SurferM, TSA bad news confirmed today. They do indeed use parchment a year from the 21st century. Madame Xena Albright went in 3D, burning 20 million year old fossils in thermodynamic processes to propel her in an aluminium can to Russia and used dead squid 'smokescreen' juice to inscribe her name on some dead trees, mashed and dried into a kind of papyrus. Great! And these people rule the world?
If they had used electronics, they could have whizzed it round the troops yonks ago and have got encrypted approvals, while saving very many taxpayer dollars. Of course that's nowhere near as much fun as flying first class around the world, staying in the best hotels, meeting all sorts of important people, eating delicious dinners and playing 'I'm the most important person in town'. All on other people's money. Taxpayers are like sheep - ever waiting to be fleeced and seemingly oblivious to it.
Which brings me to my point. You wondered whether Mr A had considered using Congress as liquid propellant. Without giving away all the secrets, we [in NZ] have in fact done that and are in the process of developing a super powerful and reliable launch vehicle with really low cost. There is also a negative opportunity cost of amazing proportions. I'll explain.
Recall how the ATF [Alcohol-Tobacco-Firearms] Federal buildings in Oklahoma was blown up in a revenge attack using a mixture of fertilizer and diesel fuel. Well, the explosion just needs to be contained and timed and hey presto, you have a rocket. There are a few other details, like steering it, but let that go for now.
Well, [to use Irwin's word], in the 1980s, at the height of the 'world's running out of oil' scare and with oil at $40 per barrel spot price, some sophisticated minds in NZ turned to ways of making cars and trucks keep moving in the absence of oil.
You know we have sheep. They eat grass, which only needs some CO2, dirt, water and lots of lovely sunshine - ultraviolet light welcome. Sheep breed prolifically. Grass grows fast. Sheep get fat.
As fortune would have it, we also have a big gas field in NZ. You can run methane over a cunning zeolite catalyst and get methanol. Which in itself is a good fuel and useful for lots of other things in the chemicals production industry.
One of the chemical processes is you can turn fats into esters using methanol. Esters can be good fuels with high cetane numbers. Tallow is produced in large quantities here because sheep are not only fleeced, but eaten. But people don't enjoy the fat. So there is heaps of tallow left over, which usually goes into making soap. But tallow esters are good diesel fuels!
Sure enough, hot damn, when we put it in some trucks, they took off like a rocket! Rocket?!!! Hey, we need those too! Unfortunately, tallow esters burned too slowly to be rocket fuel.
But as luck would have it, one of the products of gas fields, with a bit of processing, is fertilizer! Somebody had built a fertilizer works down by the gas field to sell to farmers to make grass grow.
Sure enough, just as the demonstration at Oklahoma showed, fertilizer plus tallow ester gives a real BOOMMMMMM!!!!! Light fuse - Stand clear! You see, the fertilizer is the method of getting heaps of oxygen in close contact with the fuel so that it burns in a big hurry.
It wasn't long after that, as people considered the relative values of fat supplies and eyeing politicians on television who seem to have a propensity for tallow formation in substantial quantity that the concept of negative opportunity cost arose. By using politicians, one would gain a large supply of tallow and that would prevent expenditure of taxpayer dollars which would be a huge boost to the economy.
As you can see [if you have seen our Prime Minister Jenny Shipley, or ex Prime Ministers Jim Bolger, Mike Moore, David Lange, Robert Muldoon, Bill Rowling, Norman Kirk, Keith Holyoake or mere MPs such as Jonathon Hunt on TV] we have got the right sort of politicians. They seem to have lunch and Public Service as their highest priorities so they could fulfill their desire for tallow formation and public service while helping launch the 21st century.
[Patents pending]
Maurice
PS: Incidentally, how much do you weigh? I heard the USA has a weight problem. Maybe we can help. Hmmmm, liposuction could be as useful as blood transfusions.....
[I drool when I see Ted Kennedy - he could singlelovehandedly launch 2 Globalstar satellites. Sorry to mention politics, knowing your sensitivies.]
ATF....how come those three go together? Seems an odd mix. Oh well...one of the mysteries of life. |
