My line is prepared for 40 kW 3 phases, since the former owner also used electric heating (this kind of night loading heating), but since I switched for gas, I can use anything for my computers :))) In facht it is 400V/230V since more than 10 to 15 years, but everybody is still talking about 380V/220V ... And yes, 3 phases are the only kind of connections the power companies offer - so the outlets will be split up among the phases to get an even load (3 phases outlets are not very common :). Gruss H. -- Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut HRK

Reason I'm posting this is that other list members may find themselves in similar straits. The situation is not necesarily as difficult as you might think it is. On 4 Feb 1999, Eric Smith wrote: So upgrade the breaker box and the service entrance cable or wire-in-conduit. The rest of the house is going to stay the same. Get a box that uses the same brand of breakers that you currently use. Then you can add wiring, some of it surface if necessary, to key portions of the house. The electric company wire from your pole to your house can probably already carry the current. Most people do not realize that they use a "one size fits all" for the task. Plus it is a wire in free air and the rules about current capacity are far less stringent. You would be surprised at how small a wire can carry service entrance current from the pole to your house, when it is not enclosed in a jacket or tube. Of course, it is a little more complicated than that but still... Is that 2400KW or 4800? If you are only rating that at 120V, then you are only using 10% of your incoming power. So you can do it after the fact and leave the legacy of its strangeness for the next owner. Seriously, you also get another possibility by a 2x upgrade. You now have the ability to isolate machinery, appliances, kitchen gadgets, your tools on one 120V leg and put all the sensitive electronics on the other (plus balance everything else loadwise across the two). Think of it as less of a drag and more of a real opportunity. -- Steve

Tony Duell <ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote: Yes. As you'll recall, that was exactly my point. There seems to be some controversy amongst physicists about this.

Dwight wrote: There are at least a few legitimate physicists that think that it may be possible to tap the zero-point energy (which comes from nowhere). Remember that not that long ago most physicists didn't believe that it was possible for a black hole to emit radiation, but now most of them accept it. The ideas for how zero-point energy might be tapped are similar. The books get balanced by a corresponding loss of energy elsewhere (or perhaps elsewhen). As far as I know, no one has yet proven that you *can't* borrow some of the zero-point energy.

Oh yeah - I know - his happens at least once every year when I buy tickets for a US flight, and have to notice that I already spend the engergy .. er money ... them I borrow it from somewher or when ... Gruss H. SCNR -- Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut HRK

Bah! Shows how much YOU know.. Why, I've just succeeded in generating 10 times as much zero-point energy as I did last week! Now, wheres Nikolai Tesla when you need him... -Lawrence LeMay

Eric Smith <eric(a)brouhaha.com> wrote: Yes, many still look for that magic valve. As a good rule of thumb, don't invest in anyone that says he has found it. For the most part, we haven't been able to model the mathematical part correctly that shows that it can't be done. We haven't found one case in nature that uses the principle. This is usually a good case for there not being a way to do it. As we look at everything man has done, we notice that nature has often been using that principle for something else for billions of years. It is vary important to explore why we can't do it but foolish to believe that because we don't know why we can't that somehow we will beat all the indicators and find the trick that nature missed and only we could find. Dwight

Max Eskin <max82(a)surfree.com> wrote: And why do I see this argument as being on my side? On a separate line, modeling is an interesting thing. Where I work, we model how semiconductors work. Even though the models makes many valid predictions, it is also incomplete in representing real silicon. The models make other predictions that don't work as well. The trick of using models to make predictions is that they have a chance of predicting correctly if they don't violate rules that we have never seen violated before. If they point to new rules that we see no particular violations, then we should expect that we have a chance. Like I said, we should completely understand what in our model that makes a prediction that seems to contradict what we have seen to be true. It is also that we are not seeing things correctly but to treat predictions that contradict known understanding as a good candidate for a valuable new science is truly a waste of time. In order for goal oriented science to stand a chance of working such as making the bomb, we need to be at the point where there are no contradictions that we know of. The problem is that there are a lot of things that ARE and likewise a lot of things that AREN'T. We understand, slightly, only a small amount of things that are and can think of orders of magnitude of things that aren't. If we were, tomorrow, to find a new working principle of the universe that explained how we could violate the principle of conservation of energy that would allow taking advantage of Zero-point energy then I would say go for it. Without that new principle, talking about using this new source of energy is about as useful as worrying about the probability that all my atoms might suddenly move five feet to the left. Probability and practicability are two quite different things. We can talk about making free energy from magnetism or a car that runs 2000 miles on a drop of gas. How about instantaneous flight to distant galaxies, temperatures less than absolute zero, worm holes in space, .... Any one of these things may be possible. Wasting much time exploring these with the knowledge we have today would most likely be fruitless. We might stumble across the key to any of these tomorrow but not likely for any specific one of them. In making the bomb, the scientist of the time that did the work, saw that there was a lot of work to do to create the thing but didn't have any specific nature of things that they otherwise knew of at the time that would mean that it couldn't be done. It was specifically because they thought that they had all the pieces that they attempted it in the first place. Dwight

On Fri, 5 Feb 1999, Dwight Elvey wrote: Well, hate to break this party up but we can probably talk about it on another forum since it seems to have taken on a life of its own. ObCC: Picked up a GRiDCase Plus today. Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Always hasslin' the man. Coming in 1999: Vintage Computer Festival 3.0 See http://www.vintage.org/vcf for details! [Last web site update: 01/15/99]

"Ward D. Griffiths III" <gram(a)cnct.com> wrote: Hi All the pieces were there, all we've done is put the pieces to gether. In the zero-point case, there seem to be missing pieces. Besides, fast fission is not any different than regular fission that we knew about before hand. Just because nature hasn't made a fission bomb ( that we know of ) doesn't mean we have made a big jump on nature by mixing a material that multiplies neutrons with a material the used neutrons to trigger fission. We took things that we knew existed and combined them. Each part of the bomb used a principle that was known to work in nature. Nothing really new here. This isn't to belittle the creative nature of man to put thing together in creative ways but we are still just putting things together, in predictable ways, not making them do things that don't make sense. We built the bomb on sound understanding of the principles involved. We used things that were already there. We didn't invent a new nature of matter to make it work, we observed a natural processes that we knew worked and went from there. We didn't take a model of nature that we knew wasn't consistant with what we saw and expected it to create something that wasn't there before. Dwight

We didn't invent a new nature of matter to come up with zero-point energy either. AFAIK, it is entirely consistent with the Standard Model. The Standard Model has proven remarkably good at predicting the existence of things that have never previously been observed, such as the top quark and several of the vector guage bosons. As I.I. Rabi asked about the muon, "Who ordered that?"

"Hans Franke" <Hans.Franke(a)mch20.sbs.de> wrote: Hi It isn't just the quantity of fissionable material that makes a bomb work, you also need a way to increase the number of neutrons quickly. This material is sometimes called a trigger. The idea is a fast bomb, not a slowwww one. Dwight

Do you realy want us make belive that Nature already had invented MS-Windows before ? Not even Blind Mother Nature van be that blind. Gruss h. -- Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut HRK

On 5 Feb 1999, Eric Smith wrote: You'll note that they're all getting their power from their local electric companies. "Vacuum energy" is a fine concept that may someday power interstellar spacecraft (but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it), it doesn't work down here in the Well. -- Ward Griffiths "the timid die just like the daring; and if you don't take the plunge then you'll just take the fall" Michael Longcor

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