Ahmedinijad is out of power and the tales of Iran's nuclear program (from what I can see) appear to be mostly overblown propaganda. I'll grant that this is a "legitimate" issue among "experts" in diplomacy, but I'm not buying it. YMMV...
Whatever you think of their politics, I'm sorry to see them leave the club, even if it's only temporarily. Spaceflight is one of the few remaining areas of "friendly rivalry" where everybody still cheers for the other teams' success, even as we hope to best them. Nobody ever watches a launch and thinks "I hope it explodes! I hope it explodes!" No... you always think "Go, baby, go!"
It will be interesting to see how "bad" this landing was... Was it a total, catastrophic loss, or did it just break a leg on landing and fall over onto the barge platform? The engines are the most expensive part of the "stack", and there are nine of them on the F9 booster stage. If they can salvage six or seven of these Merlin engines from this booster, even that will be a major victory.
Given the rate of innovation and development we've seen from SpaceX in the last few years, I suspect we'll see them nail the landing within the next couple of launches.
It's kinda cool that we can witness this process in real time, as populations in Singapore, India, etc. gradually adopt more English vocabulary, norms, and syntax. Singapore is a great example of this phenomenon... say a Cantonese-speaking guy marries a Malay-speaking girl. Neither one of them speaks "native" English; they both have an accent. But they also can't speak each others' native tongue. Their only shared language is "broken" English... and that's what their kids grow up with as their native language.
Living in Taiwan all these years, I find myself confronted with a host of different accents and dialects that I would never have encountered back home in Iowa. I've heard all manner of "English" from Kiwis, Ozzies, Scousers, Paddies, etc... not to mention folks from other language families altogether.
Even as the old divisions fade away, you can see the new divisions emerge...
A spot of paint on your balloon would locally restrict expansion as it inflates, as galaxies seem to do in our expanding universe. My understanding of current hypotheses is that dark matter plays the role of "paint" in this analogy. However, there's an intriguing alternative explanation, which only becomes apparent when you think of space as a fluid.
Ironically, I stumbled upon this notion after musing on the strong interaction. (And I confess I was a bit high at the time.) Something that repels at a distance but attracts in proximity... that reminds me of bubbles interacting in the surface tension of fluids. So I googled "space as a fluid" and found that there's a whole branch of inquiry in this direction. It doesn't get as much attention as String Theory, but it's not dismissed out of hand either. (Correct me if I'm wrong... IANA physicist.)
Anyway, I'm curious to hear others' thoughts on this.
I've been losing weight steadily for several months now, on a low-carb, high-fat, "paleo" lifestyle which includes light exercise and intermittent fasting. I do not pay any attention to calories whatsoever, I only avoid carbs and eat as much "real food" as I feel like, meaning single-ingredient, natural, fresh-cooked or raw products, as opposed to the processed "edible food-like substances" which occupy most of the shelf space in a modern supermarket.
In terms of caloric intake, my diet is about 75~80% fat, 15~20% protein, and 5~10% carbs.
I eat a lot of the following: Raw veg: carrot sticks, celery, broccoli, cauliflower, salad. Cooked veg: spinach, cabbage, sprouts, etc.. Fermented veg: dill pickles, sauerkraut Dairy: butter, cream, cheese, cream-cheese, sour cream
- Do eggs count as dairy? I eat about two per day. Nuts: almonds, walnuts, pistachios, etc.. Meat: the fattier the better, especially organ meats Fish: the fattier the better.
I avoid all processed foods and carbs in particular: Sugar, soft drinks, fruit juice, bread, pasta, starchy veg (eg. potatoes)... and also "somewhat avoid" legumes in general and soy products in particular.
As for exercise, I don't have a regime or program, I just live in a walkable city with great public transpo, so I end up walking a couple miles per day on average. I also started using a stand-up desk last spring. I've been losing a steady 1lb per week for the last half year, and am well on the way to my target by next summer.
Economy of scale still applies to solar energy. It's still going to be cheaper for a utility company to set up hundreds of solar panels and sell the electricity to consumers than it will be for everyone to buy/maintain their own system.
That pretty well describes Elon Musk's business plan with Solar City. From what I've seen, it looks like they've already passed the tipping point into self-sustaining progress. Their main problems seem to be keeping up with demand and managing the "growing pains" of such rapid business expansion.
In addition to transportation, I'm curious about storage. How much "peaking power" comes from renewables (or stored renewables) as opposed to grid purchase (or quick-startup resources such as gas turbine)?
I'm stoked to hear about real-world success in renewable energy, but I see a lot of "fluff" cheerleading in the press without much attention to details about how much this or that project produces, compared to total consumption, and how much power is being consumed by various sectors of society.
As home-built or purchased alt-energy installations become more common, and more people become aware of these issues, I hope we'll see more discussion of these issues in the press. It's about time.
We'll need the fuel depots in any scenario, simply because LEO is a more versatile launch/assembly venue, capable of handling much larger missions than anything that could be launched (with or without fuel) from Earth.
And don't assume that mining the moon will be "insanely" expensive until you've seen the methods that are being worked on right now. Bottom line, the cost of the fuel itself will be just a tiny fraction of the total cost to deliver it on orbit. And as it turns out, there's a significant advantage for producing fuel on the moon -- it takes a bit more than 3x as much delta-v to move a certain mass from Earth to LEO as it does from the moon to LEO (9.3 km/s vs. 2.74 km/s, respectively).
Let's say Elon gets launch cost down to $125/lb to LEO. That means he's paying $1000 per gallon, just for transport to the depot. Which means my "insanely expensive" lunar miners can spend $500 per gallon to extract the fuel, and still beat Elon's price at the LEO depot. That is a significant forcing function, sufficient to drive mining activity on the moon for decades to come.
This is one of the more novel designs I've seen. It seems to be scaled to a good size for wave action near the coastline, it's modular and extensible, and it looks like it would allow for small vessels to navigate over the grid, as long as their draft depth is shallow enough. Another advantage is that it doesn't "ruin the skyline" the way a wind farm might do in Massachusetts.Also, the ocean is more "reliable" as an energy source than wind or solar... this method ought to deliver a more "reliable" 24/7 output.
Sounds like a pretty good deal for certain areas, and I bet those areas will start installing this system (or something like it) in the next few years.
Overturning Citizens United will require a constitutional amendment. Have you done your part to move that process forward yet? Here are a couple of things you can do:
3. Contact all of your elected representatives at every level of government and make sure they know where you stand on the issue of corporate personhood, and why.
Either way, storage is the "next big thing" for the electric grid. For one thing, it's essential for integrating intermittent sources like most renewables. But it will also help to make the entire grid more "islandable" -- diverse and distributed -- and thus more robust.
For now, yes. That's why I said the real revolution would be learning how to harvest raw materials from space. And it won't take nearly as long as you seem to think.
I'll be surprised if it's more than five years before the first privately owned fuel depot begins operating in LEO. And I'll only be slightly less surprised if it takes more than ten years for the first lunar-mined fuel to be delivered to that depot.
Maybe you hadn't heard, but there are people being paid to work out how to do all these things, and have been for years already. And in case you hadn't noticed, SpaceX is about to slash the cost-per-pound to orbit by an order of magnitude, once they can land and re-fly a booster (scheduled in the next few months). The next few years and decades in space are going to be pretty spectacular.
I've always wondered why they didn't try again with another crew, once they figured out the cement thing. (Or if they did, why I never heard about it.)
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No, I didn't forget about it, I never heard of it before. That is sad. Citation....??
Ahmedinijad is out of power and the tales of Iran's nuclear program (from what I can see) appear to be mostly overblown propaganda. I'll grant that this is a "legitimate" issue among "experts" in diplomacy, but I'm not buying it. YMMV...
Whatever you think of their politics, I'm sorry to see them leave the club, even if it's only temporarily. Spaceflight is one of the few remaining areas of "friendly rivalry" where everybody still cheers for the other teams' success, even as we hope to best them. Nobody ever watches a launch and thinks "I hope it explodes! I hope it explodes!" No... you always think "Go, baby, go!"
It will be interesting to see how "bad" this landing was... Was it a total, catastrophic loss, or did it just break a leg on landing and fall over onto the barge platform? The engines are the most expensive part of the "stack", and there are nine of them on the F9 booster stage. If they can salvage six or seven of these Merlin engines from this booster, even that will be a major victory.
Given the rate of innovation and development we've seen from SpaceX in the last few years, I suspect we'll see them nail the landing within the next couple of launches.
I can hardly wait! ;-)
The announcer said they might try again as early as Friday, just before SpaceX live stream was terminated.
It's kinda cool that we can witness this process in real time, as populations in Singapore, India, etc. gradually adopt more English vocabulary, norms, and syntax. Singapore is a great example of this phenomenon... say a Cantonese-speaking guy marries a Malay-speaking girl. Neither one of them speaks "native" English; they both have an accent. But they also can't speak each others' native tongue. Their only shared language is "broken" English... and that's what their kids grow up with as their native language.
Living in Taiwan all these years, I find myself confronted with a host of different accents and dialects that I would never have encountered back home in Iowa. I've heard all manner of "English" from Kiwis, Ozzies, Scousers, Paddies, etc... not to mention folks from other language families altogether.
Even as the old divisions fade away, you can see the new divisions emerge...
To quote Mr. Spock... Fascinating!
A spot of paint on your balloon would locally restrict expansion as it inflates, as galaxies seem to do in our expanding universe. My understanding of current hypotheses is that dark matter plays the role of "paint" in this analogy. However, there's an intriguing alternative explanation, which only becomes apparent when you think of space as a fluid.
Ironically, I stumbled upon this notion after musing on the strong interaction. (And I confess I was a bit high at the time.) Something that repels at a distance but attracts in proximity... that reminds me of bubbles interacting in the surface tension of fluids. So I googled "space as a fluid" and found that there's a whole branch of inquiry in this direction. It doesn't get as much attention as String Theory, but it's not dismissed out of hand either. (Correct me if I'm wrong... IANA physicist.)
Anyway, I'm curious to hear others' thoughts on this.
No one will ever need more than 640 kB of memory for a personal computer...
Forgot to mention coconut oil, which is a major contributor to the fat content of my diet.
I've been losing weight steadily for several months now, on a low-carb, high-fat, "paleo" lifestyle which includes light exercise and intermittent fasting. I do not pay any attention to calories whatsoever, I only avoid carbs and eat as much "real food" as I feel like, meaning single-ingredient, natural, fresh-cooked or raw products, as opposed to the processed "edible food-like substances" which occupy most of the shelf space in a modern supermarket.
In terms of caloric intake, my diet is about 75~80% fat, 15~20% protein, and 5~10% carbs.
I eat a lot of the following:
Raw veg: carrot sticks, celery, broccoli, cauliflower, salad.
Cooked veg: spinach, cabbage, sprouts, etc..
Fermented veg: dill pickles, sauerkraut
Dairy: butter, cream, cheese, cream-cheese, sour cream
- Do eggs count as dairy? I eat about two per day.
Nuts: almonds, walnuts, pistachios, etc..
Meat: the fattier the better, especially organ meats
Fish: the fattier the better.
I avoid all processed foods and carbs in particular: Sugar, soft drinks, fruit juice, bread, pasta, starchy veg (eg. potatoes)... and also "somewhat avoid" legumes in general and soy products in particular.
As for exercise, I don't have a regime or program, I just live in a walkable city with great public transpo, so I end up walking a couple miles per day on average. I also started using a stand-up desk last spring. I've been losing a steady 1lb per week for the last half year, and am well on the way to my target by next summer.
Four "heads" on a single PC? Or if you have multiple PCs, how do you arrange keyboards and mice?
Methane release also played a key role in the Permian Mass Extinction Event.
Economy of scale still applies to solar energy. It's still going to be cheaper for a utility company to set up hundreds
of solar panels and sell the electricity to consumers than it will be for everyone to buy/maintain their own system.
That pretty well describes Elon Musk's business plan with Solar City. From what I've seen, it looks like they've already passed the tipping point into self-sustaining progress. Their main problems seem to be keeping up with demand and managing the "growing pains" of such rapid business expansion.
Seriously though, how far can this scale up? What if just plug one of these into the LHC?
Perhaps bigger?
Did it ever occur to you that most people don't vote on racial lines?
TFA is 190 words long. How is it possible to define this as anything other than a "fluff" piece?
In addition to transportation, I'm curious about storage. How much "peaking power" comes from renewables (or stored renewables) as opposed to grid purchase (or quick-startup resources such as gas turbine)?
I'm stoked to hear about real-world success in renewable energy, but I see a lot of "fluff" cheerleading in the press without much attention to details about how much this or that project produces, compared to total consumption, and how much power is being consumed by various sectors of society.
As home-built or purchased alt-energy installations become more common, and more people become aware of these issues, I hope we'll see more discussion of these issues in the press. It's about time.
They can use the old Sherwin Williams slogan: "Cover the World!"
The only solution that I see is to recruit people that will be polyamorous without developing excessive jealousy.
"I must say, that is an astonishingly good idea you have, Doctor!"
-- Russian Ambassador to Dr. Strangelove
We'll need the fuel depots in any scenario, simply because LEO is a more versatile launch/assembly venue, capable of handling much larger missions than anything that could be launched (with or without fuel) from Earth.
And don't assume that mining the moon will be "insanely" expensive until you've seen the methods that are being worked on right now. Bottom line, the cost of the fuel itself will be just a tiny fraction of the total cost to deliver it on orbit. And as it turns out, there's a significant advantage for producing fuel on the moon -- it takes a bit more than 3x as much delta-v to move a certain mass from Earth to LEO as it does from the moon to LEO (9.3 km/s vs. 2.74 km/s, respectively).
Let's say Elon gets launch cost down to $125/lb to LEO. That means he's paying $1000 per gallon, just for transport to the depot. Which means my "insanely expensive" lunar miners can spend $500 per gallon to extract the fuel, and still beat Elon's price at the LEO depot. That is a significant forcing function, sufficient to drive mining activity on the moon for decades to come.
This is one of the more novel designs I've seen. It seems to be scaled to a good size for wave action near the coastline, it's modular and extensible, and it looks like it would allow for small vessels to navigate over the grid, as long as their draft depth is shallow enough. Another advantage is that it doesn't "ruin the skyline" the way a wind farm might do in Massachusetts.Also, the ocean is more "reliable" as an energy source than wind or solar... this method ought to deliver a more "reliable" 24/7 output.
Sounds like a pretty good deal for certain areas, and I bet those areas will start installing this system (or something like it) in the next few years.
Overturning Citizens United will require a constitutional amendment. Have you done your part to move that process forward yet? Here are a couple of things you can do:
1. Visit MoveToAmend.org and sign the petition.
2. Visit Wolf-PAC.com and volunteer.
3. Contact all of your elected representatives at every level of government and make sure they know where you stand on the issue of corporate personhood, and why.
Either way, storage is the "next big thing" for the electric grid. For one thing, it's essential for integrating intermittent sources like most renewables. But it will also help to make the entire grid more "islandable" -- diverse and distributed -- and thus more robust.
You still have to "up-mass" the raw materials.
For now, yes. That's why I said the real revolution would be learning how to harvest raw materials from space. And it won't take nearly as long as you seem to think.
I'll be surprised if it's more than five years before the first privately owned fuel depot begins operating in LEO. And I'll only be slightly less surprised if it takes more than ten years for the first lunar-mined fuel to be delivered to that depot.
Maybe you hadn't heard, but there are people being paid to work out how to do all these things, and have been for years already. And in case you hadn't noticed, SpaceX is about to slash the cost-per-pound to orbit by an order of magnitude, once they can land and re-fly a booster (scheduled in the next few months). The next few years and decades in space are going to be pretty spectacular.
I've always wondered why they didn't try again with another crew, once they figured out the cement thing. (Or if they did, why I never heard about it.)