Antarctica Environment

Earth's southernmost continent is not a nice place to be.   There's ice over a kilometer thick at the surface of most of it.  At the hottest point in the summer, the temperature is as cold as it is in the middle of winter where I live, peeking at 15C in the hottest ice-less valleys.   During the winter, temperatures drop as low as -80C.   The gleaming white surface can give explorers and scientists that visit sunburn in a matter of minutes.  There's also altitude issues due to the ice -- Antarctica is high, and with it, thin of air.  And yet, it can save the entire world.
  An elaborate plan to use Antarctican conditions to suck CO₂ out of the air has been proposed, using the high winds to create wind power, which would power giant freezers.  In the freezers, pressurized air would press CO2 into a liquid that would then sublimate into snow when ejected.   The wind turbine's power wouldn't be very useful for other things, since maybe 200 scientists live in Antarctica.   As time went on, this freezer and compressor would suck the carbon from the air, and leave it locked forever in the snow.
  Of course, being who I am, I couldn't help but imagine a potential improvement in this plan.  Snow falls very slowly in Antarctica on account of it being technically a desert.   What little snow does fall remains as ice for a millennia, so I could use this to lower the ocean.   To our wind-freezer system, we add a desalinization plant.     Ocean water is pumped through huge pipes up from the ocean, using wind power.   Under intense pressure, fresh water accumulates on the other side of semipermeable membranes.   This fresh water is then sprayed towards the pole.  In the freezing conditions of Antarctica, even boiling water tossed into the air will quickly solidify into snow.   Thousands of years worth of snow will fall every single day, preferably on top of the dry ice snow that we were creating.   As this accumulates, the sea level slowly drops, saving countless low elevation communities around the globe.
Of course, Slashdot poster gman003 found a minor rub with the whole thing:

The only thing I see stopping it is politics. In particular, America and China. Europe seems to at least recognize the need for action, and they're willing to work together to try things. China is generally too selfish and shortsighted to worry about the environment, but you could probably convince them if you could make it somewhat-profitable for them (just have the wind turbines and such made in China, that should satisfy them).
But then it falls on to America. And you're going to need America at least not fighting this plan, because if the US decides to actively fight it, it's not happening. Period. You'd also need them to at least chip in a good chunk of the funding if you're going to do the full plan, make a serious dent in CO2. Problem is, denying the very existence global warming is a political requirement for half the country. They'll fight it just on principle, and I can't see the rest of the country fighting back for a project that doesn't have any immediate gains for the US specifically. While some sort of "compromise" could probably pull it off, or with luck it could be swept under the rug and never become a political issue, that's not guaranteed.
Still, it's the best plan I've seen so far.

 There's no need for it to necessarily be government funded though, and I could definitely see American green charities paying for it, European engineers designing it, and Chinese engineers physically assembling it in place.

Plasma Water Cleaning

Clean water is a major need in much of the world. While water is a very common commodity on Earth, drinkable water is much less so. Much of our water is unthinkably salty, polluted, or so swarming with disease-causing bacteria and viruses that drinking it will probably result in your death. In many parts of the world, half of one's day is spent obtaining clean water so that your family doesn't die. And even then, some very clear, very clean water can be infected, and you'd never know until everyone who drank it becomes unbearably sick. In Berkeley, scientists have developed a way to not only sterilize water, but make it actively kill bacteria and viruses for up to a week after treatment, allowing people to stockpile water. They do this all with low temperature plasma, the type that develops in a neon light sign, or those lightning-ball toys. It's cheaper so far than the traditional treatments for water, such as bleach, filtering, or UV light. This kills even drug-resistant bacteria, which could save thousands of lives. Plus, it's cheap. A metal rod and a few cents of electricity will clean a few gallons of water. Even if the average resident can't afford this, there are many charities that would very cheerfully provide it. The saved time will also improve lives, as Dr. Hans Rosling pointed out how the washing machine turned his native Sweden into a first world country. Why? With the time that his mother saved by not having to manually scrub the family's clothing, she was able to educate her children, work to increase her income, and generally make life better all around. Automation has clearly made everyone's lives better. With clean water, child mortality will go down, hygine will improve, there will be more time for education and productive work.

Watering Afghanistan

Japan and Algeria have a joint project going to make solar power plants that also refine solar cells from the desert sand. This would enable plants to effectively reproduce themselves -- haul the solar cells a few miles away, set them in a concrete lattice, and this is power plant #2. They hope to cover the Sahara desert in these power plants, which would provide half the energy needs of humankind. Here's the video:

This inspired another Japanese scientist to cut a deal in Afghanistan to bring water for humanitarian purposes, as well as sociological studies of the plausibility of this kind of thing. There's a video of that too except it's in Japanese and I can't find an English language version of it. Sorry. I'll report on the English language report that brought this to my attention.
It seems that his original plan was to make concrete rivers that slowly leech water into the surrounding environment, which encourages plant growth and fertility, which reinforces the river in a continuous positive feedback cycle. Japan has many concrete rivers due to paving over natural rivers (and then, to the bafflement of the rest of the world, claiming that the river is still in its natural state). So this technique would be quite familiar to him. Only...turns out concrete is kind of hard to buy and pour in Afghanistan. Too much disruption. So he changed the plan to use chicken wire and rocks. Afghans are often quite familiar with chicken wire for use in caging in domestic animals, and there's no shortage of rocks. Already a number of rivers have been built this way. First, make a box with chicken wire. Then fill that box with rocks. this is now the bank of the river. Make a bank all the way up a mountain, where one finds likely sources of water, and let the water flow. A small amount of the river's water leeches into the ground water, irrigating miles around it.
The scientist, Dr.Tetsu Nakamura, also likes this plan because it can now continue without him. Already Afghans have been trained in the basic techniques, and are now improving conditions in their own country on their own effort. If this succeeds, they will not need foreign aid, relief work, or any of the other usual solutions to poverty and want. And that's the way the charitable want it.
It was speculated that all this kicked off from a pun. Japan's native name for itself ("Nihon") translates to something like "Origin of the Sun," which leads Japanese people to think of the sun quite a lot, and makes them very enthusiastic about solar power. If this is true, then perhaps I should ask Chinese people for advice on geothermal energy, because their country's name translates literally as "Center nation."
(America is named after an explorer, and my country's full name is the United States of America because we're not very creative at coming up with national names.)

Hormone Cleanup

Earlier this week, I pointed out that human activity has been putting hormone-like chemicals into the water. Don't panic. Discovery news has a solution.
Alfalfa and similar grasses absorbs this pollution, and is not often eaten by humans. Rabbits breed fast enough that we could have a disposable batch of rabbits to eat this, live their short lives, and produce pelts when they end. Running it through the alfalfa partially breaks it down, and feeding that alfalfa to rabbits will break it totally down. In theory, the rabbits would be safe to eat. (In practice though, I think they will wind up as dog or cat food.)
And if water treatment plants need to include a small alfalfa farm, I think they could do this. Water would be so much cleaner, for very little added cost.

Water Recycling, Historically

Human civilization uses a lot of water. We drink it directly, use it for cleaning, and pour tons of it on our plants for farming and gardening. It doesn't come from magic. We take it from nature. Various lakes and streams and rivers. (Though smaller sources like ponds tend to be a bad idea. The water gets stagnant and things start to grow in it.)
After we've used the water, it tends to be unappealing. If we washed things with it, it's now full of dirt and soap. It may contain sewage. In the old days, we'd just flush it straight back into the river. The river did tend to take it away where we never saw it again. We now know that all rivers eventually go to the ocean, and the ocean an only absorb so much before we get horrible blooms and such.
Since then, we've learned to chemically clean water. We add a material that sticks to the dirt and bacteria and soap and whatever other additives. We run it through sand and charcoal. We expose it to ultraviolet light to kill off what bacteria remains. The end result of this is cleaner than the water we got from the stream in the first place. And yet, it's been proven in Singapore and Australia, two places with a desperate shortage of water, that people are still grossed out by the idea of recycled water. (And yet all water is recycled. In nature, it's filtered by clay and such before flowing back to the river. The clay does a very good job, but it is quite limited in capacity. Put more than a certain amount of water through it and it just stops working at all.)
So if people won't touch this filtered water, the next best thing, and the thing that I'm 99% sure actually happens, is to return recycled water to nature. No more infected, polluted rivers. No more harmful algae blooms from detergent. And yet, this could be better.
Studies of river water with returned water show traces of pharmacology byproducts. The metabolic transformations of the pills people took, peed out, and survived the filtering process to return to the river. Sometimes they combine into hormone-like chemicals. News reports feminized frogs, where various pills combined to form a pseudo-estrogen, the frogs absorbed this and feminized.
I suppose the only way around this is to find a better purification system. The only way I could be totallly sure would be to electrically separate the hydrogen from oxygen, and then burning the hydrogen to recombine them. (and condense the resulting steam, of course.) This is not energy efficient.

Waterplane

When I was 12, I wanted to be an astronaut. Several things screwed this up. The first one being that I suffer from major motion-sickness. I have to dope myself up to the gills to not heave up my latest meal should I travel by boat or plane or train. (Another thing being that I'd have to join the air force and do well in it, but that's another story.) I do okay in cars for some reason.
The big reason for motion sickness has to do with your vestibular system in your ear. When what you see doesn't match what your system reports the local gravity to be, your body concludes that you're in a whirlpool, and decides that you need to be a little lighter to escape. Up comes your stomach contents. The misery of this also attempts to condition you to not jump in whirlpools, fool. One big problem of this is that it's not a whirlpool, it's a plane, and you can't exactly just jump out of it anytime you feel like.
Then some time ago, I saw a TV program in which physicist Michio Kaku is given something out of science fiction, and told to try and describe a way to have it really happen, as best physics will allow. This particular episode was about "destroying the death star," the pivitol scene from the movie "Star Wars." His version was very different from the movie. One of the things he had to work with was G-Force, in which inertia plus a fast turn proves really, really bad for pilots. Each "G-Force" is an increase in force above what is felt due to gravity, so a pilot experiencing five g-forces is thrown with 5 times the force of earthly gravity. Air force pilots routinely suffer 7 g-forces, and astronauts experience ten. Both require elaborate systems to stay conscious by reducing the effect this has on them. Too many g-forces can prevent your brain from receiving blood, causing you to pass out, and too much more can smash your body to pulp. Dr. Kaku's solution was to immerse the pilot in water. Buoyant force counteracts the inertial force, so even as the water experiences 7, 10, or 50 g-forces, it also distributes it so that your own body doesn't feel them. He proved this with a water balloon in a centrifuge. The balloon in an air filled beaker was flattened by the force. The balloon floating in water retained its shape, no matter how fast the centrifuge went.
This makes me wonder if I flew in a tank of water, if maybe I wouldn't get motion sick. The plane could experience all the turbulence in the world and I wouldn't feel it. I'd need some sort of breathing system, as we humans don't have gills or skin-breathing the way animals that live in water do. If everyone was in tanks like that, you could not bother pressurizing the cabin, just a breathing tube in the tanks. Flying would be a more comfortable, if soggier, experience. I say this because there is a limit to cabin pressurization. The more the plane is pressurized, the harder the forces on the hull, and more than about 8.6 psi is an intolerable risk. Too much pressure and the plane simply pops like a balloon. A balloon made of metal. Not fun for anyone, but even worse for those inside it. So even with pressurization, flying in a plane is like a trip to Tibet. You have much less oxygen, and it's woozy and difficult and your sense of taste is diminished from the low pressure. In tanks, you could get a sea-level amount of air and breathe normally.
The air force would also be interested in this technology. A pilot that flew in a water-filled cockpit could turn harder and faster than one in a conventional cockpit, as he would be without the risk of blacking out. This probably makes it worth the extra weight. Especially if competing planes don't have such a system. Enemy nations would face planes that could abruptly turn around and destroy them from positions that were previously thought of as totally vulnerable. Dives could be further and faster with fewer consequences. Mobility in general would vastly improve.

Pool Robots

One of the things my father loves about his house is his pool. He can go for a swim any time he feels like it, and then go right back home afterwards. No fees, no dealing with car keys, or locker rooms, just a happy dip whenever. One of the things he doesn't love about his pool is the maintenance.
Pools require a lot of maintenance. The water must be circulated, or mosquitoes will lay their eggs in it, bacteria grow and prosper, and pond scum grow, stinking up the entire yard. The water requires chemical treatment to ensure that diseased based organisms can't take root. Organic debris like leaves tend to fall in, and must be fished out. My father spends a lot of time on this. Though it will put many pool-boys out of work, I'd like to automate this work. Pools are nice, and I'd like to make them more comfortable and affordable for everyone.
Already on the market are automated machines to sweep the bottoms and sides of the pool. Experiments with automated quality control tests in factories suggest that a netting machine could work by having many cameras looking at the pool, and bringing down one of many nets on a mechanical arm to remove the offending object. A perpetually running pump circulates the water, but before it returns to the pool, it gets run through a chemical probe, which determines the numbers all pool owners need to know: pH and Chlorine levels. It would have a reserve of chemicals so that it could adjust these levels as necessary. It could also email or tweet when these chemicals are in short supply. Lastly, a trip past an ultraviolet light would kill off any bacteria or virus that survived that far. The then clean water is returned to the pool. Ideally, the pump should be underground, where the noise it makes will not be heard.
It may also be wise to have a reserve water tank. When it rains, dad's pool sometimes overflows, which annoys him. When it doesn't rain for a long time, the water level decreases. (Dad's usual solution for this is a hose.) With the reserve tank, when the water reaches a certain level, we can siphon some off into the tank, and return it later when the water level reaches a lower level. The pool would maintain a certain homeostasis. (The water tank would also need to be ultravioleted. We could probably skip on the chlorine, and mosquitoes are unlikely to lay eggs in an underground tank.)

News Summary

NPR says that the best way to survive in a falling elevator is not to jump at the last second, as is popularly believed, (as you could not possibly jump fast enough), but you should instead lie on the floor, and try to wedge yourself between the two walls at the last second. You'd take a beating, but you'd live. After all, it's not the fall that kills you, so much as the sudden stop at the end. Hopefully my readers will never need to know this information, but better to have and not need, then to need and not have.
Discovery News reports what female friends of mine have said to me all along: If you're female, your own body hates you with the ferocity of a thousand suns. Estogen clusters in ovulating women make it hard for them to think straight, brain scanning studies of American women showed that they want to be thinner, sometimes thinner than is biologically possible for them. Confrontation with the idea that they might be fat, even if demonstrably false, sent part of their brains into existential crisis.
There was also reported to be a crisis in groundwater, in that at the rate it is being used faster than it can be replaced (by rain, underground water flow, etc). Complete depletion would result in a massive and disastrous desertification of the area. (I do not believe their claim that this is connected to sea level rise. Groundwater has always gone towards the sea since there was a sea to begin with. Groundwater didn't come about by magic, but by rain from evaporated seawater.)
They also report that before airplanes, there were still intercontinental exchanges of disease causing viruses and bacteria, carried by duststorm. Bacteria and viruses would travel with the dust, blown by the wind, until deposited on a new land, with new hosts to infect. The disease would arrive in a weakened state, having to survive both a dry wind storm and a large amount of UV radiation, which was only partially blocked by the supply of dust.
Fark leads me to a story by ABC news, which says that a mall in St. Louis, Missouri, banned groups of unaccompanied teenagers, to the immense annoyance of said teenagers. The mall also discovered that said teenagers were not their primary patrons: the policy made all store's profits go up, even the ones catering to teenagers. The large groups hanging out tended not to spend money, preferring instead to horse around and irritate others around them.
Tomorrow I return to the mad science.

Water Mine Disarm

Discovery news is reporting today that the US army is disarming mines in Afghanistan, not with wire clippers or other metal tools, but with water. Wait, what?
Almost every schoolchild knows that you can use water to dig, and most engineers are familiar with pressurized water being able to slice through steel, but why mines? Because mines are a danger to people and property. This system, positionable by both humans and robots, sacrifices a bit of water and energy to slice IEDs in half, whereupon they explode. You lose only some dirty water and maybe a piece of hose. Both are very cheap in Afghanistan. Expensive assets, like human personnel, are quite safely out of the area when the mines explode.
And I'm all for it, with the aphorism that "One who saves one life, saves the whole world."

Teabag Filter

Water is a common substance on earth, covering over 75% of its surface. Potable water, that is, water free enough of salt or pollution to drink, not so much. People in many of the poorer parts of the world have only rivers and ponds to drink from. RIvers and ponds that often contain some kind of pollution and give them a bad case of the runs.
Well, that's all about to change, says PhysOrg, a science reporting site. South African environmental scientists have invented a new type of filter, one that resembles a common tea-bag. Only instead of tea, it contains a fiber-like material that absorbs mud, pollution, bacteria, and heavy metals. The water is then as clean as bottled water and can be drunk. The filter is inexpensive and can then be thrown away, where it will break down. (Please discard it away from the water source.) The filters cost three South African cents each, and even the poorest South African can afford to buy several per day. The filter can purify up to a liter of water.
The filter doesn't scale up very well, so it wouldn't be useful for, say, purifying a municipal source of water. There, heavier technology would have to be employed.

Water Touch

A Japanese computer scientist has come up with an interesting, soft, 3d touch screen that one can happily poke all day with no chance of sore fingers. Namely, a tank of water. Wait, what?
It works with a tank of water, and a webcam. The screen is projected to the bottom, and the camera can detect distortions in the water, and infer from them how the water was touched. From there, simple multitouch-screen software can send the input back to the computer, translating it into the manipulation of information.
While you'll never develop sore fingers, or carpal tunnel syndrome, from this setup, it does have the disadvantage of only working in one orientation (namely, the screen straight down from your perspective), and I can't imagine it's easy to type on. Still, Hack a Day described it as the most relaxing interface ever, which it effectively is.

Fogbox

Water is a precious resource, as Discover News is aware. They now report that deserts have additional options for gathering water. A dutch inventor has a box to pull moisture from morning fogs, the rare rain, and occasional humidity condensed. A tree planted in the box in the middle of the Saraha desert survives 90% of the time, but a tree planted in the same place with no box survives only 10% of the time.
Apparently, this was inspired by a Peruvian practice of using a net to absorb water from morning fog. The net would absorb water from the fog, and drip it down during the day, thereby bringing water to environments that were normally quite dry.
I'd like to see this used to modify climates. Trees in the desert would provide shade and comfort to those who live there. And some climatologists think that enough trees could actually tip over the balance of climate and bring rain. (And others think that rain is a matter of wind and evaporation and the first bunch is a bunch of whack-jobs.)
The box is designed to provide an initial sealed environment, and ultimately gets pushed out of the ground, where it can be taken away to be reused. By the time the tree is strong enough to do this, it's typically reached down to the water line, and is no longer dependent on surface sources for water.

Alternative Shower

Every day, I take a shower to get clean. Sometimes two if I'm working hard. This uses a surprising amount of water. With more and more of the country facing drought, there must be another way.
Well, one way would be to recycle and purify the water. It's been done, so I'm off to the crazier methods.
How about I copy the space program, and have a cleansing foam sprayed onto me, and then vacuumed off? It would use no water at all, and in theory the foam should be recyclable. Waste that it pulls off of me could go straight into a garbage can for easy disposal. Or, alternatively to that, an incinerator. Easy fuel source.

Tank Bed

Sci-fi shows have the ultimate water-bed: a large water filled tank in which floats the subject, probably for medical regeneration or such.
It sounds comfortable to me, bringing back all kinds of memories of swimming pools, and floating in them. However, breathing is an issue. We humans cannot breathe under water. A null issue in Sci-fi, since it's always implied there that they have extra-corporeal breathing and circulation: basically their blood is being oxygenated outside the tank and then re-injected. (A tad extreme for a bed, ya think?)
So for a bed version, I would have a strapped-on oxygen mask attached to a tube, attached to an air-pump, a-la a CPAP machine. This is dependent on power, so in case of power failure, there will be an uninterruptible power supply, and instructions to drain the tank should the power fail. We can refill it if the failure proves temporary.
The tank fills from above, adding a certain amount of sea-salt for buoyancy. The user is put in from above (I guess you climb stairs to go to bed?), deploys the mask, and starts the air pump. The pump shoves air into your lungs through the mask, and exhalings bubble out of the mask into the water, where they rise to the surface. After eight hours of sleep, the tank drains from an openable vent at the bottom, into the sewer, the user climbs out through hand-rails or a cord, and the tank is cleaned, perhaps through a water-spray.
A relaxing, if extremely weird, way to sleep.

Auto-Watering...even cheaper

Hack A Day brings my attention to a system to water your lawn from gathered rainwater...and if it runs dry, to refill with city water, so your lawn doesn't die. (It prefers rainwater because rainwater is free.)
And having set that up, you have, as I previously wrote, a number of options....

Turbulance Cancellation

Discovery News reports that liquid-flow engineers now have a technique to cancel turbulence in a liquid as if it were sound: an equal and opposite turbulence defeats it.
This is actually a surprisingly big deal because it allows pipes to instantly unclog themselves, improving flow and speed of the liquid within, and in fuel-transfer environments can actually result in a marked increase in efficiency.

Greywater

As a society, we Americans pour quite a lot of water down the drain. Then we get fresh water from the faucet to water plants, the lawn, or a flower box. Most of the country is experiencing drought. My cognitive dissonance is massive.
Okay, sure, you rather sanely wouldn't want to drink water that's been in your sink with the raw meat and dirty dishes. Plants are less picky. If your water is full of bacteria, they think that's awesome, it'll bring them more vitamins. If it's hard, even better, free mineral supplement! It's warm, no biggie there, either. It's we animals that worry about that kind of thing.
Greywater systems that recycle safer sources of used water to water a lawn or garden have existed for years, the main obstacle being legal. See, plumbers used to install septic systems really close to the house out of sheer laziness, and then when something went wrong with the septic system, the homeowner had a massive flow of unmentionable straight into the basement, which was bad for the owner's health. And whatever plumber was called in to fix it. So the universal plumbing code requires all septic systems to be a certain distance away from any house, and numerous safety features that don't play well with greywater.
However, in an increasingly thirsty world, more and more municipalities are forced to reconsider these rules, lest they be forced to pay for expensive treatment plants on increasingly stressed budgets.

Underground water treatment

In an age where fresh, potable water is in short supply in many many parts of the world, a water-purification plant is a clear benefit to any area. It cleans pollution from water until it's drinkable again, and provides it back to the water system. If not the human-use system directly, then to the rivers and lakes that feed the human-use system. The lakes and rivers don't care where their water comes from, so long as it doesn't have noxious chemicals, bacteria-infested sewage, or anything like that.
However, people do not like having water-purification plants near them. Water purification plants often smell bad. They have stinky pollution, sewage, and bad smelling treatment chemicals. They might, depending on their pump technology, be loud. This causes the "Not In My Backyard" principle to block most water-purification construction.
Of course, being the maniac that I am, I'm thinking of ways to build it in ways that don't make people complain. I'm thinking, deep underground. The odor likely won't reach the surface, and the sound will be muted by the soil above. The only way you'd know it was there would be cheaper water bills.
Unfortunately, this would also mean greater energy use, as the purified water would have to be pumped back to the surface. That's a drag.

Water Plan

Okay, let's imagine two houses. One near the sea has a city water supply, the other on the top of the mountain does not due to its remoteness. Here's a crappy drawing.

The house painted green has a city water supply, the house in orange is a remote house in the mountains where land is cheap. The orange house has a solar-panel and battery water supply, a rain condenser, and other engineering supplies, but is still short on water. While I suppose the most cost effective solution is to pay the nearest city to build pipes to the house, this blog is all about the awesomer, but less practical solutions. We're going to pipe jack all the way to the freaking ocean.

The pipe will be straighter than that, of course. We install a fine mesh filter at the bottom, water processing equipment like a storage tank, a desalination machine, and so on in the basement, at which point the basement will look something like this:

We can then insert the large (and extremely long) screw , attach a gear to it, and attach the chain to an electric motor.

For cheap, a small piece of the sea is pulled up into the basement every second, where we can pipe it through the desalinization machine. Now we have a ready supply of fresh water and brine. We can drink the fresh water, bathe with it, wash the dishes, and water the lawn. As for the brine, we can discard it through the nearest sewer, where it will flow back to the ocean, or we can boil it and sell it as sea salt, which fetches quite the price these days.

The main issue with this is legal: land ownership deeds traditionally describe the landowner's property as extending all the way to the center of the earth. I would need to get permission of every landowner that the pipe traveled through, which makes it a tad impractical for the places that could really benefit from this.

Archimedes' Water Lifter

In ancient times, the philosopher, mathematician, and general mad scientist Archimedes invented a machine to lift water an unlimited distance, using only it's tendency to flow downhill and a crank. The water screw is incredibly useful for any situation where water is down and needs to be brought up, be it for supplying an uphill foundation with water, or to drain a downhill location, like a mine. (The uphill site will want to drain in a different downhill direction.) In Archimedes' time, the crank would be turned by a slave or cheap laborer, but since then we've found the electric motors work way better. Motors don't get tired or bored, to say nothing of the absolute immorality of slavery.
This gives me a brilliant idea, which I will describe in detail tomorrow.