Weekend project - build a ferrator.
Water purification
The Economist
Jan 20th 2011
IRON in water is normally regarded a pollutant. Luke Daly, the
boss of Ferrate Treatment Technologies of Orlando, Florida,
however, plans to turn that thought on its head. He intends to use
a chemically unusual form of iron to clean water up, not make it
dirty.
Iron is found in the part of the periodic table known as the
transition metals. Like all metals, these react with other elements
by giving up electrons to form positively charged ions. Transition
metals, though, give up different numbers of electrons in different
circumstances, and thus have ions of various charges. Usually,
iron loses two or three electrons. But in ferrates, which are
compounds of iron and oxygen with non-transition metals like
sodium and calcium, it loses six. That makes ferrates extremely.
First, ferrates are strong oxidising agents. That means they
destroy bacteria and viruses, and break up organic molecules with
alacrity. Second, they are coagulants and flocculating agents.
They attract other chemicals in the water, including dissolved
metals, and precipitate them for easy removal. Moreover, once it
has done its job, the iron in ferrates precipitates too, as iron oxide,
leaving pure water behind.
....Thomas Waite of the Florida Institute of Technology, an
academic scientist on whose work the company has drawn, jokes
that in the early days of his research he kept the whole world’s
supply of ferrates in a cabinet in his laboratory.
&c., &c. http://www.economist.com/node/17956927
La patent — http://tinyurl.com/49828qn
There dobe other patents.
djh
---
This is what I thought: for the most banal event to become an
adventure you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it.
This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he
lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees
everything that happens to him through them; and
he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.
But you have to choose: live or tell. For example, when I was in
Hamburg, with that Erna girl I didn't trust and who was afraid of
me, I led a funny sort of life. But I was in the middle of it, I didn't
think about it. And then one evening, in a little cafe in San Pauli,
she left me to go to the ladies' room. I stayed alone,
there was a phonograph playing "Blue Skies." I began to tell myself
what had happened since I landed. . . . Then I felt violently that I
was having an adventure. But Erna came back and sat down beside
me, she wound her arms around my neck and I hated her without
knowing why. I understand now: one had to begin living again and
the adventure was fading out.
Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people
come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are
tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable,
onotonous addition. . . .
That's living. But everything changes when you tell about life; it's a
change no one notices: the proof is that people talk about true
stories. As if there could possibly be true stories; things happen
one way and we tell about them in the opposite sense. You seem
to start at the beginning: "It was a fine autumn evening in 1922. I
was a notary's clerk in Marommes." And in reality you have
started at the end. It was there, invisible and present, it is the one
which gives to words the pomp and value of a beginning. "I was
out walking, I had left the town without realizing it, I was
hinkingabout my money troubles." This sentence, taken simply for
what it is, means that the man was absorbed, morose, a hundred
leagues from an adventure, exactly in the mood to let things
happen without noticing them. But the end is there, trans-forming
everything. For us, the man is already the hero of the story. His
moroseness, his money troubles are much more precious than
ours, they are all gilded by the light of future passions. And the
story goes on in the reverse: instants have stopped piling
themselves up in a lighthearted way one on top of the
other, they are snapped up by the end of the story which draws
them and each one of them in turn, draws out the preceding
instant: "It was night, the street was deserted." The phrase is cast
out negligently, it seems superfluous; but we do not let ourselves
e caught and we put it aside: this is a piece of information whose
value we shall subsequently appreciate. And we feel that
the hero has lived all the details of this night like annunciations,
promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises,
bind and deaf to all that did not herald adventure. We forget that
the future was not yet there; the man was walking in a night
without forethought, a night which offered him a choice of
dull rich prizes, and he did not make his choice.
I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves
like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch
time by the tail.
Jean-Paul Sartre Nausea
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