You wanna know the number one most common email, the somebody who hosts a Bible podcast on the internet gets? Let me think, dear Matt. No, I don't know what it is. It's ideas for perpetual motion machines.
Is it really? No, not too many. I have received two messages over the course of my career. People reaching out to me with ideas for perpetual motion machines.
Are you serious? I have, which is funny because... You would think those would be the emails I would give. It's not really my genre.
Yeah, I get all kinds of people reaching out with perpetual motion machines. You ever get one that worked? No, no. Is that just because of the loss of thermodynamics?
Yeah, it turns out. That's what keeps doing it? That's a thing that keeps doing it. Are those laws though, or are they suggestions?
You know, you bring up a good point. There is a thing that I saw one time in Houston. This guy had a, I don't know, he called a warp drive. I don't know what you wanna call it.
Right. Basically it's a, oh shoot, there's a name for it. It's a Al Kumbier driver. It's got a really fancy name.
It's called the Al Kumbier drive warp drive thing. So basically it's like a horn. It's like microwave energy. And the idea is that you can put electricity into this microwave generator.
Okay. It's rust out of it. Okay. And it's weird because you're not really reacting against anything.
So you pull a vacuum and you start this microwave drive and you appear to be getting thrust. So my thought is, when you look at the way the force profile works, it looks to me like something's warming up and something's cooling off. So I don't know. So that's what breaks it?
Long story short, it appears that it may be the experimentation itself that is contributing to the apparent thrust. But I don't know, I want it to work. Because if you get even like a micronutant of thrust, like if you could scale that, well, it's time would help you scale. Like if you could push something for like 10 grams or whatever the newton equivalent of that is for a very long period of time, then that's acceleration.
Force equal mass time acceleration. If you get to accelerate at even a little bit of acceleration over time, that can really add up, right? Yeah. Because the acceleration, we keep going.
Yeah, exactly. And so you could get to stupid velocities. So what you just described, that's what they call a second order or a second type of perpetual motion machine where the idea is that you, I'm not beginning this right, you add energy to something, you add heat energy to it. And that single initiation of heat energy is the thinking behind it.
What? Right. So you're going to do a perpetual motion machine. I don't know the classes of, you know the classes of perpetual motion machines?
I went down this rabbit hole a few months ago and I started, apparently, I told Twitter now X that I like failed perpetual motion machines in my feed. And so the 4U feed just keeps giving me perpetual motion machines that don't work. Really? And gradually, I've gleaned that there's more, but there are three types of perpetual motion machines.
Really? I'm going to see if I can get it right. I'm going to Google it in a second because I might not. OK.
I didn't know this. Number one is no input required. Some sort of machine where you don't have to add energy to it. The second class is one where you do add energy, but that initial input of energy is enough.
Everything is recaptured. So no energy is lost. Obviously, it's transformed. But it all goes back into the recirculation of that energy and it goes forever.
That would be acceleration at infinitum. Like you were talking about with this warp drive. I'm listening, man. I'm just listening.
And then the third would be the class of perpetual motion machines that are predicated on friction-free vacuum environments, where you don't lose anything to any kind of contact between particles between items. I'm struggling here. So this is what I understand a perpetual motion machine to be. OK.
It's a theoretical or a, I don't know, but what is the word for a thing that we hope to exist that doesn't actually exist? Is there a word for that? I don't know. OK.
It's a proposed machine that you start at working and it continues to work. And you're able to harness just a little bit of the energy off of it, but you're still able to keep it going. And so it's basically free energy. Yeah.
That's why I understand when people say, I've got this perpetual motion machine. That's what I understand that they're talking about. Is that correct? Yeah.
So effectively, what you're trying to do, if I understand it right, is you're trying to put an object in motion and then have it not come into contact with another object, so that it stays in motion. OK. And somehow in that, you harness some benefit off of it. I think everybody would agree to be pretty cool.
You just get one to go in motion and stay in motion. But why doesn't that work? Why doesn't it work? Yeah.
Why can't you just put something in motion and have it say that way? Because of losses. I mean, you've got frictional losses. You have heat losses.
You've got aerodynamic drag losses. I mean, just even like intermolecular forces trying to attract each other, like cohesion and weird stuff. You have to burn energy with motion. Like, energy is just going to dissipate and move.
You're going to raise the temperature of the air in the room just a little bit because of the friction of the air. I mean, just weird stuff. Not something you can measure, but it's going to take energy out of the system. So a top, for example, there's this beautiful, I mean, I've often thought this would be really fun to do, but there's this beautiful competition on this Japanese show where they take a top, a mechanical top, and they have these machinists, or these craftsmen, and they have these engineers.
And they say, here's what we're going to do. We're going to build these tops, and we're going to see who can make a top spin for the longest period of time. Where does your brain go automatically? Let's say I was to limit you to 500 grams, or whatever.
Where does your brain go? Like, how do you optimize that? Yeah, got it. I want to get as much of that weight spread out as far from the point, the center point as possible.
I want the finest point of contact possible with the surface, the most friction-free material I can get. And I want to use only the minimum amount of my total weight distribution for something that I can grip or mechanically spin so that I get a really clean start and don't burn a bunch of my energy on launch while it stabilizes out. OK, so you want to spread out the mass as far away from the center as possible. So you want to increase the rotational inertia of this thing.
I think I do. Yes. That's what I said. You're just looking at me like I'm wrong.
No, that's what I wanted to do too. The point, that's where my brain goes, right? To the point. So what do you do?
Do you have a needle on a plate of steel? Do you have a? Do you get to pick the surface? Yeah, just build it for me right now.
Well, yeah, I want something that it won't cut into, even at the visibly imperceptible level. So for example, first I was just looking at the surface right in front of me, a wood desk. Well, there I would say, I don't want that point to be too fine. Because what if I do get this thing to spin for 15 minutes?
It's going to drill into that wood. That doesn't work. I would need to distribute that weight a little bit, or my top's going to do damage to my spin surface. But if I get to choose the spin surface, I would just do research to figure out what isn't going to get cut into or changed by the action of the top.
I think what I would do is I would make a small dish with a very shallow dimple in it. I'm spinning on, and I would make that out of ruby. And then I would take a spherical ruby, or an equivalent, very, very hard gemstone of some sort. Is that the heart?
I mean, diamond? What's the heart? Diamonds? I'm so far.
They're all great. OK. And then I would take something like that, and I would have a sphere rotating in a concave dish. And the reason I would do that is because if it ever starts wondering up the dish, it'll come back.
It will ride back down the dish to the center. And so it would spin right there in the center. So that's what I would do. Budget wise, I'd go with cubic zirconium.
Chronic zucchini. Yeah. Everything else you said just makes perfect sense. So you're trying to eliminate travel.
I mean, a top's going to waste energy traveling. No, not that. I don't want to eliminate travel. What I want to eliminate is the.
But travel would be bad, right? Because you're giving up energy to air resistance. You're squandering energy pushing through. Yeah.
Here's another thing I would think about. So you got this mass. We've got this ring. I'm thinking about, you ever seen what carpet comes on?
Like these big rolls? Like it's a big cardboard tube. Yeah. We used to cut those off with a little hexon and turn them into Megatron arms.
That's awesome. Yeah. Just got it. So I'm thinking like a slice, like a one-inch long slice of that.
I would want all my mass spread out like that. But the question is how do you connect that mass, that ring, to the point, or in my case, the ruby ball? I wouldn't want just to put arms out there. Well, you don't want that on bearings.
Well, no. No, just think you've got a ring, like a disc, kind of thing. And you've got the point in the middle. And somehow you have to connect the mass on the outside of the ring to the point so they can rotate, right?
Right. So you have to think about the design of how you're going to connect that. And for me, I wouldn't want to just put spokes like a wagon wheel. Because as those spokes cut through the air, they're going to create turbulence.
And they're going to dissipate more and more and more air. They're going to be whipping up the air. They're going to be spinning the air in the room, so to speak. So I think I would want a flat surface on the bottom.
Like I would want my top to have a bottom to it, like a whole disc. So that as it starts spinning, it's just spinning up the air right next to the disc. Does that make any sense at all? Yeah, I think it does.
And then I want to do it in the vacuum. Well, let me do it. OK, we can go way down this rabbit hole. The point being, the top is a really good metaphor for a perpetual motion machine.
It's not going to work. And we can all into it. It's not going to work. You're under perfect conditions.
It's not going to work. I remember in my old high school that has now been converted into a dorm for the University of Northern Colorado. But back in the day, it was an old, typical public school building that then was a private school. There was this one hallway, just a gillion miles long.
And you think about the longest straightest hallways you know they're probably in schools, right? And it had, I don't even want what you call that kind of floor, where you're putting stone and aggregate. And then you just shave the whole thing down. I love that for airports.
Yes. Because it doesn't make your luggage go. It goes over tile. It goes over tile.
It does hair and huntsville. Yeah, it just goes forever. Yeah, smooth. Yeah.
So what I had was one little key ring. I'm just learning to drive key ring. None of the keys had any kind of fob or even rubber on them. They were just metal keys on a metal ring.
I had one for our door at our house and two cars, all metal. And what I could do is I'd get on one end of that hallway and like bowling. I could just flick with my wrist at about the height of my knee or my hip, that key chain with no velocity. And I'll never forget the way it would just glide all the way to the other end of the school.
The school's like two blocks long, three blocks long. It defied your instincts. You know, you have those physical instincts. Like if I push this, it's going to go that far.
If it goes twice that far, you're like, that's kind of odd. Something's off there. It's the surface. It's the item.
Maybe I'm a little amped up. Why did that move so much? You notice all these things. I would say, again, it's one of those advanced algorithms that our brains have.
We can anticipate how this thing will interact with this thing physically. And this would just blow my mind as a 16-year-old. How does it go that far? And obviously, it's just, I would just say, a very minimal friction coefficient.
Yeah. What I'm thinking about right now is something called Stiction is a word somebody told me one time. So I visualize friction like two saw teeth on top of you, you know, with the teeth facing each other. You've heard the static coefficient of friction and the dynamic coefficient of friction.
And they're different. And so the way I imagine it is as something is resting on another object and it's not moving, I imagine that the atoms of that object are kind of nestled into the atoms of the surface, like the saw teeth kind of match up and the teeth kind of grip each other. But as you push something and it's moving real fast, it's broken that Stiction. So it's just moving.
It's like, ooh, over the top. And those atoms never have an opportunity to fall down into the atoms of the surface. That's how you visualize it or is that how it is? Maybe both.
I don't know, but that's how I visualize it for sure. And so I imagine that if you roll something really, really fast, or I guess slide something really, really fast, that it's just kind of bumping along over the top of everything. And it's not actually indexing down inside those. I don't know.
I imagine like, there's nothing to grab it. Yeah. What would grab those keys in that situation? I don't know.
Nothing? Yeah. I guess it's losing velocity because of air. Yeah.
The surface is doing almost nothing to it. Yeah. Hard metal on hard polished stone. It just goes.
So they get you thinking, though, like, well, it's possible with the right kind of surfaces, the right kind of points of physical contact between two separate moving parts to make something go a lot longer and a lot further than you would otherwise figure. And then your kid brain starts thinking, well, what do I do is to make something just start going and never stop. I didn't know you couldn't make perpetual motion machines. I didn't know that was against the laws of physics.
So I think without knowing that, I started thinking about it. And I used to keep fish tanks, right? Yeah. You can see where I'm going here.
This is a famous one with the fish tank. I used to clean it out. I have this tube. You put the tube in the water.
And it's like a big cylinder, maybe an inch and a half, two inches in diameter, this plastic clear cylinder. And then there's a surgical tubing coming out the back. And this is how you get the goop out of your fish tank without pulling out all of the water. And so you put that in there.
You put that in there. You're in the side of the section. In the shade siphoning. And you throw your back end of the surgical tubing in a five gallon bucket.
And then you just stab the rocks in the bottom of your fish tank. And it sucks up the fish waste and the food and to try to sort of grow stuff is in there. And there's like a filter in the tube or something? No, it just pulls out the yuck and leaves the clean water.
It's a really pretty effective way to tidy up the tank. OK. Clean out the rocks. So I was doing that.
And I started thinking to myself, well, what if I just put the siphon tube? Like, what if I just made like a snake eating its own tail? So the water just goes right back into the aquarium. Wouldn't that run forever?
Why would that ever stop? And so I started trying it. I would set up siphon. And see how long I could make it run as a high school kid.
That's awesome. I even did that well into adulthood. When I had my little Star Wars Dagobah aquarium that was in my office, I would do that from time to time there. And I would sit there and look.
And I just let it run in the background while I was working on other stuff. And I would watch it gradually fail. And I still don't understand why it would always gradually fail. Destin, why did it always gradually fail?
Well, where were you pumping the water to? Right back into a container. Where was the container? So I tried different heights.
I mean, obviously, elevation has a lot to do with this. Because everything is how hard the siphon is going. Yeah. I tried different things where I would siphon out almost exactly the same level and just bring it back around.
Yeah. I even tried a thing where I had a little spout, like on a tea kettle. Yeah. So I could drop it in below the height and fill it from the bottom.
Yeah. And it would still always fail. You built something called a manometer. What?
A manometer? M-A-N-O-M-E-T-E-R, a manometer. A manometer. So a manometer is a tube that you were trying to build a siphon, but you built a manometer.
You kind of did both. So basically, if you have a tube of water and you hold it on this side of the room, you hold it on the other side of the room, what is the water level on my side versus the water level on your side going to do? What? Is it all one container?
Yeah. It's built a shape of the container. It's just a pipe. Yeah.
It'll just fill the shape of the container. Well, it's the water level on my side and the water level on your side is going to equalize to the same distance from the center of the earth. That's what it's going to have. Sure.
Yeah. Why? Because it fills the shape of the container. I don't know.
Because atmospheric pressure on the open end of my tube is going to be equal to atmospheric pressure on the open end of your tube. And if it's not, then you've got the soft structure. If you blow into your side of the tube, then your water level's going to go down. And on the other side of the pipe, the water level's going to go up until that pressure equalizes again.
It'll go right back to neutral. Correct. A manometer measures a pressure difference between two locations. OK.
That's what it does. And so you can do all kinds of cool stuff with this. You can be blowing air through an air conditioning system, for example. And you can put a tube into the side of the duct work on the air conditioning system.
And then you can have the other tube just sitting out here and ambient air. And when you turn that fan on, the pressure inside that air conditioning system will change and it'll change the level of the water outside. And so you can use it to measure pressure differences between locations. So if you're using it as a manometer, you can do that.
So I was building the wrong thing. Well, I was trying to make one thing. But I was like, if you're siphoning, let's say you're siphoning fuel into a tractor, which is when I most often use a siphon. OK.
So you have a fuel tank and then you have a piece of tube and you're going over into the fuel tank. If you have one side of the fuel hose, we used to call it an Arkansas credit card. I like that a lot. So an Arkansas.
Yeah. Well, so Grandad, he would say, hey, man, where's my Arkansas credit card? And I was like, what's that? And he was like, well, if you're out of gas, but you got a little link to hose, you just steal gas out of some ice car.
That's called the Arkansas credit card. It was a joke. My grandfather didn't steal gas out of people's cars. But the idea was you can get gas out of a tank with this piece of hose.
The unfortunate thing is you have to get it started. And so because the gas tank is here down, I'm, you know, motioning down at my hip and you've got to get it somewhere else. You have to put the other end of the hose to your mouth and you have to suck it like a straw. And what that does is that pulls the fuel up and then you quickly stick your thumb over the hose.
And then you put the other end of the hose down below the gas tank. Has to be lower so that the so that the liquid will run exactly right. Not suck because that point is just gravity that's pulling it correct. And then yeah.
And the reason it works is because the waters going up the tube and back down. But the reason that whole thing works is because there's no air at the top of the tube. Yeah. So as it's pulling down out of the tube, there's a vacuum at the top of the tube.
And so that vacuum is what's pulling the gas back up into the top of the tube and then back down. That's how it's life and works. And so you can buy these little squeezy things. I've got one in the other room from my 3D printer, wash tank.
So you can buy these little squeezy things where you can pull a vacuum with a little pump bulb and then you open a little screw on the top to vent to atmospheric pressure when you're done pumping. So it's pretty neat. Got a little chip valve in there. That kind of stuff.
It didn't work is because eventually the water level equalized on both sides of the tube. And once the water level equalizes on both sides of the tube, you fill up your container on the other side, then atmospheric pressure on one side and the atmospheric pressure on the other side equal. And there's no more difference in pressure to push the fluid through the tube. So even with a teapot where it curls back up above the bottom of the teapot, so I force fed almost like a netty pot or like an assassin's teapot kind of thing.
I force fed a tube in the spout of the teapot and then back up into the reservoir and was able to initiate siphon, either by thumb over it. Or I don't remember, but I got siphon going for a second, but it wouldn't keep going. And so the reason you're telling me that it ran out is it just got to a place where we're drawing on the same reservoir for both. And once there's water in contact with the other end of that tube, we're done because the pressure is equal.
It's all about potential energy. So like do you have, well, that's not true. It's all about potential energy and pressure at the openings and that's where it is. So you basically, it's hard to describe without a drawing, but whenever you look at the fluid system, you look at the atmospheric pressure at the top of the fluid.
If it's a closed tank, you can actually pressurize that. If you pressurize a tank, what's going to happen? You can, and you got a hose out the bottom, you can blow fluid out of that thing. Like when you used to take your high C box and you stood below in it, you're putting gas down into the straw and it's blowing up the top of the high C box.
And then when you pull your mouth away, there's pressure at the top of the high C box and it blows that fluid down back out the straw. So you have to take into account the pressure and you have to take into account the altitudes or the elevations of the water levels. So as you know, you know all this intuitively. Yeah, I suppose so.
But I think the issue is what you're talking about earlier, just it isn't intuitive that you are losing energy that energy is dissipating in all of these less. So then obvious ways. So you can super minimize friction, but you're still losing energy there. You can make something move in a repeated pattern, maybe using magnets, but you're still losing energy there.
I mean, what are some of the perpetual motion machines that you see that people sell on the Internet like desk gimmicky things? You see any of these? I've never bought one. I've seen the little chaos things like you got to pendulum with a magnet on the bottom of them and then you start it and it'll just rock back and forth and it'll bounce off the magnet in the center.
And then those will keep going for a long time because they have an electro magnet in the bottom. They actually push a little bit. OK, so that is you pulled up an article here on these. Yeah, I never heard of the three machines and the three of the three of the perpetual motion machines.
OK, so that would be that would be a machine of the second kind that you're describing. OK, OK, back up. What is the so there's three types of perpetual motion machines? Yeah, my explanation wasn't very good.
It was from Twitter, things I'd read. This is way better. This is from US dot M.I. S U M I.
What I mean, what even is this? Mac Lab. And this is an article by looks like it's not credited. There's some pictures here.
It looks like maybe Tesla and Da Vinci drawings of perpetual motion machines. I don't really understand what those are, but here we go. Machines of the first kind produce work without any energy being input to the machine. So this is a clear violation of the first law of thermodynamics.
What is that one? Oh, shoot. I don't. You can't make energy.
Is it matter can be created or destroyed? Is it that one? Energy can't be created or destroyed. You're putting on the spot here.
But the second is entropy. So first is gotta be you can't make or destroy energy. Yeah, there's time has an arrow to it. OK, what is that there law of thermodynamics?
I'm supposed to know that. I don't think that's the name of a news album. No, their album is called second law. I don't know.
Oh, I know. It looks stupid right now. You don't look stupid right now. Yeah.
Well, let me tell you this. If people are hearing this right now, you might look stupid, but you also look very secure in your own skin. If they're not hearing this right now, well, then I'm pulling it up right now. OK, first law of thermodynamics energy cannot be created or destroyed.
Second law of thermodynamics for a spontaneous process. The entropy of the universe increases. That's time has an arrow. So the disorder increases.
Third law of dynamics, a perfect crystal at zero Kelvin has zero entropy. What? I don't know. I just this is the first thing that a perfect crystal.
So at a perfect temperature with perfect construction, it isn't breaking down. I don't know. There's an exception to things breaking down. I have no idea.
Hold on. Just a sec. The zeroth law of thermodynamics defines thermal equilibrium and forms a basis for the definition of temperature. The two systems for each and thermal equilibrium with the third system, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other.
That sounds a lot about a transitive property. That's exactly what it sounds like. The first law of thermodynamics states that when energy passes into or out of a system, as work, heat or matter, the system's internal energy changes in accordance with the law of the conservation of energy. So basically, you can't make or destroy energy.
Just repurpose it. Second law of thermodynamics states that in a natural thermodynamic process, the sum of the entropy of the interacting thermodynamic systems never decreases. A common corollary of the statement is that heat does not spontaneously pass from a colder body to a warmer body. Have you ever heard of the heat equation?
Hang on. Hang on. I thought I understood the second law of thermodynamics, but that was a lot of words. Okay.
You know what entropy is? Yeah. I mean, that's what I think of it. Disorder.
This is the entropy things are breaking down. Well, so like if I have a rod, if I have a rod and the left side of the rod is hot and the right side of the rod is cold. And I just say, okay, go. You're a system.
What happens? What's going to happen eventually? Even out. Yeah, the whole thing will become a warm rod.
Eventually, there will be a heat death to the universe. Okay. That's one of the funniest jokes you and I have ever had between each other, right? We were waiting on somebody to do a thing.
Oh, yeah. You remember that? Yeah. And you said, well, I'm sorry, we're going to have to wait for the heat death of the universe.
The third law of thermodynamics, I am embarrassed to say, this is not one that I really understand or have thought of that much. I'm reading from Wikipedia. The third law of thermodynamic states that a systems entropy approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches absolute zero. With the exception of non-crystalline solids like glasses, the entropy of a system at absolute zero is typically close to zero.
Hmm. The first law and second law prohibit two kinds of perpetual motion machines, respectively. The perpetual motion machine of the first kind, which produces work with no energy input and the perpetual motion machine of the second kind, which spontaneously converts thermal energy into mechanical work. Interesting.
I didn't even know there were different kinds of perpetual motion machines. Okay. I'm learning. This is fun.
Yeah. This episode of Notre Dame Questions is sponsored by HelloFresh. And there's this little section here. You see this map says, read verbatim.
You see that? Read verbatim. I absolutely do. You want me to read it?
Yeah, just read it. Verbatim. Pretty good reading. Here we go.
Yeah. It's worth reading. This is a good offer. Yeah.
Go to hellofresh.com slash ndqfree and use code ndqfree for free breakfast for life. One breakfast item per box while subscription is active. That's free breakfast for life at hellofresh.com slash ndqfree with the code ndqfree. All right.
So many questions. Like what is HelloFresh and how does it work? Well, that's a great place to start, Matt. That is an excellent place to start.
So HelloFresh is a meal kit delivery service. In fact, I think America is number one meal kit. And imagine you who has to eat every day, at least that's how most people like their lives work thermodynamically. Imagine you have food sent to your house.
Since you're not a perpetual motion machine. I mean, I know you might think you are, Matt. You're not. Do you feel like you're a perpetual motion machine, Matt?
No, there has to be some sort of input. There's entropy works upon my body. I can feel it. Really?
That's interesting. You can actually keep it. Yeah, it would be okay if I described some of the ways and graphic detail. I was hoping you would please do.
There are none of them are appetizing. This is a food spot. I'm not. But I've noticed some.
I got some. Okay, let's know. Let's not do that. So anyway, long story short.
HelloFresh is awesome. It's a really cool way to learn how to cook. I personally like that they send all the ingredients to your house. It's a little frozen thing in the box to keep all the meat and the vegetables cold.
But my favorite thing is that I learn how to cook. It's got the little instruction card. I get to chill out and I don't know. Sometimes it feels like I'm hungry.
I got to eat. I could go microwave that thing or that can of whatever. Or I could open the HelloFresh and I could just have a journey like an experience. And I really like doing that.
I do too. And like most people who like food and live indoors, I can get into real boring food habits. Because I don't know, just not creative about that. HelloFresh grabs me by the shoulders and shakes me vigorously and gets me to try new things that I never would have thought of.
And then suddenly I like new things and I look more sophisticated at parties when everybody's like, I had this thing and it sounds all French. Then I can be like, real quick, open my up and scroll and be like, what was the name of that again? Well, I had this and I made it myself. I've made a lot of new friends that way.
When I was a kid, we had certain things we ate. It was like spaghetti, tacos, hamburger helper, pizza. That was the rotation. What have you had with HelloFresh?
What are some of the stuff that you've enjoyed? I intentionally go out of my way to order anything that involves some kind of sliced, pan-seared steak and some kind of ludicrous sauce. I'd never make sauces except when I do HelloFresh and they got me putting all this stuff in a sauce pan and then I stirred around until it gets a certain viscosity to it. And I have no idea what that's going to taste like, but I've been conditioned to know that if I just bravely dip my steak in that sauce I just made, it is going to work and it never, ever disappoints.
So I'm a sucker for that. What about you? Yeah, I like that as well. I did tacos recently and it was like a black bean taco.
Typically, when you do tacos, it's just like the meat and seasoning. But HelloFresh spices it up a little bit, pun and tund it or whatever you want to say. It's great. It's great.
It was like a black bean, different kind of sauce, squeeze a lime over the top. That's kind of in there branding. It has a lime, always has something to like zest it up. That's good.
I think it's wonderful. If you want to try it for your family, it's a fun way to make food and experience an educational thing. You can try it at hellofresh.com slash in DQ free. Use the code indqfree for breakfast for life.
One breakfast item per box while your subscription is active. Yeah, all the ingredients show up. It's very measured, ready to go. There's a recipe card.
It's super easy to use. If I can make delightful food with this, you can make delightful food with this. It always shows up fresh and ready to go. Delivery is timely and awesome.
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My understanding is that the third kind is just an attempt at frictionless to just completely eliminate every aspect of friction, atmospherically, mechanically, and then theoretically if you could achieve that, if there's no friction, then an object to motion will remain in motion, comes into play, because it will never come into contact with another thing. But it seems like the problem there would be even if such a thing could exist, how could you harness anything off of it without causing them that frictionless vacuumless system to come into contact with something else thus reducing its momentum, its inertia, right? I don't know. You said a lot of words.
my brain. I don't speak this language. In the time you said that I went back to the mechanical Turk. Do you remember that?
Do you remember talking about the mechanical Turk with me? I do remember that phrase, but I don't remember what it means. There was this chess playing machine that... Do you remember this?
Keep going. There was a machine that played chess against people. And so basically there was a guy, he had this machine, he was like, hey, I've got this thing that can play chess to machine. And this was a big deal because it was back before electronics and all that.
And so he basically would bring people to the machine and he would say, all right here, and I'm assuming he would have to wind it up to act like it was like a thing. But what it really was was a small person that was really good at chess living in a box and playing chess. But the automata had the ability to move the chess pieces, which is pretty interesting. And so it could actually play chess.
And while you're sitting there talking about all that, I realized, you know, if I was in the 1800s, I would wind up a machine because it's the system, right? And I would say, hey, just using the energy here, I can beat you at chess with my machine that I built. But I realized now you probably could make a machine that you could wind up and power a small computer to actually power such a device, which is really interesting. So anyway, I was thinking all that because all this perpetual motion depends on where you define the system.
If I'm drawing a machine on a piece of paper, I'm going to have to put a dotted line around the system. And that's where no energy can pass in around it. A lot of things that we have that look like perpetual motion machines, they have a battery in them and the batteries. Well, or solar power, for example, the solar power, for example.
Oh, okay, we need to go ahead. I have a question about that. Go ahead, though. No, keep going.
I'm going to take us somewhere else. Okay, so perpetual motion machines, as best as we understand the universe, they're not going to work. I get it. It's disappointing.
But I can accept that. So then to what extent is the pursuit then trying to just get as close as you can possibly come? So it's the minimal energy input. Hey, this little nine volt battery can generate this mountain of energy in this crude form.
I mean, does it need to be perpetual? Or is there some kind of, this is so primitive, such a silly question. But is there some kind of thing where cost wise, we could just make some little device that will charge a phone, but the cost to make the sprockets and wheels and whistles go inside of this thing is so minimal that it becomes worth it. And is there some simple mechanical solution that could outperform the things we currently use for power?
I made a video a long time ago called the gravity light. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, in developing nations, a lot of times you'd be way off the grid and you wouldn't have access to power or anything. And there's just a little bit of device that has a spring in it or whatever.
And you would put a weight, a bag of rocks would do it. And you would kind of like an old grandfather clock, you would pick up one side of the chain and pull down the other and then you would hang this weight of rocks up there. And then it would start to drop the bag in a very controlled way. And as it dropped the bag, you could turn on a light, a little bit of LED.
And this was great because people could have light in a village where there was no light, for example. But you could do the same thing with charging a cell phone or charging a battery or things like that. I just think it's a really neat idea. Now, in that particular model, what is the system?
Where would you have to draw your box around the entire Earth, right? No, tell me why that's right. Because the Earth is pulling on the rocks and the rocks are dropping towards the Earth. So the whole system, it includes the mass of the center of the Earth that creates gravity and its rate of constant accelerators.
Well, Earth gravity, as we understand it, that one gravity. Got it. And if you were to think really big picture and you were to draw this dotted line on the piece of paper around the bag of rocks falling towards Earth, what that system would look like is the berry center or the earth. The earth and the moon, if they were exactly the same mass and they were so far away that they could be orbiting each other, the 50% mark.
That's the berry center of the orbit. The sensor is way bigger. It's much closer to the moon. It's much closer to the Earth.
That's the way it works. The berry center. Oh, yeah, obviously. Lifting up two weights, where you have a five pound.
That's great. On one end, you've got 1045s on the other end. You'd have to grab really close to the side with all the heavy weights. Exactly.
Got it. And so in my head, if you were to draw the dotted line around the bag of rocks for the gravity light and for the Earth, the rocks are pulling on the Earth and the center of that gravitational system is just a little bit, like, I don't know, thousands, I don't know, a very small distance from the center of the Earth's gravity center. But as the rocks fall down, then it would equalize. And so it's really fun to think about all that, where the energy is actually coming from.
Okay. So the gravity light is a good example of a very primitive machine mingled with modern technology. And so I continue to wonder, and this is so simplistic, I get that, I'm embarrassing myself here. But I continue to wonder if there might be some sort of energy solution that's just very, very small and quaint, whereby using something more primitive that might even be decorative and kind of fun, you could manufacture a simple machine that is in the spirit of goofy, eccentric, perpetual motion machine inventions.
But that, say, could become just a trendy fun thing to own that looks neat and it's just in a house like a macrame owl was in the 1970s, except it just takes all of the cell phone charging off of the grid. And now that isn't something that we do with the grid. Instead, we have this really cute little thing that relies on just simple mechanical processes. It's not perfect.
It's not maximum efficient. But when you add up the aesthetic value of the acquaintance, along with the minimal energy input needed to set it in motion for a while a bit lasting and acting that it could do just a little bit of the lifting of all the stuff that we do and that we use electricity and power for. I'm thinking about that and where that took me is how much power or how much energy is in my cell phone battery. And it's kind of a lot.
It's a lot. I used to every once in a while, we go hike the Appalachian Trail. I remember having this 4G phone. It was a flip phone.
It was a Motorola-flipped. Yeah, it was a really new one, man. I had a screen on the outside where you could read the time. I need to open it up and add a color screen on the inside.
But it had removable batteries, which was awesome. That is awesome. I miss that. And so kind of as a gimmick, but kind of for fun, I would take matches, electric matches, camping.
And so instead of trying to rub two sticks together or what would have been much more, made much more sense, just a cigarette lighter, I would take electric matches. And then I would pop the back off of my phone and I would put the electric match leads on the contact patches of the cell phone and I would start fires that way. I did it three or four times just to be like, four your phone melted. No, never melted.
Like, I mean, there's a high resistance on those matches. I just did it to be like, okay, I know I can do it. If I needed to do that, I could do that now. That's a lot of power.
It's my point. And so I wonder if it's like a 50-cal rifle shot or something. I would, I wonder how, can I see the computer? Yeah, how much power is in a cell phone battery?
How much power is in a cell phone battery? As you're looking that up. So I guess my question is, is just the equation upside down for anything that we actually use in real life, that in any way consumes power with a simple goofball, da Vinci-like perpetual motion designers, just everything we use consumes stuff at such a rate that it just wouldn't be efficient or make any sense in the grand scheme of things to use something in the spirit of a perpetual motion designed to power something around the house. It'd be fun.
You wouldn't obviously make a perpetual motion machine, but you could make something. That's why you keep saying in the spirit of, if you need to have a modern grandfather clock, you know, with the weights, the cylindrical weights, ding, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong. Did you ever have one of those grown up? My grandparents did both of my grandparents did.
My parents have one of those. And it'd be really cool if you just had that in the corner of the room. And every few days you go and you just lift the weight and just had a little USB jack on the side. See, that's the kind of thing right there.
What would you get out of it? I have no idea. Probably nothing. It's like I can power an LED.