SFB

If I have a modern Energy Star rated DVD player that use less than 1 watt of standby power, when does it make economic and environmental sense to replace my power strip with one that cuts off the DVD player completely when the TV is off?

The economic cost is fairly easy to calculate - there are 8760 hours in a year, so my one watt device would waste 8.7KWh in a year, or around $1.30 at 15 cents/KWh. Actually, it will 'waste' less than that, since I have to subtract the time that I'm actually using the device - if I watch a 90 minute movie every night, then that's 546 hours in a year when the device is not "wasting" power since it's in use.

However, the environmental cost is harder to determine. There's some environmental and energy cost involved in making the smart strip and delivering it to me, so how to I balance than against a watt of wasted energy? The plastic smart strip is made mostly from petrochemicals, plus additional energy is used to create the plastic and mold it, as well as refining the copper for the conductors and shape them. And the semiconductors that make it "smart" must have some environmental cost to create them. And then there's the energy used to ship the power strip (from China?) to my local hardware store. And the pollution generated by all of these things.

I'd likely give away my current power strip which is otherwise working fine. But perhaps that doesn't count as an environmenal resource loss if I give it to someone who reuses it.

Further complicating things is that 4 or 5 months out of the year, I heat my home, so the "wasted" energy from my DVD player is not really wasted, it is dissipated as heat that goes toward heating my home.

So, how do I make the right environmental decision?

What happens to the rain water when you stand under a tree? As I stood under a tree waiting for my bus today, I was struck by the fact that I stayed nearly dry without an umbrella, yet people standing a nearby out in the open endured a steady stream of rain that I could see dripping from their umbrellas.

Occasionally a larger drop of water would fall from the tree, but since in 30 minutes I only got hit by a few drops, I stayed much drier than I would have if I were out in the rain. If the leaves were just consolidating small raindrops into larger drops, I would have expected to get just about as wet under the tree as outside the tree.

The trunk of the tree was relatively dry so I don't think the water is somehow making its way down the trunk.

I didn't notice a lot of water drops dripping from the circumference of the tree so it doesn't appear that the leaves force water to the edge of the tree. Though I'll admit that I didn't stand under the edge of the tree to confirm this. This seems like the most likely explanation, but visual inspection didn't confirm it. The tree was around 40 feet in diameter so you'd think if that much rain was being pushed to the edge of the tree there'd be a steady stream of drips near the edge of the treecover, much as there is from a house roof. And indeed, I could see a steady stream of drips coming from the nearby bus shelter with a 12 ft x 4 ft roof - it was clear that anyone standing under the edge of that roof would quickly be soaked.

So, where does the water from the tree go?

I've noticed that in any question that refers to a physical product, there are always affiliate spammers that reply with a generic off-topic answer that doesn't really answer the question that was asked -- they just want to get their link into the answer so people click on them. This just adds "noise" to yahoo answers, and I find it to be annoying.

The most common one appears to be Amazon's affiliate program. Although I report these users to Yahoo when they answer one of my questions, is there a way to report them to Amazon? I figure that reporting them to Yahoo does no good -- they just open a new account, but making them forfeit their Amazon Affiliate account and open a new one will make it more painful for them.

I didn't see any obvious affiliate abuse reporting URL on Amazon's site.

I have a house that I use as a "second home" and I'd like to refinance that for a lower interest rate. Additionally, I'd like to purchase a house for use a primary house. Ideally I'd refinance the house first and take some money out for more down payment on the new house (but even after that it will be 70% LTV). But I could get by without doing that.

Will the refinance affect my credit in qualifying for the house purchase? Is it better to purchase first, and refinance second?

A secondary question - I rent out the "second home" about 10 months a year, can I still call it a "second home" for the purposes of the refinance or is it an "investment property"? My goal is to eventually move into the "second home", but that's at least a few years away.

Atheists and agnostics do not believe in a god because there is no proof that he exists (and much proof that the creation of earth is not how it is depicted in the bible).

If god really did exist and wanted to show himself, how could he possible do so in a way that would convince skeptics?

Simple miracles wouldn't suffice since, as Arthur C Clark said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." A miraculous demonstration could simply be an advanced alien race showing off their technology.

I read in a newspaper article that external firescapes are not acceptable in new construction. Why is this? What is it about an external fire escape that is so dangerous? I know they have some weaknesses: window exits, shaky construction, lack of adequate safety railings, narrow stair widths, etc, but all of these could easily be addressed in code, so why ban them altogether?

This is a followup to this question:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201009...

Which is presumably a homework assignment to find out how much power it would take to heat a swimming pool in 2 hours. The answer is 450KW

Assuming that you really did want to install this high powered pool heater, how would the power company deliver 450KW? Even 480V service would require 1000A of current -- what's the standard service voltage above 480V?

At the end of the Wikipedia article for Electron Drift velocity at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drift_velocity, it claims "If the wire was 1 meter long, (assuming 18 Gauge copper wire) and 3 amps was flowing through it, it would consume as much energy as a 150Watt light bulb. (Verry rough calculation)".

How can that possibly be true? Using P=(I^2)R, the power dissipated by that 1 meter length of wire (R=.02463 ohms/meter) should be 3*3*.02463 = .22 watts, which sounds much more reasonable.

Am I misreading the article? Is the writer claiming something else?

When I was younger, I was a strong christian -- went to bible school and church, hung out with a church group after school, etc. In church (baptist), we were taught that if we accepted Jesus into our hearts as our personal Lord and Savior that he would always be there and through Him we would be saved and would go to heaven. I truly believed in the Lord and accepted Him willingly and honestly.

Well, in the 30 years since then, I've become a devout atheist and recognize the bible as a collection of fairy tales (some loosely based on historical fact) and see religion as a means for those in power to control and manage the population.

But, I think that I'm covered just in case I'm wrong and there is a god, right? Jesus wouldn't abandon someone who accepted him into their heart, right?