Grantville Gazette 38

Businelli, 'THE HOMEMAKER’S HYDROGEN GENERATOR' (2010)

http://www.princeton.edu/~iahe/Document/IAHE-PrincetonUniversity_Final_Report.pdf

[AGLJ], Gas for War Balloons, American Gas Light Journal 104: 59 (Jan. 24, 1916)

Teed, The Chemistry and Manufacture of Hydrogen (1919).

Liu, Hydrogen and Syngas Production and Purification Technologies

Blomen, Fuel Cell Systems

Philpott, The On-Site Production of Hydrogen

Platinum Metals Rev., 20: 110-113 (1976).

http://www.platinummetalsreview.com/pdf/pmr-v20-i4-110-113.pdf

Wilcox, 'Hydrogen for the R100'

http://www.nevilshute.org/Engineering/JohnBWilcox/jbw_hydrogen.php

Maxfield, 'War Ballooning in Cuba,' Aeronautical J., 83-6 (Oct. 1989).

Molinari, Treatise on General and Inorganic Chemistry (1912).

[JCE] 'Steam and Superheated Steam,' Chemistry Comes Alive!

http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/JCESoft/CCA/CCA3/MAIN/STEAM/PAGE1.HTM

Yurum, Hydrogen Energy System (1995).

Stovel, Contributed Discussion of Dodge, Specific Heat of Superheated Steam, Proceedings of the American Society of Mechanical Engineeers, 28: 1473 (May 1907).

Babcock amp; Wilcox, Steam, Its Generation and Use (1919)

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22657/22657-h/chapters/superheat.html#chapter_superheat

Pennsylvania RR, Reports on Tests of Locomotive 60,000

http://www.cwrr.com/Lounge/Reference/baldwin/part03.html

Udengaard, Hydrogen production by steam reforming of hydrocarbons

http://www.anl.gov/PCS/acsfuel/preprint%20archive/Files/49_2_Philadelphia_10-04_1205.pdf

Smit, Enriching the Earth (2004).

Templer, Military Balloons, (1879).

Weissermal, Industrial Organic Chemistry (1997).

[BLE] Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineer's monthly journal, Volume 13 (1879).

Moedebeck, Pocket-Book of Aeronautics (1907).

Baden-Powell, 'Military Ballooning,' Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, 27: 735 (1883).

Langins, 'Hydrogen production for ballooning during the French Revolution: An early example of chemical process development', Annals Sci., 40: 531-558 (1983).

****

TMI

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

William Gibson saw it, although not completely clearly, this future-this present- filled with self-obsession and knowledge at our very fingertips. I’m not sure Bill was the first to see it-I know Algis Budrys saw miniaturization and small computers long before anyone else-but I know this: When I first read Neuromancer, I thought Bill’s future sounded awful.

And now I’m living it.

Yeah, I know, the computer isn’t jacked into my brain-yet. But I have more information at my fingertips than I could ever consume. And I’m in minute-by-minute contact with people all over the globe through various social networking sites, if I so choose to be.

I’m halfway through my life, raised in an analog world, so I’ve only partially adapted to this one. Yet I loathe it when I can’t log on at the minute I want to, and I love to whip out my iPhone to answer some trivia question. I took one look at the Kindle Flame and decided it wasn’t for me. Not because I think it a bad product-I don’t. But it runs on wireless, and my experience with wireless, particularly in remote places (like the town I live in), means that I won’t be able to download something the moment I think of it.

And I hate that.

I couldn’t do it four years ago, but now, I really don’t want to live without it.

But I’m not a sharer. And by that, I’m not talking about all those folks on Twitter who feel compelled to tell me what they’re cooking for dinner.

By that, I mean I don’t use half the commands on my phone or in Facebook or on my Kindle. A year or so ago, when Amazon upgraded my ancient (!) three-year-old Kindle’s operating system, it added a feature that to me, looked like those used textbooks I used to buy when I had no money. Every sentence in the John Grisham novel I had been reading was suddenly and inexplicably underlined.

If I moved the cursor to one of those sentences, the device would tell me that 85 people liked it. Or it would ask me if I wanted to share that sentence with my friends.

Um, no. I like keeping my reading private. Although I do underline when I read. Nonfiction. For research. Using a pen and a real book.

It took me a couple of hours to figure out how to shut off that feature. Then I mentioned it to another Kindle-owning friend who is older than me (but not by much) and he had a visceral hate-reaction to that underlining feature, and choice words for the folks who use it.

But these options are proliferating. When Google Alerts sends me an obligatory mention of my name on the web, sometimes my name is attached to a random quote from one of my books, often on Good Reads. People will quote one line from my 600,000 word Fey saga, and other people will mark whether or not they like that one line.

Never mind that it’s taken out of context. Never mind that it might be the opposite of what I personally believe. It’s there, I wrote it, and people like it.

I find it all weird.

When this whole sharing thing started, it blind-sided me. Now I have little links to all the various sharing services on my blog, and I know folks use them. Heck, I’ve used those little links lately on other people’s blogs, because the dang things are convenient, even if they do mean that some cookie somewhere has linked my Twitter account to that blog or hacked my Facebook account (is it hacking if they have my permission?) so that I can post on Facebook without logging onto Facebook.

Privacy advocates tell me I should be offended by all of this sharing, but I’m not. It’s convenient sometimes, and creepy sometimes, and Just The Way Things Are.

Big Brother isn’t watching, not really, but it is data mining-mostly stuff we’ve already put out there.

See? Not even Orwell predicted that.

I do read all the privacy articles, and I keep my location finder off. I don’t put personal information on the social networks such as the dates of an upcoming trip or when I’m away from home. I check my privacy settings often to make sure some change in one of the social networking sites that I use doesn’t suddenly turn on my location finder or something that I want off.

And I dip back into the analog world a lot. My office-where I’m writing this right now-has no internet connection. It also lacks a telephone. There’s an iPod in here, but no iPhone. You can’t reach me when I’m working, unless you walk directly into my office and knock on the door.

That’s not because I’m anti-technology, but because my superhero name would probably be Distracto-Girl. I could waste days tracking down a piece of information. For example, I just got a copy of one of my stories in Russian, and I would love to know what they changed the title to. But I don’t read the language. So I’d have to log onto the magazine’s website, copy the information, put it in a translator program, and see. And if I did that, then I might translate the whole story. Or the footnotes (yes it has footnotes-one of which explains what the Ohio Buckeyes are. I can tell that because “Ohio Buckeyes” happens to be in English).

So Distracto-Girl keeps distractions to a minimum so that she can get things done. Maybe that’s why I didn’t