First my response to the first message in this thread from Santos, lamenting the redundancy of so many AWE projects and their likelihood for success, I’ve somewhat jokingly been calling it “idiots, idiots, idiots” all along, and while I certainly was including Santos in that category, I do not see anything wrong with his post.
I hope Santos can now see for himself now how ridiculous censorship is in “an open forum”.
How does it feel Dave Santos to find your honestly-expressed opinion being shut down because someone else has a different opinion, and that person has achieved the most powerful position he has ever attained in his life (junior-high-school-hall-monitor - er um I mean “internet-chat-group censor”) and thereby feels compelled to dictate and push things around to control what people are allowed to say in a group supposedly intent on breaking paradigms. Oh sure, break paradigms, just not any of MY paradigms.
I don’t care whether someone questions the statement that “Jesus” will solve AWE, whether highly-funded university efforts are naturally superior to backyard tinkerers, or even the idea of “global warming”, if you are looking for “out-of-the-box thinking”, you’d better be ready to entertain opinions that conflict with convention and (gasp!) authority.
Many if not most scientific theories are eventually modified, obsolete, or disproven. It is easy to see the political and religious influence over scientific “thinking” when you go back through history. So if you think you should censor peoples’ thoughts, consider whether you should be running an “open forum” seeking “new thinking”, “paradigm-shattering”, and “new, previously unknown ideas” because you are probably a natural “conformist”, possibly without much of a sense of humor, possibly very intolerant, probably the opposite of what you believe, so wake up and stop destroying free thought.
The photo of the electric skateboard and kite are interesting and it’s nice to hear someone rode such a skateboard in charge mode while being pulled by a kite. Slightly more impressive than shaking a self-winding watch, but in both cases, really, nothing new was learned, and no true progress was made toward AWE. Was there any doubt a kite could pu9ll someone on an electric skateboard, or that the skateboard could be set to charge while being pulled? We have no data, as usual, and nothing leading to a useful generation system. It’s a “science-fair-level” demo stunt, except for generating no data, bringing no new information, and not leading to a working, economical AWE system. If you want to imply such could be carried out on rails, on a road, on a dry lake, even on wet lake using a boat as many have proposed, as an economical energy harvesting system, someone would have to actually DO that, not just ride a skateboard while flying a kite and claim it is the world’s greatest wind energy research. Imagine applying for a grant from NREL, the CEC, or ARPA-E, for a project to fly a kite from an electric skateboard, allegedly on charge mode, taking no data, providing nothing but your anecdotal account of merely doing it and photo of your apparatus. At least if some data were included it could be said to point in some direction. Without the slightest bit of data we are left to “believe” some “estimate” from the perpetrator, whose statements are of questionable veracity, at best.
And speaking of “The Wright Brothers” and let’s throw in “Leonardo DaVinci”, in both cases these “geniuses” completely ignored what had been the largest source of non-animal power in Europe for nearly 1000 years, which consisted of shaped airfoils having a pressure (lower) surface and a suction (upper) surface.
These “geniuses” were UNAWARE of what was right in front of them. For 1000 years people walked by windmills not even knowing what they were looking at. 1000 years of “idiots, idiots, idoits”. Davinci could have talked to some real engineers who were powering the continent of Europe. The Wright Brothers could have just visited a working windmill and say “Heyyyyy, wait a minute!”, but they did not. Duh-Vinci instead drew the kind of unworkable crap you find on junior-high-school kid’s bored doodling in the margins of his notebook, while the Wrights spent years testing single-surface “airfoils” in wind tunnels before aviation slowly “developed” the “modern” airfoils which had already been in use for 1000 years! That is about as ignorant and clueless as you can get, and yet we celebrate it as genius! If and when AWE “takes off”, I believe you will find a similar “slap yourself in the head” moment, but then again, I’m not sure either the Wrights nor DuhVinci EVER REALIZED what they had overlooked. In the case of DuhVinci, he was long gone by the time aviation took hold. In the case of the Wrights, I do not remember ever hearing them lament how stupid they must have been to not notice their sought-after high-performance wings were already in operation, spinning in circles, right in front of their eyes, the whole time.
So people today celebrate these people who “overlooked” known, highly-developed technology as “geniuses”, airborne wind energy might look just as obvious in retrospect, that if you ever see it work out, you will slap yourself in the forehead as DuhVinci and the Wrights should have.
