Karthikeyan KC

I don’t think you will suffocate by covering your face with a blanket. To answer the rest of your questions, it’s fairly simple. The blanket is not an impermeable material to block all the CO₂ that you exhale.

If so how fast? What does the disperse rate depend on?

It’s a cloth and obviously, the CO₂ will disperse at a slower rate, but not at the slowest to suffocate you. However, this depends on the type of sheets you are using. If you use a very thick woolen sheet, you might actually suffocate yourself (Your brain will wake you up anyway!).

Source – I bury my head inside my pillow every night. :)

This is damn interesting! Adding on the fact about languages, I think it’s rooted from South Indian languages, possibly Tamil (my native language). As the wiki says (no citations), in Tamil, people used to call it as Naram. However, I never hear anyone calling it that way in India now. There is a possibility that the Arabs might’ve gotten it from the Indian languages. I think it’s quite the same in Spanish too.

I also tried to do this with Python. I found out that ipinfo.io returns a JSON object for any requests. If you have Python installed in your Windows machine, maybe this will help you display your public IP address in the command line.

import requests
import json

r = requests.get('http://ipinfo.io/')
json_data = r.json()

print json_data['ip']

If you want to copy the IP to your clipboard, all you have to do is to use the | clip operator. E.g: python ip.py | clip

Pretty simple. :)

Additionally, you can add a batch file to get it done quickly!

@echo off
echo Your Public IP
python ipfind.py
set /P choice = "Do you want to copy it to your clipboard [type 'y' or terminate using 'CTRL+C'] ? "
if "%choice%" == "y" goto copy_stuff_to_clipboard
:copy_stuff_to_clipboard
python ipfind.py | clip
pause

I don’t think there is a faster way in Windows (If that’s what you are asking for). You can either install cURL on Windows and do a simple thing like this curl ipinfo.io. If your machine is Linux, I think it’s pre-installed and you can get your IP right from the terminal.

However, you can write up a vb script in Windows that will show you your public IP as a response from a server. Maybe the following script would help you.

Dim http : Set http = CreateObject( "MSXML2.ServerXmlHttp" )
http.Open "GET", "http://icanhazip.com"
http.Send
Dim ipbox
ipbox = InputBox("Your Public IP",,http.responseText)

Save it as myip.vbs in your desktop for quick access. You could also run it from CLI using this command – cscript myip.vbs

I’d play the game again for the music. :)

He’s a Pirate – Hans Zimmer

Eliminating any turbulent effects, you would need to calculate the molar mass of the two compounds that creates the smell. Then by simply applying Graham’s law,

\(\large \frac{Diffusion \ Rate \ 1}{Diffusion \ Rate \ 2} = \large \sqrt {\frac {Molar \ Mass \ 2}{Molar \ Mass \ 1}}\)

you can find which the faster smell is. Still, it won’t be that accurate.

Also, if you are so curious, you can analyze the diffusion co-efficient using the formula from the wiki I linked above.

The smell/scent/odour is due to the chemical nature of the compound that enters our nose. We perceive smell when these chemical compounds react with our olfactory receptors in our nose. I guess you already know this. As Farhan said, the speed depends on various factors. Elaborating on that, It’s basically the diffusion rate of that particular molecule among the gas around you. If the molecules have a high diffusion coefficient, then it will diffuse much faster (but not that fast enough to reach your nose). Again, a molecule can diffuse in many ways.

Diffusivity is not the only factor that governs the speed of smell. Turbulence in the air affects the speed of that particular molecule a lot. Hence, the convective currents play a dominant role compared to the molecular diffusion. This is the primary reason why you can smell stuffs around you. Convection brings you the compounds much faster than diffusion.

So practically, there is no definitive way to calculate the speed of the sound. Interestingly, if we could calculate some of the variables at STP and go by diffusivity, we can predict speeds of different smells relative to each other. As far as I know about this, that’s the closest thing to the speed of smell we can get to.

There’s no place I can be… Since I’ve found Serenity…

Sonny Rhodes – The Ballad Of Serenity

They do sound synonymous, but both are actually different concepts. I’ll try to explain these concepts in a way that I know.

Neural Adaptation

Neural adaptation is observed when there is a continuous and constant stimulus around us and our receptors slowly inhibit their responses to that particular stimulus. The important thing about this is that we could not control it over time. The best example for this is the human olfactory receptors. When you are exposed to a particular odour/stimuli for a very long time, (your own odour, the smell of your house and similar continuous stimuli), the receptors would hinder themselves to it and eventually ‘adapt’ to it. This means that the receptors send limited signals to the brain.

Check this (and this) article that deals with this concept.

Habituation

Habituation happens with stimuli that occur intermittently or periodically. Most of the habituation process is a bottom-up process, which means this is totally driven by the external stimuli. This could be controlled and changed by us to a certain level if we pay close attention to the stimulus that is being habituated. A good example of this is our ears tuning out some of the frequently heard noise at our home. In this case, the information is sent to the brain but ignored.

I hope this helps.

Never gets bored! From Lindsey Stirling, The Assassin’s Creed music. The Violin… :) It feels so good!

I had the same intuitions when I began exploring this. Fortunately, the concept of ‘continuity’ knocked my mind and I found something interesting. There is, of course, a maximum theoretical limit for the maximum efficiency of a wind turbine. Check out Betz’s Law.

No turbine can capture more than 16/27 (59.3%) of the kinetic energy in the wind.

Besides all this, there is a bigger problem when you come to larger turbines. If you add more blades, the component cost per wind turbine increases way high compared to the energy you obtain from the configurations. Also, the weight increases with each blade along with the torque. Higher torque will need stronger structural parts like more efficient gear boxes, break shoes and yawing gears. It’s quite complex though.

You are correct! One-bladed turbines are the most efficient one.

One-bladed wind turbines

These type of wind-turbines have high rotational speeds and hence, the efficiency is higher when compared to the other configurations. However, due to this high rotational speed, the hub of the wind turbine is subjected structural stress. To avoid this, designers add a counter-weight to balance this. Also, the hub would need additional shock absorbers to avoid any turbulent forces acting on the shaft. Then again, this increases the cost.

Two-bladed wind turbines

These balances the cost that is spent on the one-bladed design’s weight. With two blades, the wake interference is very less too (compared to three). This was once a conventional design. But as two blades rotate, the whole rotor disk experiences an imbalanced air flow on the upper part and the lower part (laminar flow, with earth being the boundary). This twists the shaft horizontally, and to counter this, the hub should be teetering one. Of course, this adds up the cost too.

Three-bladed wind turbines

Add a third blade, and you could eliminate the teetering hub. This makes it easy for the rotor disk to be balanced. In this case, the efficiency is less, but a tradeoff is made for other factors. For example, in the above two design configurations, the hub would need a complex gearbox due to the requirement of a higher gear ratio. With this three-bladed design, the cost of such complexity is eliminated too. So this is considered as an optimal configuration.

More blades

For larger wind turbines, if you add more blades the efficiency will drop, as the wake of one blade will affect the flow vector of another blade in an undesirable way. But in smaller windmills like the one used to draw water by running pumps, you would need more blades as it gives a high torque.

I hope this answers your question. However, I would wait for a professional wind turbine expert to weigh in here.

Thanks for sharing this Ronny. I experience this a lot. The longest run without internet is when we moved to a new place. I was offline for like a month and a half. The cables weren’t laid and I had to wait that long. It was a bliss, though. I happen to talk a lot with family and friends, I went out sometimes, I even started a workout routine for the month. It all halted as soon as the internet arrived.

But I still experience some offline days due to occasional network failure in our area. The best part is, my friends will be offline too. Besides, it also helps me to be creative without any distractions. I mostly write some short stories, if this is the case. It gets better without distractions, and the motivation surge is way awesome, as I don’t have to care about anything else.

I didn’t own a modern smartphone until March 2015. I had a Nokia 5800. Now I have Lumia 830! Trust me… My life was way better without these annoying notifications every damn minute. Now that there is a notification center in Windows 10, it just got worse. Disabled them anyway. In a corner, just like you, I still wish for a total internet blackout so often to refresh ourselves. :)

Nostalgic theme. Yet another musical piece from John Williams.

The Jurassic Park – Theme

Evil, Pride, Menacing | OST

The Empire Strikes Back – The Imperial March (Darth Vader’s Theme)

Today’s epic track!

https://youtu.be/U8d9MmJ0ojY