Story on the news tonight about hapless firefighters in New York battling building blazes in 100º heat. That must be miserable with all the heavy protective gear they have to wear.
Why hasn't anyone invented something better than water hoses to put out a fire? Listen, in order to freeze a bunch of water into ice crystals, you have to take a lot of energy out of it. Where can you find a lot of energy? Oh yeah -- in a fire. How come nobody has figured out how to harness all that energy to freeze a block of ice inside the burning building? I suppose it has something to do with ambient temperature -- fire is a couple thousand degrees ABOVE ambient, and ice is a hundred BELOW ambient, so you can't use the former to cause the latter.
When I worked in a data center it was protected by a halon fire suppression system[/url]. We were warned that if it ever went off we were to evacuate the room ASAP, because all the oxygen in the room would disappear within seconds.
I guess maybe that wasn't strictly true.What would happen if you
exploded a container of liquid nitrogen in the middle of a burning building? How about just
room-temperature nitrogen?
Also on the news tonight, a local citizen killed a homeless man he caught breaking into his car. The man said he had a gun, but it turned out he didn't. Somebody needs to invent a
Vulcan Death Grip device that instantly mobilizes an attacker without killing them. Like a
taser, but deployable over a distance.
A Star Trek phaser set to 'stun.'
One properly-designed device would solve both of the above needs.
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