@landhawk: Thank you for providing such an in-depth explanation! I'm always hungry for knowledge, so I find a vast majority of topics interesting and worthy of engagement. I remember cylinder diagrams from some educational books I owned when I was a tiny peep, but had forgotten (or, more likely, never learnt) some of the more intricate aspects and idiosyncrasies of compression ratios and higher octane mixtures. A very welcome bitesize refresher course on cylinder function and combustion engines.
So, in theory, you wouldn't want to risk putting a low octane fuel in a high performance automobile, as you may very well induce knock, and consequently damage the engine.
The most rewarding professions don't necessarily pay the best!
This is going to interest nobody, but: In the Soylent ad, Brad spoke of 'high-octane diesel' as a good thing, which it's not. Octane is the measure of a fuel's ability to resist early detonation- That is, to not combust from the heat and pressure of the cylinder compressing before the spark plug fires (commonly referred to as detonation, or knock). The higher the fuel's octane rating, the less likely it will knock. An engine with a higher compression rating (that is, a larger ratio of volume when the cylinder is at the low-point of its stroke vs. the high-point of its stroke) will subject the fuel mixture to more pressure. This is why high-performance gasoline engines (which typically have a higher compression ratio) often call for fuel with high octane ratings.
However, a diesel engine typically does not use spark plugs, instead relying on a very high compression ratio to detonate the fuel/air mix. As such, a fuel less resistant to detonation without a spark plug is actually a hindrance, meaning the quality of diesel fuel is measured by the inverse of its octane rating, called its cetane rating. High-octane diesel would be low-cetane diesel, and therefore not good fuel at all. I'm sure no offense was meant to the fine people at Soylent.
Is this essentially the 'space' inside the cylinder? So, a cylinder at its high point in an engine with a higher compression rating will allow more fuel into it than an engine with a lower compression rating, and, as such, require more heat and compression before 'knock' (thus necessitating a higher octane fuel)?
Jeff reminds me of a cat sometimes. He's kind of a super adorable, grumpy gangsta cat--a bit like Garfield. Especially the way he pushes over the drum set in the manner in which, say, a cat would tentatively paw at a cup until it fell off a table, just to see what happens.
I'm starting to wonder if half of the commenters here are employed by HTC, because there sure is a lot of defending the device's 'nuances' and berating of the staff for not researching 'workarounds' thoroughly enough prior to recording. It costs $799--after calibration, barring the occasional fine-tuning, you shouldn't have to do anything beside launch the software. Everything here looked like hot garbage apart from Google Earth. Entertaining feature, though.
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