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GizMag Wins Me Over–I could change careers!

In checking out these utterly cool aircraft (my favs the Gravity powered aircraft flies with no fuel and VTOL AirBike) I really became obsessed with GizMag. Between GizMag and Make: (which has a blog) I could really get depressed over not having enough money for these cool toys or enough live span to play with them. I guess in addition to these two I need to spend more time at Kurzweil AI learning how to live forever.

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We can improve our gas mileage

This I have to try! Apparently, adding acetone to your gas (1-3 ounces per 10 gallons [29-87milliliters per 40 liters]) can increase gas mileage by 15-35%. Just make sure that your gas station isn’t already adding acetone! Too much and your performance will decrease.

In other warnings, acetone eats paint and dissolves plastics. Should be stored outside.

Additional Benefits

In addition to increased mileage acetone added to fuel boasts other benefits such as increased power, engine life, and performance. Less unburned fuel going past the rings keeps the rings and engine oil in far better condition.

A tiny bit of acetone in diesel fuel can stop the black smoke when the rack is all the way at full throttle. You will notice that the exhaust soot will be greatly reduced and your truck or car runs smoother.

Acetone can reduce hydrocarbon emissions up to 60 percent. In some older cars, the HC readings with acetone in a 1986 GMC went from 440 PPM to 195, as just one example. Though mileage gains taper off with too much acetone, hydrocarbon emissions are nevertheless greatly reduced. Pure acetone is an extremely clean burning fuel that burns in air with a pretty blue, smokeless flame.

Acetone reduces the formation of water-ice crystals in below-zero weather which can damage the fuel filter. Change that fuel filter every year to protect injectors.

There are no known bad effects and every good reason to use acetone in your fuel. I have never seen a problem with acetone, and I have used ACETONE in gasoline and diesel fuel and in jet fuel (JP-4) for 50 years. I have rigorously tested fuels independently (with burns all over me) and am considered an authority on this important subject.

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Kevin Costner did it first

Wired has a great article on NASA’s attempts to recycle urine into drinking water. Excellent read!

Over the past five years, the agency has spent $60 million delivering potable water to the International Space Station on the space shuttle (6 tons at a cost of about $40,000 per gallon).

One gallon of that stuff would dramatically improve my family’s quality of living. Two gallon’s and we’d have a whole new life!

Alan Shepherd’s first 15-minute suborbital flight was so short that no one thought to install a urine receptacle in his space suit. At T-minus 15 minutes, an electrical problem caused an 86-minute delay on the launchpad. Shepherd’s bladder soon reached the bursting point, and he radioed the first-ever “Houston, we have a problem” message. After some deliberation, mission control had an answer: “Do it in the suit.”

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Program with external documentation

Visio Rules! If you program, build databases, or build database driven websites (which counts as programming) then you should be documenting your code within the code itself in the form of comments and externally in documents. My stand-bys are a site map (created in Visio), a data dictionary (created in Word), a data map (created in Visio), and a specification (created in Word). I also maintain a single document that records all my assumptions, questions, and notes about future upgrades or oversights that need to be modified "later." Maintaining these documents is enjoyable and having them on -hand makes the coding go so much smoother.