Gary H

Can anyone tell me if there is a real reason that the neutral wire for U.S. residential must be grounded? I realize that if not, the AC is floating and both hot and neutral will display voltage to ground (rather than the voltage from neutral to ground being nearly zero). But I'm not sure if that creates either any sort of hazard or is in violation of NEC. Can anybody refer me to an NEC code or describe a situation where this could be hazardous or otherwise incorrect?

I'm talking about say a bowl filled with particles of gold, or say nickel or chrome or iron, whatever, each grain being only one or 2 atoms large. I'm imagining it would look like liquid, and almost feel like it as well, yet still hold some shape like sand. But why have I never seen this? Why do we end up with clumbs no smaller than billions to trillions of atoms in size, even when we precipitate a metal out of solution? Has anyone ever seen a bowl of gold atoms?

Something in my XP machine has taken over all 3 of my browsers, redirecting search links to either the yellow pages, or some car ads, or some green page where I'm asked to supply the address I'm coming from and other info. It does it on all 3 of my browsers (IE, Firefox, and Chrome). I completely de-installed Firefox (including all info) and re-installed it, but still the same. I've ran AVG (free version) scans several times. How do I fix this crap?

I'm having trouble designing a 12-pulse rectifier with a 3-phase 208V input (120V to neutral). The output is a low voltage (24-30V range, approx 100A), so I'm doing the classical parallel version with a reactor. From graphing, it appears that the output is very close to the peak value of the secondary voltages - is that correct? So do I specify the secondary voltages by the peaks?

Also, how do you choose the inductance of the center-tapped reactor?

I've been trying to simulate the design in Tina9, but the results are suspicious, with minor alterations of values resulting in either convergence faults or overcurrent faults, even though I have nothing floating or mis-connected.

I have several .pdf's open. For some reason, my CPU is nearly running full throttle for acrobat.exe.... continuously! What the hell is acrobat doing and how do I get it to stop? They're just documents, for God's sakes, they ain't supposed to be doing anything! This is a Vista machine, only half my 3GB of RAM is in use, and I just did updates and a reboot. It was doing this before, then was ok after reboot for awhile, now it's at it again.

My stepson's class is doing Romeo and Juliet. At one point, his character jumps up and calls out, "My rapier - Ho!"

But he can't seem to say it any other way than "My rapier, ho!", and then we bust up laughing. The performance is tomorrow - what to do?

8^)

Friggin' vista! My desktop icons now give "no association..." for .exe's when clicked, but the program will run if I nav to the actual program, right-click, and select "run as administrator" (but not if I just double-click it) What's going on? I have no other user accounts, nothing has changed since I got this system, unless my daughter did something she shouldn't have.

We have a portable closet-sized temperature chamber that I want to use to cool an external mass to -40C, which will be used to provide cooling to a larger chamber. I envision a heat exchanger external to the larger chamber that I clamp the smaller chamber to, with lines running from it to the mass inside of the larger camber. A separate set of lines and fan would be used to transfer cold from the mass (perhaps an insulated box of several tons of sand?) to the large chamber.

My question is, what might be some choices for the fluid and pump used in the heat exchanger? I don't expect air will give sufficient performance? Again, the operating temperature will be -40C. Experienced refrigeration answerers only, please. Thanks.

I drove to the beach yesterday, at a speed of only 10 miles per hour. I drove back at a faster speed, and when I did the math, I found my average speed for the round trip was 20 miles per hour. What was my average speed home? Am I lying? Why?

The beach is x kilometers away . You drove to the beach at a rate of 60km/hr. How fast would you have to drive back to have gone the whole round trip at an average speed of 120km/hr?

I'm posting this in reference to another question I answered as a demonstration.

its hard to make me laugh can you give me ur best joke

i like to eat my own poop. icant resist it! it taste like what i ate for breakfast lunch dinner all combined. my dog that talks says i should stop and so do my friends is my dog rite?