencies, which are not only just to repel but to get as far apart from everybody else as possible?

[TinselKoala]

@Mark:

Thanks for your nice comment. I do sometimes get discouraged... perhaps that's why I'm including the koan, to remind myself of the single note.

I too have been watching the MrWayne story with great interest. From the few comments and questions from me that he's responded to, I was under the impression that he was claiming they had run successfully for longer periods and were indeed making some output, like lighting the usual light bulbs and etc. Your statement that it ran for a few hours and then was stopped, doesn't sound particularly encouraging.
I remember how surprised many people seemed when I demonstrated that a good heavy platter on good bearings could run a long time on a little push... like take 10 minutes or more to run down from 100 RPM, and even seem to run at a constant speed for some seconds due to easy measurement imprecision.

But with all the groaning and straining, it's hard to imagine the Travis device running even for a couple hours on the stored startup energy alone since there are manifestly such great losses. There is a small air compressor that is kept running, for the pneumatic valves and actuators, isn't there? I thought I saw one in the photos but of course I can't tell if it is running during the operation of the main device.
The hydraulic motor/windmill generator genset that can be seen in the photos and video would be one set of items that I would be scrutinising carefully... if allowed.

I am intrigued and have even considered a site visit myself, as I am in South Texas and it would not be a huge trip for me. However, if there is some hanky panky going on, of course I would not be allowed to detect it.

I'll be waiting with a lot of interest, to see what happens on your next visit.  I've not analyzed the spreadsheets that seem to give numerical support (no pun intended) to the multiple cylinder system, but I can't help but feel that some critical item, like the mass of the cyls themselves, is being left out. Leave out bearing and other friction, for example, and a flywheel will run forever...  on paper.

Let's not digress too far here, though. Right now, for the next day or so, I want to continue with the essays on basic concepts of QED and how the Hydraulic Analogy is both helpful and yet incomplete in informing us about electricity/electromagnetism and the behaviour of circuits, devices, and systems.  I'll be putting up another chapter in a few hours.

Thanks again for your interest and encouraging words!

--TK

[TinselKoala]

A brief aside: Precision and Accuracy.

Target shooting is an Olympic sport, did you know that? Several Olympic events involve shooting at targets under various conditions with various projectile-throwers like air rifles and pistols. And obviously, the athletes are scored on how well they hit their targets. And they spend a LOT of time practising and preparing their very expensive equipment for the Olympic events. What does it mean to be a good target shooter?

Well, duh. It means that you hit your target, and you hit it consistently. You need to be both _accurate_ and _precise_ in your performance, and the two criteria are different and somewhat independent. Roughly speaking, accuracy means that you hit what you are aiming at, and precision means you hit in the same spot every time.

So let's say you are an Olympic athlete, a sharpshooter with a ten thousand dollar precision match grade air rifle and you are practising at the range, plinking away at a tiny target, a set of concentric circles on paper, ten meters away. You have a lowpower telescopic sight with crosshairs and of course you put these crosshairs dead center on your bullseye before you squeeze off a pellet. Pop ! Pop! After 5 shots you go and check the target.... and you see that all five of your shots have gone through a single hole in the paper, each pellet enlarging it slightly so there's a little irregular star punched out, just bigger than the pellets themselves. That... is precision. You are performing consistently, your trial-to-trial variance is small, and the variance itself is much smaller than the "measuring instrument"... the pellet. Use a single small hole for five pellets, that is pretty precise shooting indeed. Five holes grouped together in a space the size of a quarter is the best I could ever do... not as precise but still not bad for an amateur with lesser equipment.

But wait..... our athlete's single hole is over at the bottom right of the bullseye, not centered in the ten-ring at all. Her _accuracy_ is off. She is shooting extremely precisely, but not very accurately at all. Perhaps there is a crosswind, or perhaps the rifle's scopesight needs to be adjusted.  Or, since the _precision_ is clearly fine, the system could be _calibrated_ to produce acceptable results. If the single hole is an inch low and to the right of the exact center of the bullseye, what will happen if our athlete _aims_ not at the bullseye, but an inch high and to the left? Since we know that the precision isn't going to change from moving the aimpoint.... our athlete is back in the running, because now she is hitting the target precisely _and_ accurately.... even though technically she isn't even "aiming" at the target at all. She has calibrated her aimpoint to give accurate results.

So too it is with electrical measurements. Our tools have been getting better and better for years, improving in most areas but making inevitable compromises in others. The digital revolution has really changed the process of making measurements on electrical parameters over the years -- not least by making them much easier to obtain. It is no longer necessary to "guesstimate" the position of a needle against a scale, or interpret a scope trace using the screen graticle and the amp and timebase settings--- we can simply position cursors and read numbers from boxes, letting the instrument sweat the detail work. The _precision_ of our measurements or at least the potential precision, has increased vastly. It's easy to measure picoamperes of current in the calibration lab, set voltages to a precision of seven significant digits, and weigh things to the microgram... of precision. But if you've got a speck of dust on your balance pan...your microgram weight, very precise indeed, is still not going to be an accurate representation of the mass of your sample. But since it is so easy to obtain precise measurements these days.... even a child could do it..... even if she doesn't  understand what mass is or how errors in weighing can occur, she can still obtain a very precise, even if wrong, weight value.

So...  while precision often comes built in, like in a fine match-grade Olympic air rifle or a modern digital oscilloscope... ACCURACY, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder: it depends on where and how you look, and whether or not you are looking at the right things and in the right places.

[mrsean2k]

+1 on the explanations. Even those things I believe I understand and "know" are the better for this kind of thing.


I used a version of HA to explain AC to my nephew (and in the end to myself). More useful for explaining AC than DC I found; DC seems just to be less of a stretch.