my mid life crisis is inventing
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10z boy, just can't beat ebay......was able to get a 1/2 size violin sent to my door for $45.00, already set up and the works...lol
D
TJ...thanks for the thought...we are in Jacksonville,,,home of the Jaguars for you football fans.....Just below the Georgia line on the east coast.
We are monitoring the situation and watching the cars go by from South of us...
Looks like at the moment, it will veer over more towards Bob and then up to Petry's area,,,,Alabama/Fla panhandle...
We will get some damage anyhow....if you print a map and cut out the center section of the eye....then lay it over that same map of Fl....you can't see Fl any where.....
It is so wide and now that it is slowing down on forward movement it will just have longer to grind on where ever it lands...
I will be staying here unless things change.. I will update as long as I have power....
At the moment I am going violin shopping with my 8 year old....the schools have closed and she is going to take violin class in school....so off we go
Janes/James....haven't heard from you in a while,,, are you still reading the postings
tia
D
TR...has anyone done any research on "GSA RESOURCES of Arizona"??
GSA Resources works with a number of companies which provide services based on the unique properties of the specialty minerals produced by GSA Resources, Inc. We invite you to link to the companies listed below.
Filtration and Media Group
BK Enterprises
PC Sales
Desiccare, Inc.
Filter Flow Technology
Hiatt Distributors
Radian Engineering
Oak Ridge National Laboratories
ODORZOUT™
Westinghouse
Lockheed Martin
RT Vanderbilt Co., Inc.
Hydrometrics, Inc.
Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration
Links for Chemists
The Critter Company
TR....interesting...eom
Expensive, but I got another 175K shares today....ready for all the good news to start happening...lol
me trying to buy at .055 aon...lol so I canceled it
A Hot Assignment: Set Fire to Cocoa, Concrete and Sludge
Burgeoning Field of Testers Keeps Materials Safer By Incinerating Them
By THEO FRANCIS and ALEX FRANGOS Staff Reporters, The Wall Street Journal
WEST GLOCESTER, R.I. - Dennis Waters and Tom Lawson have set fire to power-turbine housings, burned up a big stack of toilet paper and incinerated municipal-waste sludge. They have set applesauce ablaze and torched teddy bears stacked by the hundreds in cartons.
"You name it, we've probably burned it," says Mr. Lawson, head of research and testing for FM Global, an insurance company in Johnston, R.I., a suburb of Providence. Mr. Waters runs the company's burn laboratory.
It's their job to burn things down, not just for FM Global's insurance clients but also for building-supply manufacturers. They study how materials burn and help develop ways to minimize losses from fires.
The field is hotter than ever, with new materials being introduced every day. Terrorism fears have also spurred business, as large-scale testing of building materials and industrial equipment takes on a new urgency. Today, another crew of engineers, at Underwriters Laboratories Inc. in Northbrook, Ill., will ignite a 17-foot replica of a section of the World Trade Center's flooring to see what role it may have played in the buildings' collapse.
The slab of concrete, supported by steel trusses, will be heated in a gas furnace to 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit. Shyam Sunder, the lead investigator for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Gaithersburg, Md., decided a year ago to conduct the live fire test at UL. While it's long been known that fire contributed to the collapse, its precise role still isn't clear.
It has taken nearly a year to fabricate the trusses and pour and cure concrete to the requisite hardness. "Too much water in the concrete and it would affect the result," Mr. Sunder says. Sprayed with the fireproofing material used in the original building, the floor unit will be scorched until it shows signs of damage.
Last week, engineers did a preliminary test at a UL lab near Toronto. A 35-foot truss, almost identical to those that held the World Trade Center's floors, was burned until it showed signs of weakening. Mr. Sunder, who witnessed the test, says, "All I will say is it was enlightening to see the results," which were, he says, "counterintuitive to conventional wisdom."
FM Global recently built a new 1,600-acre testing complex on its wooded compound in West Glocester. The company uses the site to simulate full-size fires, test roofs against hurricane-force winds and study how electrical equipment stands up to explosions. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives -- part of the Justice Department -- last year opened a new $106 million facility, which includes a forensic fire research laboratory, in Ammendale, Md. It regularly burns mock living rooms and small buildings to assist in arson investigations. This month it agreed to burn merchandise for the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.
The FM Global lab features a concrete outdoor bunker where testers study the combustibility of dust. Fine powder of almost any sort will explode violently under the right circumstances. The lab has burned cocoa powder, which smells like hot chocolate, and dried municipal waste sludge, which smells as you would expect.
In a test last Thursday, a 10-pound cloud of plastic powder was ignited, sending a 20-foot fireball into the sky with a Hollywood-style bang. An eight-year-old boy named Kyle Bodine was there to see it, watching wide-eyed from behind a transparent safety partition. "It's pretty amazing you can do all this stuff without getting hurt," he said. Kyle was on a tour with his father, Craig, a member of the Association of Governmental Risk Pools, visiting from Prague, Okla.
That day Mr. Waters was in his office showing off film footage of a transformer fire that a friend of his had sent him. A dozen sprinkler heads line the desk of his colleague Dennis Anderson, one dating to 1896. His computer wallpaper shows a nearly out-of-control lab test, dubbed "the mother of all fire tests," in which a stream of industrial lubricant was set aflame. His FM Global mouse pad shows a tower of flame and the sales slogan "Don't play with fire. Let us do it for you."
In a test two years ago, FM Global ignited wooden pallets stacked high with 8,000 tiny plastic bottles of heptane, an industrial solvent standing in for perfume or nail-polish remover. The question at hand: Would a large number of small bottles necessitate fewer fire sprinklers than a small number of large containers filled with the same flammable liquid? Soon, one box exploded, then another. Mr. Waters shouted for water as fireballs erupted. He got his answer: Packed together, tiny bottles are little Molotov cocktails, and they should be stored like gasoline, with sprinklers not just in the ceiling but in the storage racks themselves. "It took them an hour to get it out," Mr. Anderson says. "That was a very dandy fire."
At the nonprofit Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, engineers have ignited pallet-loads of swimming-pool chemicals ("high order of flammability") and watermelons ("low order of flammability"). Once they sent about 2,400 pounds of pecans up in smoke.
The Institute tests new materials for industry and the military. A few years ago, it set fires in garbage cans lined with high-tech garbage bags designed to shrink-wrap in the heat and smother flames. "It was the most amazing thing to watch," says James R. Griffith, manager of the department of fire technology. "It's like a Venus flytrap." The bags have yet to be marketed.
Another hot area of testing: plastic gas tanks, which have replaced metal tanks in most cars because they can be molded to fit into cramped underbodies. Mr. Griffith and his colleagues pour gasoline on the pavement beneath cars and let it rip to see whether tanks can withstand the heat.
Plastics -- "solid gasoline," as some engineers call them -- and other petrochemicals are increasingly turning up in building and packaging roles once dominated by wood, paper or metal, which engineers already understand well. Now, 100-gallon tanks used to store flammable liquids often are plastic. Where wooden pallets once reigned in shipping and in warehouses, plastic pallets have become common, says Bob Zalosh, a professor of fire protection and engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass. Just how these materials will behave in bulk, and in combination, requires real-world testing.
Burning buildings shed light on construction practices as well. Crews raised pieces of two mock houses at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, mimicking small-lot subdivisions springing up around the country. Although the houses are commonly just six feet apart, codes don't require exterior fire-cladding. Safety experts worry that flames could sweep through whole blocks, says David D. Evans, a manager of the institute's fire research program.
Mr. Evans, who admits he "enjoys looking at a big fire," had his crew light a sofa on fire in the den of one house. In three minutes, the fire broke the window. In five minutes, the flames jumped to the neighboring house.
Mr. Evans used high-tech calorimeters during the test to gather data that will eventually feed into a computer model. He'll use that model to spark a virtual fire that engulfs an entire neighborhood on a windy day, a concern following last year's devastating southern California brush fires.
White House Shifts Its Focus on Climate
New Report Focuses on Emissions as Cause of Global Warming
By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times
In a striking shift in the way the Bush administration has portrayed the science of climate change, a new report to Congress focuses on federal research indicating that emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are the only likely explanation for global warming over the last three decades.
In delivering the report to Congress yesterday, an administration official, Dr. James R Mahoney, said it reflected "the best possible scientific information" on climate change. Previously, President Bush and other officials had emphasized uncertainties in understanding the causes and consequences of warming as a reason for rejecting binding restrictions on heat-trapping gases.
The report is among those submitted regularly to Congress as a summary of recent and planned federal research on shifting global conditions of all sorts. It also says the accumulating emissions pose newly identified risks to farmers, citing studies showing that carbon dioxide promotes the growth of invasive weeds far more than it stimulates crops and that it reduces the nutritional value of some rangeland grasses.
American and international panels of experts concluded as early as 2001 that smokestack and tailpipe discharges of heat-trapping gases were the most likely cause of recent global warming. But the White House had disputed those conclusions.
The last time the administration issued a document suggesting that global warming had a human cause and posed big risks was in June 2002, in a submission to the United Nations under a climate treaty. President Bush distanced himself from it, saying it was something "put out by the bureaucracy."
That may be harder to do this time. The new report, online at www.climatescience.gov, is accompanied by a letter signed by Mr. Bush's secretaries of energy and commerce and his science adviser.
The White House declined yesterday to explain the change in emphasis, referring reporters to Dr. Mahoney, assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and the director of government climate research.
In an interview, he said the report was mainly an update on the overall climate research program and was not intended to be a conclusive "state of the science'' summary of the administration's thinking. A series of 21 reports are promised on particular issues in coming years, he said, and the studies on climate models, agriculture and other subjects mentioned in the new report are "significant but not definitive.''
Still, the report was disputed by some groups, aligned with industry, that oppose restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions and have attacked science pointing to dangerous human-caused warming as flawed.
Myron Ebell of the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute said the report was "another indication that the administration continues to be incoherent in its global warming policies."
At the same time, the report did not please environmental groups, which have repeatedly criticized Mr. Bush for opposing efforts to require restrictions on the gases linked to global warming, though he has gradually come around to the position that warming is at least partly caused by emissions.
"The Bush administration on the one hand isn't doing anything about the problem, but on the other hand can't deny the growing science behind global warming," said Jeremy Symons of the National Wildlife Federation.
The studies in the report that point to a human cause for recent warming all involved supercomputer simulations of climate, which have increased in power over the last several years.
The latest analysis, done at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., found that natural shifts in the output of the sun and other factors were responsible for the warming from 1900 to 1950, but could not explain the sharp and continuing rise since 1970.
The report's section on agriculture focused on several studies in which fields and grasslands were exposed to doubled concentrations of carbon dioxide, with growth patterns in plants shifting in ways that could harm yields.
In such conditions, it said, plots of shortgrass prairie in northeastern Colorado contained less of the nutrient nitrogen, and their grasses were less digestible than those that grew with no extra carbon dioxide.
"In another experiment, increased CO2 stimulated the growth of five of the most important species of invasive weeds, more than any other plant species yet studied," the report said. "This suggests that some weeds could become bigger problems as CO2 increases."
lighthawk--- did you ever get the shares bought that you were talking about recently? tia
D
TJ---lol ya, ya I heared ya...
D
Hey, Have I Got a Stock Scam for You!
By Sandra Block, USA TODAY
The breathless phone message from a young woman whose boyfriend works in the investment business sounds like something out of Sex and the City. But the seemingly misdialed voice mail is a clever investment scam that's sweeping the country, the Securities and Exchange Commission said Thursday. (Video: Don't fall for this) In the voice mails, a young woman, appearing to have dialed a wrong number, tells a friend the "hot stock exchange guy" she's dating has passed on information about a small company. She says the company is planning to make a big news announcement that will cause its stock price to skyrocket. In one message, the woman claims the company "is supposed to be like the next Tommy Bahama," a popular clothing and accessories brand. The woman, who identifies herself as Debbie, says the stock is expected to rise from 50 cents to $5 or $6 a share.
Don't Buy This Call
Hey, Tracy, it's Debbie! I couldn't find your old number, and Tammy said this was your new one I hope it's the right one. Anyway, remember Evan, that hot stock exchange guy I'm dating? He gave my dad that stock tip and it went from under a buck to like three bucks in two weeks and you were mad I didn't call you? Well, I'm calling you now. This new company is supposed to be like the next Tommy Bahama, and they're making some big news announcement this week. He said it's cheap now, like 50 cents. Sorry, I'm eating, but I'm starving. It's 50 cents now, and it's going up to, like, five or six bucks this week, so get as much as you can. Call me on my cell I'm still in Orlando. Dad and I are buying a bunch tomorrow, and I already called Kelly and Ron, too. Anyway, I miss you. Give me a call. Bye.
The SEC said the messages are part of a "pump-and-dump" scam in which con artists promote shares of a thinly traded company, claiming the price is about to soar. Once demand has driven up the stock price, the scammers dump their shares and pocket the profits. Then the price falls, leaving investors with big losses.
The promoters target small companies that trade for less than $1 because there's little information about them, making their stock easier to manipulate. Most aren't aware of the con. Richard Miller, chief executive of Maui General Store, a specialty retailer of island products, says he didn't know fraudsters were touting his company's stock until he started getting calls from people who received the voice mail. "Because people don't read between the lines, they think I'm the scammer," he says.
The SEC has received calls and e-mails about the messages from across the country, says Susan Wyderko, investor education director. Some companies named in the messages have seen sharp increases in their stock prices and trading volume, she says.
In the past, pump-and-dump scams have taken advantage of Internet message boards, chat rooms and spam e-mails, "But this is a new wrinkle," Wyderko says. "The messages are very cleverly done. They appear to contain inside information mistakenly left on your phone or cell phone."
The SEC's advice to investors: "It's never a good idea to buy stock on the basis of a hot tip," she says, particularly from a stranger.
TJ...lol,,, I'll have you know,I resemble that remark..
D
Plus,,,we are getting paid to manage the place also...
D
TJ,,,the only thing you did not figure in to the total is what they are paying FASC for the lease....on a monthly/anual basis....that final figure is just the buyout figure at the end of the lease
D
tech--- I agree, FASC is showing it can create a revenue stream, imo.... I also believe that stream will continue to grow.
It is pretty obvious to anyone who has watched FASC for any lenght of time that the type of potential customer FASC markets to takes a long time to move from initial look to contract,,,,,whew..... I believe that the marketing teams are on the back side of those long wait times with a fair amount of customers and there are plenty more filling the proverbial "trough" so as there will be a regular closing rate from here on out...fwiw
I also believe there is a continual increase in the amount of potential customers filling that trough.
On a final note, I believe several events are going to shorten the lenght of time a potential customer takes to get from first look to signing a contract....
1)Ongoing R&D
2)More active systems for clients to see
3)Higher energy costs will push potential clients to look at alternative energy
4)political/legislative enviroments will become more acomodating for both of the above reasons....
D
Congrats Sam eom.
Report warns of flooding, heat waves, melting glaciers across Europe due to global warming
JAN M. OLSEN
Associated Press Writer
COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Rising sea levels, disappearing glaciers in the Alps and more deadly heat waves are coming for Europeans because of global warming, Europe's environmental agency warned Wednesday.
The European Environment Agency said much more needs to be done — and fast. Climate change "will considerably affect our societies and environments for decades and centuries to come," its 107-page report said.
It said rising temperatures could eliminate three-quarters of the Alpine glaciers by 2050 and bring repeats of Europe's mammoth floods two years ago and the heat wave that killed thousands and burned up crops last summer. The rise in sea levels along Europe's coasts is likely to accelerate, it added.
Global warming has been evident for years, but the problem is becoming acute, Jacqueline McGlade, executive director of the Copenhagen-based agency, told The Associated Press. "What is new is the speed of change," she said.
"It takes a long time to see these changes in the glaciers, at the sea level, so like big tankers turning around, they take a long time to change. But now that we see them changing direction, then it means that there are warning signals in many parts of our life," she added.
McGlade said action is needed at all levels in Europe — continental, regional, national and local. She said, for example, that European nations should insist climate change be on the agenda of international free-trade talks.
Greenpeace welcomed the report. Flooding, heat waves and melting glaciers "make people become more and more aware of the consequences of global warming," Steve Sawyer of Greenpeace International told AP.
Global warming is believed to be intensified by human activities, in particular emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.
The European Union has been a leader in pushing for implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, a U.N. pact drawn up in 1997 to combat climate change by reducing carbon-dioxide emissions worldwide in 2010 to 8 percent below 1990 levels.
So far 123 countries, including all 25 EU members, have ratified the pact, but it isn't in effect because it hasn't reached the required level of nations accounting for 55 percent of the industrialized world's emissions. The United States, the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, has refused to ratify, arguing the agreement would hurt its economy, and Russia also hasn't signed.
Wednesday's report, "Impacts of Europe's Changing Climate," urges that the Kyoto Protocol be adopted, saying climate changes "will considerably affect our societies and environments for decades and centuries to come."
It said the 1990s were the warmest decade on record, and the three hottest years recorded — 1998, 2002 and 2003 — occurred in the last six years, with the average global temperature now rising at almost 0.36 degrees per decade.
The report singled out floods across Europe two summers ago and last summer's heat wave in western and southern Europe as examples of destructively extreme weather caused by global warming.
The flooding killed about 80 people in 11 countries, affected more than 600,000 and caused economic losses of at least $18.5 billion, the report said. More than 20,000 deaths, many of them elderly, were recorded during the 2003 heat wave, which also caused up to 30 percent of harvests in many southern countries to fail, it said.
The report said melting shrank glaciers in the Alps by 10 percent in 2003 alone and predicted three-quarters of them could be gone altogether by 2050. European sea levels have been rising by 0.03-0.12 inches a year over the last century, it said, and the rate of increase could be two to four times faster during this century.
The agency is sponsored by the 25 EU countries as well as Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.
————
On the Net:
EEA report:
http://reports.eea.eu.int/climate—report—2—2004/en
TR--thanks for all the DD you do.....nice to see steady process,,,imo, even though it is fairly quiet at the moment, I feel the same thing is happening with FASC.
fwiw
D
Will,,,glad to hear that they are alive though,,,,,sounds like a real mess.....we did ok also, it passed on into the Atlantic about 50 miles south of us..
D
Bob, how are you doing with hurricane Charley???? Am up in Jacksonville so will be seeing it later tonight...
D
From the FASC website....it may be new to the website also???
Glass
Though already recycled in large quantities, the value of recycled glass is generally low and the costs of transportation can make recycling uneconomical.
Glass fragments introduced to the KDS system in pieces 2” in diameter, or less, are ground at the rate of 1 - 1.5 tons per hour into a fine powder. The powder is smooth and fine to the touch, without sharp edges. The maximum particle size is about 150 microns and about half of the powder is below 45 microns.
Even finer particle sizes have been achieved with the KDS system at lower feed rates. In one such test, 18 % of the glass powder, i.e., 200 lb/hr of output had a particle size of less than 1 micron. The grinding energy required was only 200 kW hr/ton. No other grinder can produce sub-micron glass powder in such large quantities while consuming so little energy. Such fine glass powder can command high prices as an industrial feedstock.
Darwin
I like what I see in this investment....think I will let it work for a while
D
10Z...lol, ya suppose that is why I am all blue in the face...
Have a great weekend,,,headed to Miami to celibrate Mom's 77th birthday.
D
tech...thanks,,,kind of figured as much but sure is nice to have it confirmed,,,,,I won't be calling him..fwiw
D
TR...amazing... What a wonderful group of potential clients,,,,especially when we need them to help get legislation changed when they want our product....
My hat is off to you, again...I don't care what anyone says,,,,we have gotten more exposure than anyone could have ever asked for...
This stock is solid as a rock....imo of course..lol
thanks again
D
TR,,, The thing I like about it all is we don't need the 6000 to get sales. The product we already have is able to produce and is being sold as we speak...
Yes it will be nice to have the bigger model. And, from what I hear, many potential customers want a bigger model,,so there will be customers waiting..
But there is plenty to do even without the 6000... I am glad the company is getting a reputation for being inovative, customer centered and willing to customize their product for and with the customer..
D
TR...you have mail
D
TR...imo, I would venture to guess it would be used for building of a prototype model 6000, and the testing/debugging phase that goes with such an adventure.... I believe this would be completely inline with such grants' historical protocall's...
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beis...way to go....congrats....I may be following your lead if I can get my wife's accountant to get her tax bill straightened out...lol
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TR...Only the better for share collectors like James...lol
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TJ...looks like some good bargain prices this morning...wish I had the funds...lol
D
TR...agree...simply amazing...wish I had more funds..lol
D
TR...This validates you and all the other posters that ground out the details of the notes you found,,,,,
This project is in addition to the Phase II - STTR small business grant from the US Dept. of Energy which is currently in the final stages of review."
Great DD
thanks
D
James...over all, can agree with you....and feel very conservative....
Regarding the "suprising costs", this is the second time I have noticed you put that into a conversation....I am not necessarily disagreeing with you.....
I see it some what more managable than most companies that have gone through what we hope FASC will be going through....
My reasoning,,, is along the lines that TR mentions...the licensing fee/revenue sharing that Cal likes and is getting now...and imo will continue to get....
This has to keep that exhausting "cost rising faster than profits" phase under control a lot better than if we were building factories, etc...
Give me your ideas...tia
D
James....thanks...just for the heck of it,,,,what do you see as a pps after the 15 year acceptance cycle...lol and what is your updated time frame for industry acceptance now? and of course,,,since that time frame has contracted......will and how much will the pps bubble up because of the shrinkage,,,obviously if we were to compress the same amount of investor energy you saw in a 15 year cycle,,,there would have to be some extra vertical action..lol
D
James....Please explain your 15 year idea,,,are you talking about an industry wide acceptance???
tia
D
TR...lol... a billion, here or there....amongst friends...so what the diff...
D
sounds like a very good 10 year investment....glad I am invested
According to Dr. A. R. Womac Ph.D., P.E. of U of Tennessee, "identifying First American Scientific Corp. as the key industry partner was not random
I like the note regarding the NON RANDOM selection of FASC...lol
What a nice note from the UT prof...
D
We are getting a reputation,,,,and I might say, a good one at that...
Waitedg....I am comfortable with what you have to say.....other than the Atlas issue,,,,I have not spent any time to research it is all.....just have no knowledge of it...
D