Thermodynamically impossible
584849
This mug is a miracle.  Somehow they have entirely stopped entropy.  I put hot soup in here right out of the pot, and burned my mouth SIX HOURS LATER trying to drink it.

Just in case anyone is as stupid as I am: this product keeps the liquid at the temperature it is when you put it in.  It does not guarantee that whatever you put in it will instantaneously attain the ideal drinking temperature and then stay exactly there.  However hot your stuff is when you put it in, it will stay exactly that hot.  If you only have access to a very hot drink and you need to get out the door, do one of these two things:

- Put an ice cube or two in with the drink, OR
- Drive around with the lid off and the drink in your vehicle's cup holder.  The container is narrow enough, and requires enough head space for the lid to screw on, that only the worst potholes cause it to slosh over the side even when full (make sure, though, that you have only filled it to the point where the lid WOULD be able to screw on).  The drink will still stay startlingly hot even with the cool air above it, but it helps a bit.

For the price, this is an absolute steal.  I use it every day.
4844158
Received last night.  Toasted two english muffin halves on the highest setting.  Not toasted enough, so I had to toast again and watch visually to cancel at the right time.  This morning I tried to toast another two english muffin halves, and I could not get the levers to stay down.  After two or three minutes of trying, I gave up.  I even tried holding the lever down manually, and the coils would not heat up.  We successfully sent people to the moon and back over fifty years ago and we can't make a ...........
2272520
Trs  bien mais la lecture de l'vangile  est quasiment  impossible.
1317637
Accurate temperatures, good range.

Worst interface and programming ever.  I am an IT guy, programmer, project manager, etc.  This thing is incomprehensible.  It's incredibly hard to set up.

Until they fix the programming, find another unit.  It's not worth the frustration.
3450402
There are many fine books on thermodynamics, many by the masters, and still readily available (Fermi, Planck....) There are also many books which combine statistical mechanics and thermodynamics in what is called `thermal physics'. The book by Carrington is intended for a first course in classical thermodynamics. It has the virtue of developing classical thermodynamics in a series of levels of increasing generality.
At the first level, the author first starts with the ideal gas, and introduces the notions of temperature, states and processes, the first law, and entropy in a very concrete way.
At the next level,  Carrington generalizes to the classical laws of thermodynamics: the zeroth, first, second laws. He derives some useful modern results (the reversible process theorems) from the second law in Chapter 7, and discusses electric and magnetic work processes.
At the third level of abstraction, Carrington discusses Gibbs's formulation in which states are emphasized over systems and their processes. States and their properties are encoded in what Gibbs called the fundamental relation: U = U(S,V). Gibbs showed how this viewpoint could be modified to include processes in which the quantity of matter changes.
Finally, Carrington finishes with a discussion of applications, including changes of state and phase changes, critical phenomena, and chemical reactions.
This is a book written with care and a great deal of pedagogical thought. It has many worked examples, and exercises which reinforce the text. One very nice feature is that some of the longer exercises have been written in a step-by-step fashion to make them more accessible.
2556565
I am 100% torn on this steamer.  I just got it, and was flabbergasted to realize that I could comfortably put my hand 3 inches from the nozzle, and it was just slightly warm.  I figured I got a dud unit, so I called Bissell directly in the hopes that there was some issue they could diagnose.  Turns out the machine is working exactly as designed, and that's the problem.  At 3 inches from the nozzle, the temp is only 119.5 degrees. That's not warm enough to do anything but encourage bacterial growth.
Here's the breakdown as per Bissell:
4" from nozzle = 108.5 degrees (about shower temp)
3" from nozzle = 119.5 degrees
2" from nozzle = 133.9 degrees
1" from nozzle = 162.1 degrees
0.5" from nozzle = 197.1 degrees (I would think this is the furthest distance for effectively killing bacteria)
0.25' from nozzle = 222.6 degrees
Using that microfiber cloth with the steamer attachment, drops the temp (even touching a surface) back down to 162.1 degrees

So I'm giving it 3 stars, because now that I know what I need to do to get to the temp where this will actually kill bacteria, I'm gonna keep it.  I'm taking off 2 stars because shame on Bissell for not making this info readily available.  They need to rework their instruction manual to include the temperatures at the various distances.

I actively look forward to hearing the opinion of any purchaser who happens to have a microbiology background.
236544
I would give this thing a -star rating if possible. I am on my third unit in 4 mos. I just brought a replacement home 2 days ago and it has yet to reach the desired 50 degrees on top and 38 degrees on bottom. DO NOT BUY!! I will be returning this unit too and am hoping to find something that fits in the built in space of my new remodel.
506594
I bought this because of the name.  Didn't think twice about it. It  doesn't get hot enough!  I have to plead with this appliance to get hot.  My last one.  Also, it way too complicated to operate.  My last one.
2807118
I bought this due to the Q&A section with multiple people saying it is collapsible.  This cooler is in no way collapsible.  It is a nice cooler, but not for my needs at all.  I'll be returning it.
4249623
Next to impossible to start when cold.  I pulled it in the house for about 15 min. and it started on the first pull.
3505415
I could not think of its strength because I have not subjected to extreme conditions of use. The temperature setting is not practical because it takes off for a few minutes.
3155961
It looks nice, but the thermoregulator is useless. While 6 settings are marked on a round dial handle, in reality they work only either as on (full power) or off (no power). So it's either boiling rapidly, spilling your contents over the lid, or, if you move the dial just a tiny bit toward a lower number, it's off completely, not heating at all. Therefore there's no way to set it for simmering or any low-level power, which is very frustrating.
335921
Normally I'd dismiss out of hand anyone who claims to have found a fourth law of thermodynamics but from Stuart Kauffman, I'll hear what he has to say. I've been following Kauffman's work for years and his thinking is as engaging as ever. Unfortunately, his prose is not. Grandiose, clumsy and over-written, he sells his ideas short. The language is unreadably uneven as it ranges from patronising pop-sci gobbley-gook to technical minutaie of molecular biology.
Kauffman attempts to articulate something that he calls "general biology". This is simply a dressed-up term for the classic problem of the origin of life. Unfortunately, his explanation also follows the classic pop-sci strategy of explaining one mysterious thing (life) by replacing it with other equally mysterious concepts (work and semantics). In this part of the book, the writing is woefully repetitive and elliptic. No real conclusions are drawn, which is a a monumental let-down given the ego-maniacally overblown introduction. There is an intellectual abyss between Kauffman's definition of life as auto-catalytic systems with one work cycle, and real cells that undergo reproduction and darwinian evolution.
Nevertheless, there are many nuggets of gold in the later chapters. Probably the most interesting is the idea of the adjacent possible. The adjacent possible is the set of all possible chemicals that can be synthesized in one chemical step from all existing chemicals. Unlike other concepts introduced in the book, it is something that can be computed (though not exhaustively). Kauffman then proposes a fourth law of chemical thermodynamics: a chemical system advances into the adjacent-possible as fast as it can. Kauffman shows how this hypothetical fourth law can be analysed by relating this to his previous work on sustainable chemical diversity. Indeed, the best parts of the book are where Kauffman re-caps his previous work on auto-catalytic systems and genomes of real organisms, and then extends the analysis to explain his fourth law of thermodynamics.
Kauffman makes some neat analogies between the chemical adjacent-possible with economics. He points out that classical economic models of pricing rely on the assumption of a finite prestable collection of goods and services. Instead, a more fruitful model for an economy of products can be made in analogy to the ever-explanding set of catalytic chemicals. There is also a great analysis on the limits of the economy of scale where Kauffman makes a analogy between the Ksat problem and the problem of producing diverse products in a single factory. And finally, in the grand tradition of pop-sci books, there is a final chapter where all the problems of quantum mechanics and cosmology are solved with the application of one special idea. Although this last chapter is pure science fiction, the book is worth perservering as some of the ideas are original, useful and genuinely thought provoking.
2563018
Difficult to get a seal with the fitting, too loose.  Hard to read.  Read 2 lbs lower than premium mechanical gauge.  Very dubious.  Weird calibration method in instructions, hard to carry out.  forget it.

specification emphasizes temperature sensitivity and operating range no higher than 100f.  If kept in glove compartment in summer, may get too hot to operate.
It's normal for electronics to have limited high temperature operation.  The old mechanical meters have their advantages.
1121094
I bought this book thinking that it was written for scientific non-experts.  I was very wrong. I have a masters degree in electrical engineering, so I probably have more scientific background than most of the general public.  Even so, I found Penrose's book to be almost impenetrable.  The topics range from soup to nuts:  classical physics; general relativity; quantum mechanics; Mandelbrot sets and fractals; thermodynamics; cosmology and the big bang; computer science; physiology of the brain.  Every so often, Schrodinger's wave function and black holes are thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately, these diverse topics are never brought together into a coherent thesis.

Furthermore, I found many of the ideas presented in this book as being outdated and incorrect.  Examples of some of the egregious errors I found in the book include the statement that black holes destroy information and that entropy equals missing information.  A more modern (and more technically correct) treatment of entropy and information can be found in "A Farewell to Entropy" by Arieh Ben-Naim, and Stephen Hawking changed his mind about black holes -- they don't destroy information.

Penrose makes the claim that the second law of thermodynamics is a consequence of quantum gravity.  A more modern (and correct) view is exactly the reverse.  As Erik Verlinde has shown, gravity is an entropic force that emerges from the second law.

Penrose repeatedly reverts to a very outdated reductionist description of reality, which assumes that the whole is equal to the sum of its parts; i.e., physical systems are linear superpositions of complex quantum-mechanical wave functions.  The Schrodinger's Cat "paradox" is resurrected for the upteenth time, even though there really is no paradox.  (I thought the tired notion of a quantum-mechanical cat that is simultaneously dead and alive had been finally laid to rest decades ago.)

It came as no surprise when Penrose articulated the reductionist evaluation of the human brain:  "In fact, there are a lot of similarities between the action of a great number of interconnected neurons and the wires and logic gates ... It would not be hard, in principle, to set up a a computer simulation of the action of a given such system of neurons.  The brain is a thinking machine, no different than with consciousness an algorithm that is carried out by electrical impulses transmitted among neurons.  A natural question arises:  does this not mean that whatever the detailed wiring of the brain may be, it can always be modelled by the action of a computer?"  In other words, is the whole (the brain) equal to the sum of its parts (the neurons)?  Is consciousness nothing more than a computer algorithm carried out by cellular logic gates?

Penrose brought the quantum-mechanical processes, U and R, into the discussion of consciousness.  (Along with Schrodinger's Cat, U and R are repeatedly dragged into practically every topic in this book.  U represents the linear, deterministic superposition of complex quantum wave functions and R represents the reduction, or "collapse", of the wave function into real, probabilistic actualities.  Penrose states that in addition to causing the second law of thermodynamics, gravity, specifically the graviton particle, is responsible for triggering the R process.)  After some hand-waving, Penrose concludes that even U and R are not up to the task of explaining consciousness, and therefore something "beyond" quantum mechanics is required to explain it.  But what is "beyond" QM?  Unfortunately, the book leaves that question unanswered.
2716653
Impossible to use. It's screwed so tightly together I would need a power drill to loosen it. Waste of money.
2255369
At last, a book that explains energy.

When Im sat in my armchair, deckchair, or airplane seat, I don't mind doing some hard thinking, but I don't want to have to get up and go and find paper and pen and do math  its a challenging read, but it is just a read, and a very rewarding one.

The book lives up to its promise in the preface  not just explaining, but leaving you awestruck with the cleverness of the ancients. For example: Galileo, arguing the case for a spinning Earth because less power would be required than to have the Earth stationary and all the stars in orbit; Daniel Bernoulli realizing that the air had energy in it and this could drive a piston; Count Rumford  weighing heat by seeing if the scales get out of balance as ice thaws; Mayer noticing the significance of blood being redder in the tropics. My favorite chapter was on the engineer, Sadi Carnot  I was moved almost to tears.

The explanations are novel, profound, and crisp. Take, for example, Coopersmiths explanation of why a gas always continues to expand: the energy is not only trying to get distributed as smoothly as possible, but as smoothly as possible to greater and greater precision of smooth. Also, this (paraphrased) extract on temperature:  the definition of temperature leads to one universal T because (1) temperature presupposes the very experimental conditions it requires, (2) equilibration occurs in just one fundamental way, (3) the molecules don't go around in gangs of millions or billions, (4) only one thing is being equilibrated  temperature - and not, say, fabulousness. The main surprise is the emphasis given to the Principle of Least Action leading to the very deepest understanding of energy (that T and V react against each other)  I have never seen this anywhere else.

One criticism I have is with the nomenclature: T is both temperature and kinetic energy, V is both volume and potential energy. Also, Noethers Theorem isn't mentioned, and the coverage doesnt reach the present day. But Coopersmith doesnt shy away from controversy or hard topics: does heat only exist when it flows? Why was the steam engine discovered only once, why is kinetic energy quadratic, why teleology is a red herring (or anchovy).

I feel as if I could fall in love with this author - something I rarely feel when reading a physics book!