Postcards from the Bleeding Edge
Sunday, August 21, 2005

  The diamond age

I spent the weekend vibrating over the potential of nanotube sheets. I started with the idea of trying to calculate what a suspension bridge would weigh... and gradually I moved into thinking about smaller, day to day items - like houses. Assuming a huge house built of pine, that weighed 25 tons - you could make one that weighed far less than a few hundred pounds, before infrastructure. Most of the weight in supporting a house goes into supporting itself, all you really need is enough material to support the loading of furniture and people and to keep out the weather.

Tomorrow's house would be a double nano-walled construction, and transparent where-ever you didn't put insulation...

Said house could be powered by the sun, and lit by oleds, built out of the same material.... the mind boggles!

There's a few flaws in this idea, like having an entirely electrically conductive house might not be the best thing in lightning prone areas - but the ratio was the first ratio that let me get a grip on the strength of carbon nanotube sheets. It's still not the right ratio - I have no idea what a typical house weighs, for example, and what happens when you try and drive a nail through a few nanotube sheets? Do you need a titanium or depleted uranium nail?

Second flaw is that these measurements of the nanotube fabric are aligned along the direction of the nanotubes and only count for tensile strength - compressive strength is apparently negligable - but imagine a roof spread like a tent over a basic house frame and you can begin to imagine home uses for the technology.

The actual tested material, 18 sheets thick, had a strength of 465MPa/(g/cm^3). High strength steel is listed 125 MPa/(g/cm^3)).

Third flaw is that the durability of the material hasn't been proven - it could fray, or oxidize, or melt in the rain... but none of those characteristics of the material have been published yet.

It's not just me going nano-nuts this week, The Houston Chronicle writes:

And the list goes on.
 
Comments:
An electrically-conductive house, if grounded, would be a good thing in an electrical storm; it would function the same as old Ben's lightning rods which bleed off the local electrical charge and, thereby, make the area less attractive to lightning.
 
I had thoughts along that line, too, thinking that the whole house would serve as a lightning rod. My concern was that a house could build up a large resevoir of potential energy (inducing lightning strikes) - and secondly, if you leaned up against a wall at the wrong time.

I'm a digital guy, this newfangled analog electricity thang isn't always intuitive for me - having a lightning rod going to ground strikes me as safer than having the whole house being ground, but what do I know?

I've been fighting off a -50 db hum in my sound system for a month now.
 
Speaking of grounds, maybe your hum is a ground loop, a bad ground or a turned-over plug (which reverses ground and hot leads even with 3-wire "grounded" circuits).
Then again, maybe its a bass drone setting the "ground" for a verse or two of "Donella Beaton" to be skrilled on the mixolydian chanter. (Did I tell you I once gazed at the rising highlands from my Pict ancestral home near Glahms and Meigle from and that I could see the place where King Arthur chained Guenevere to a stone one night and left her to the wolves? Ah, family...)
 
s/skrilled/skirled/
 
s/Meigle from/Meigle/
(Can't edit comments. Gak!)
 
I did some further analysis of the hum problem, posted at the top of my blog...
 
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David Täht writes about politics, space, copyright, the internet, audio software, operating systems and surfing.


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