The better answer is to use the excess power from the wind farms when their production exceeds the immediate need to pump water into reservoirs and spin up flywheels, which would then be tapped when demand exceeds what the wind farms can produce at the moment. We have the technology now to do these things, what we do not have is the tax incentives to get them built. In short, the problem is not technical, it is political.
It probably doesn't help that pumping water and turning flywheels are ancient technologies that don't seem very sexy today. But every electric substation has plenty of room to install a few high speed flywheels that could inject power at the local level when the immediate need exceeds what is coming in on the high voltage lines. Do it right, and these would also be neighborhood UPS systems that could bridge short term power line failures, or provide a few minutes to do a controlled shut down of critical systems. Many of the areas that are favorable for wind farms have terrain that is suitable for reservoirs. Since the reservoirs would be drained through the same pipelines that filled them, the environmental impact could be insignificant with appropriate engineering techniques.
Another thought that just occurred to me: Would you expect that someone who has never studied music and never learned to play any kind of instrument would be capable of using your bass guitar to develop new cool cooking lines after a week or two of fooling around with it? It has been about 40 years since I once tried to learn to play a guitar, but I still remember how unintuitive the chord fingerings and strumming patterns were.
3D graphics applications are much the same way. The ones that are useful in creative work are necessarily going to have unique interfaces that will be as foreign to a typist as a piano keyboard or guitar chord fingerings.
Um, what I am trying to say is that UI experts add the same kind of value to the design of a 3D application like Blender as typographers add to writing new musical scores. Which is to say, not much. And basically nothing with regard to the making of a new piece of art, whether visual or auditory.
Computer graphics is in its infancy. What is critically needed are easier ways to manipulate Bezier curve control points, smoother processes for manipulating UV mappings, improvements in presenting approximations of the final rendered result while doing mesh edits, and that kind of thing. The musical equivalent would be determining the best number of strings for a bass guitar, and what they should be tuned to, how far apart they placed, and whether the neck should be fretted. After those things are resolved, by the musicians through their experience in making music, then there would be value in having some polishing expert develop the very best in non-scuff, scratch resistant coatings for the thing.
UI experts will have their place in making the 3D apps of tomorrow a little easier to use. But today their contribution is insignificant compared to whether Blender's techniques with 3D cursor usage are better than Maya's approach, or managing textures in a stack is better than managing them with nodes. That basic design work comes from artists in the field determining by their aggregated experience which methods are the most fruitful. Outsiders like UI designers have nothing meaningful to contribute to that.
Perhaps from your point of view my post missed the target that yours seemed to hit dead on, but that's an illusion caused by your two dimensional perspective of a three dimension problem.
I will only say this: Autodesk, etc, might have the cash to hire focus groups and UI designers, but Blender has been built by artists who also do some programming. Further, Autodesk's focus groups and UI designers are focused on developing a product that can be marketed at a profit. Blender's developers are focused on developing a product that does what an artist wants done.
Maya is built for use in commercial art studios that employ several CG artists and have concerns about security wrt the work that they are doing and often wrt proprietary information that their clients have entrusted to them. Maya expects that different CG specialists will handle different aspects of the production: that there will be a lighting specialist (who is probably most comfortable working in the theater jargon of barn doors, rim lights, etc), and an animator (who thinks in terms of tweens, etc), a rigger (bones), a texture artist (seventeen different words for "grunge"), etc. These persons may never meet face to face, but Maya has to provide the means for keeping all the work organized.
Blender is designed for the solo artist who will take on each of the specialist roles in turn, as his project progresses. And will often want to jump between roles, when he realizes that if he does this neat thing with the texture then he can do another really fine thing with the lights and end up blowing everybody's mind. Blender has no internal provisions for security: it expects the artist to lock the door when he leaves home. Nor does Blender offer any means of internal version control: it expects its user to rename MyArt.blend to MyArt-[today's date].blend every once in a while.
I have worked with Blender for about 5 years and have taken a couple of courses that used Maya. In my experience, Blender allows much easier workflows for the solo artist than could be done in Maya. However it would be impossible for reasons having nothing to do with art to use Blender in a project like Toy Story or Avatar. You would need to have someone who was expert in both CG art and database security to manage the files, and I doubt that there is anyone anywhere as yet who has that kind of skill set. Or that any studio would have the budget to hire him, if they could find him.
Maya = Closed Source software from Autodesk
Blender = Open Source software
You are comparing orange to apple, two different things...
No. He is comparing two similar pieces of software. The fact that their respective developers are organized and funded differently does not change the fact that these are similar pieces of software. Open source is not some panacea, there is no law of nature that says it will deliver the better product, it will at times suffer from a lack of *capable* volunteers and/or a lack of subsidies/donations to hire paid professionals.
No, again, and a thousand times no.
Maya is being developed by programmer-artists to make money for the Autodesk stockholders by selling artsy tools to commercial artists. Blender is being developed by artist-programmers to make better artsy tools for their own use. There is a world of difference in the results.
From my POV as an artist, Maya is crippled by the security features and database management methodology that it needs to be useful to a commercial art business employing dozens of artists, any of whom could quit at any time and carry away the family jewels in a thumb drive, save for Maya's ways of limiting that. I don't need that kind of protection, and I am not interested in taking on the limitations that Maya has to impose. I don't need a database that is implemented in subdirectory structures where persons with an access to one mesh can be prevented from accessing any textures, rigging, other meshes, etc. But I recognize that some commercial art projects do need that kind of control.
Maya is good if you are running a commercial art business or if you want to work for such a business. (If you are willing to limit your creative development to the confines of your assigned cubicle.) Blender is better for the person who wants to do CG art and is not directly concerned with paying the rent through that activity.
But you really can't compare something like Maya and Photoshop to a free tool like Blender or Gimp simply because of the difference in budget.
Too true. But the overriding reason these two are not comparable is that Maya, Photoshop, and other commercial art software are written to make money for their companies by selling artsy tools to artists. Blender, Gimp, and other FOSS art software are written by artists to make better artsy tools. That core difference in orientation results in massive differences in what can be done, and what will be done.
I have worked with both Maya and Blender. They have different strengths.
The Autodesk (Maya) set of apps is optimized for use by teams that are large enough to have their own sysadmin, who handles everything from backup and version control to the naming conventions that keep the workflows straight. It would be difficult to use Blender in this kind of environment--- the structure of Blender's databases is such that it would be impossible to impose the limitations that are needed in large teams.
Blender is optimized for the solo artist who does everything from mesh building through texturing, rigging, animation, and compositing. Maya and the Autodesk products can also be used this way, but the individual artist has to spend much more time dealing with version control issues and making sure all the files are in the right folders, etc--- the overheads of managing complex data structures. Blender does all that internally, in its object oriented database. The small Maya shop has to devote time that would otherwise be used in making art to keeping the project databases clean and functional. The Blender artist can rely on his software to do all that.
If you want to grow up to become a CG artist, and you plan to do so in the next five years, then you absolutely, positively need to lean Maya--- and you will not have time to learn Blender. The interfaces are too different to easily switch between the two, and there is too much to learn in either one. Maya dominates the market, not because it is intrinsically better, but because it fits the design of current businesses better. This may change if partnerships of Blender artists start emerging as players in the market--- but don't count on that. Putting together partnerships of artists is like herding cats. It happens, but never on a large scale like Pixar, etc.
If you want to develop your talents in CG artwork rather than using it to make a living, then Blender is probably going to be a better choice for you. You have full artistic control over the entire project through the Blender package (the Maya ecosystem will force you to specialize in one aspect only, like modeling OR texturing OR rigging--- fine if you want to develop your art skills within the confines of your assigned cubicle).
At the moment, and for the foreseeable future, Blender is being developed more rapidly than Maya. So Blender is probably the better choice if you want to be on the bleeding edge of things. This is partly because the Blender core code has just been brought through a major refactoring that better fits what we have learned in 20+ years of CG art experience, and which has opened up a lot of new possibilities for development. And partly because Maya (and Autodesk in general) have the incredible inertia of a large installed base that slows down what they can put on the market. And Maya's development is always going to be guided more by where the profits are than by what the artist requires.
The 10 second sound bite: Autodesk is in business to make profits by selling artsy tools to commercial artists; Blender is an association of artists who are developing better artsy tools.
With a station that exists to shoot at asteroids, wouldn't you expect to have to constantly change where the laser is pointing though?
I may be wrong, but the impression I have is that the laser(s) would stay focused on a specific target for months or years before moving to another target. The targets would be closer to aphelion than perihelion, since it would be easier and take less energy to deflect them when they were far from the Sun than when they were closer. So their relative motion is very slow and very easy to track from any Earth orbit whose plane was roughly perpendicular to a line from the Earth to the asteroid.
Except possibly for asteroids that were orbiting in the same plane as the Earth, a satellite orbiting at more than 7,000 miles could be kept on target continuously without changes in its attitude. This is much lower than geosynchronous orbit (although well above what the Space Shuttle was able to achieve, but then you have to realize that the Shuttle was more like a souped up suborbital ballistic object than a true space craft that could attain a stable orbit--- it never fully escaped the Earth's atmosphere).
Rather than melting the barrels of all the Bad Guy's tanks, we would rain on his parade. Such a deterrent has never before been considered, as far as I know.
Seriously though, if these lasers would be powerful enough to weaponize weather, then we should certainly agitate to get one built. The ability to shift a Katrina or Sandy hurricane even a degree or two off its projected course could save a lot of lives and damage. We have demonstrated an ability to control nuclear weapons, so I am confident that we can use the same kinds of treaties and strategies to prevent weather wars.
I am guessing that you do not remember that the original plans for the shuttle and the ISS included a "space tug" that would take cargo from the LEO that was all that the shuttle could manage to do and boost it to the ISS, which would actually orbit above the atmospheric envelope, at three times or more the distance to LEO. What a concept, putting a satellite high enough that it did not require frequent re-boosts and course corrections!
The space tug never made it past the concept stage, it died even before the manned, reusable first stage died. Its a wonder that the shuttle actually worked. After Apollo, the whole manned space program became nothing better than the camel designed by a committee.
Put the laser satellite in an appropriate orbit, and the occasional course correction could be folded into the routine maintenance of the flywheel(s). Those would need to be spun down every once in a while for inspection anyway.
The other point about gimbals is perhaps one that I do not understand. Flywheel energy storage is in use today on research ships and in some medical transport vehicles, where it is key to assuring steady power for critical equipment. These systems always use gimbals, and the engineering involved appears to be fully mature, very well understood. I would expect any flywheel used on a satellite would also be within a gimbal, and I would expect that in a microgravity and hard vacuum environment, the engineering of that system would be a lot simpler than what we do now for the oceanographers and EMTs.
But I am not confident that I understand the question about gimbals, so maybe I am not addressing the concern.
Would somebody who knows a bit about laser technology speak to this question:
Would a laser capable of slowly burning off material on a distant asteroid be suitable as a weapon against an enemy on the Earth's surface? I am guessing that beam attenuation in the atmosphere would severely limit the energy delivered to a target on the ground (but the overhead light show might be distracting).
On reflection (pun intended) it seems this question has two parts. The second part:
If an orbital laser weapon is developed, would a simple mirror of stretched mylar be sufficient to protect military assets in its shade? Could a smoke screen or fogger be used to protect areas?
A more direct use of sunlight would be titanium white paintballs, to make one side of the asteroid highly reflective. Then just wait.
We have the technology now to identify worthwhile targets and to hit them with the paintballs. The only thing we might be lacking in is caring enough about future generations to invest in something now that won't pay off for a hundred or more years.
For the DESTAR and similar applications, there is a better method of storage than those mentioned in previous post: storage as kinetic energy in a high speed flywheel.
Flywheel energy density is much higher than batteries, especially in space where friction losses can be minimized and there is no need for a failure containment vessel, so long as the thing is kept oriented in a safe direction (do not build space station modules that cross the plane of flywheel rotation). Energy can be withdrawn very efficiently, at a much higher rate than batteries support, and with much more control than is possible with capacitor storage. Final construction can be done in orbit, making this probably the easiest system to deploy on a large scale.
Look into the A.S. degrees at community colleges.You will find courses that are directly relevant with hands-on experience using today's commercial tools. If you pay attention these courses will offer enough on the theory as well as current practice that you will be in a good position to grow your knowledge as web development continues to evolve. That is, while the courses tend to be focused on getting entry level jobs working with products from Autodesk, Microsoft, etc, a good school will also provide a broad enough approach that you could easily adapt what you learned to other products, or FOSS, or whatever becomes the Big Thing next year.
Since you have 2 years toward a baccalaureate, you have probably taken many of the prerequisite AS courses. This means you could consider taking a broader range of web tech courses or even think about doing a double major: one degree in web dev, and perhaps a second in accounting, project management, etc.
Whether you go with the double major or not, you will have an excellent opportunity to hit the job market with an appropriate degree, AND a solid portfolio.
So how is this concept of "conservation of impulse" useful? It appears to describe a small corner case of the general conservation of energy, in situations where it can be implied that there is no conversion of energy momentum to other forms of energy (including heat of friction). I cannot think of any real world engineering application where it is possible to ignore the sources and sinks that "conservation of impulse" ignores; it looks like a blackboard simplification very much like centrifugal force. It seems to be some kind of bastard descendant between the purely theoretical realm of Newtonian physics and the recognition that in the real world collisions are not between points representing centers of gravity but between boundary layers that deform on the first phase of impact and return more or less to their normals on the last phase.
Certainly the concept has no value at all in a discussion of an acceleration that does not use thrust. Such as acceleration by electric forces, or by exchanging potential energy for momentum. It no more belongs to this discussion than does centrifugal force.
I have never heard of this "conservation of impulse" of which you speak.
I can set two pingpong balls on a billiard table a few inches apart and they will stay there. If I pick one up and rub it with cat fur to build a static charge, then put it down in the same place, lo and behold! Both pingpong balls move toward each other! So evidently there are ways around this "conservation of impulse".
Parent post exhibits a lack of understanding of reality. There are any number of reasons why Boeing may not be working on Shawyer's approach any more.
Could be that patent law being what it is, Boeing could see no way to monetize the product.
Could be that Boeing needed to reassign the HR resources of this project to something more pressing. Like, perhaps, something related to getting the 787 Dreamliner off the ground.
Boeing is primarily a business, and its primary purpose is to make money for its stockholders. Doing research on something that might be really valuable someday often takes a back seat to doing whatever is necessary to meet the expected profits for next quarter.
The problem with empiricism is that your truths are only as good as your measurements (and they're always a little bit wrong). The problem with rationalism is that given the right set of axioms, you can literally prove anything.
Good, as far as you go. However this only addresses one small corner case of reality.
Guess which epistemology is more useful? Hint: if you pick philosophy/rationalism, you're probably a dumbass. No really, I mean it.
Outside of the small corner case of observable reality, the above rationale has no meaning. But this raises the question of whether reality extends beyond what can be observed. The most narrow-minded and dumbass view of reality is that things that cannot be observed do not exist; that only things that are subject to empiricism, to the scientific method, are real.
This is just so obviously false.... Science is the product of testing hypotheses. Those hypotheses are products of imagination. Imagination is not measurable in any way, and cannot be understood or even explored using any empirical method. At the very least, the universe is composed of things that can be manipulated with empirical methods plus imaginary "things". Since there is no limit to what can be imagined, reality is hugely, immeasurably, larger than the corner case where the scientific method can be effectively used.
One can say "Well, that's only your imagination, that is not real". But that is denying the source of the hypotheses that drive science. Which is a dumbass way of looking at things.
Or one can recognize that all of mathematics is a set of exercises in the disciplined use of imagination. I posit that anyone capable of comprehending this post will have just constructed a mental image of the set of all mathematical exercises--- by using their imagination to do so. Without mathematics, there would be very little science and almost no technology. The disciplined use of imagination is vital to a scientist's world view.
The appropriate question is not whether empiricism or philosophy/rationalism is more useful. That is a dumbass question, since empiricism depends on the disciplined use of imaginary constructs that are developed through various philosophies. It is a dumbass question because empiricism is a subset of philosophy, and a subset that depends on members outside of itself for its continuing evolution.
I do appreciate parent post's unique contribution to the discussion. "Dumbass" is a very effective way of describing a certain kind of thinking, but it is not a word I would have introduced myself. But since it was introduced, I am quite pleased to be able to make use of it.
I am a native speaker of English, and I do find the the way that sentence was constructed to be somewhat unusual, and not entirely consistent with English grammar.
It does raise a couple of interesting questions: what, exactly, is the "size of a month"? And are months on near Earth asteroids so greatly different in size than other months?
Lotus 1,2,3 was nothing more than a ripoff of VisiCalc. The only way it was "better" was that it had the support of Lotus, then IBM, behind it.
I cannot argue with that, but I do not agree. For one thing, Lotus 1.2.3 was the first major business app to offer a "student version" at an affordable price for students. That had a profound effect on the entire PC ecosystem.
Perl was the first effective glue language (capable of launching and controlling other apps) on microcomputers. It was also the first full featured language to offer regular expressions, making it possible to mine text reports for data and feed the results into spreadsheets or databases.
C was important, too, but it came from the realm of minicomputers. It was not a product of the microcomputer / personal computer revolution. It preceded that by about 10 years (AIR).
Slashdot Mirror
The better answer is to use the excess power from the wind farms when their production exceeds the immediate need to pump water into reservoirs and spin up flywheels, which would then be tapped when demand exceeds what the wind farms can produce at the moment. We have the technology now to do these things, what we do not have is the tax incentives to get them built. In short, the problem is not technical, it is political.
It probably doesn't help that pumping water and turning flywheels are ancient technologies that don't seem very sexy today. But every electric substation has plenty of room to install a few high speed flywheels that could inject power at the local level when the immediate need exceeds what is coming in on the high voltage lines. Do it right, and these would also be neighborhood UPS systems that could bridge short term power line failures, or provide a few minutes to do a controlled shut down of critical systems. Many of the areas that are favorable for wind farms have terrain that is suitable for reservoirs. Since the reservoirs would be drained through the same pipelines that filled them, the environmental impact could be insignificant with appropriate engineering techniques.
Another thought that just occurred to me: Would you expect that someone who has never studied music and never learned to play any kind of instrument would be capable of using your bass guitar to develop new cool cooking lines after a week or two of fooling around with it? It has been about 40 years since I once tried to learn to play a guitar, but I still remember how unintuitive the chord fingerings and strumming patterns were.
3D graphics applications are much the same way. The ones that are useful in creative work are necessarily going to have unique interfaces that will be as foreign to a typist as a piano keyboard or guitar chord fingerings.
Um, what I am trying to say is that UI experts add the same kind of value to the design of a 3D application like Blender as typographers add to writing new musical scores. Which is to say, not much. And basically nothing with regard to the making of a new piece of art, whether visual or auditory.
Computer graphics is in its infancy. What is critically needed are easier ways to manipulate Bezier curve control points, smoother processes for manipulating UV mappings, improvements in presenting approximations of the final rendered result while doing mesh edits, and that kind of thing. The musical equivalent would be determining the best number of strings for a bass guitar, and what they should be tuned to, how far apart they placed, and whether the neck should be fretted. After those things are resolved, by the musicians through their experience in making music, then there would be value in having some polishing expert develop the very best in non-scuff, scratch resistant coatings for the thing.
UI experts will have their place in making the 3D apps of tomorrow a little easier to use. But today their contribution is insignificant compared to whether Blender's techniques with 3D cursor usage are better than Maya's approach, or managing textures in a stack is better than managing them with nodes. That basic design work comes from artists in the field determining by their aggregated experience which methods are the most fruitful. Outsiders like UI designers have nothing meaningful to contribute to that.
Perhaps from your point of view my post missed the target that yours seemed to hit dead on, but that's an illusion caused by your two dimensional perspective of a three dimension problem.
I will only say this: Autodesk, etc, might have the cash to hire focus groups and UI designers, but Blender has been built by artists who also do some programming. Further, Autodesk's focus groups and UI designers are focused on developing a product that can be marketed at a profit. Blender's developers are focused on developing a product that does what an artist wants done.
These are excellent points.
Maya is built for use in commercial art studios that employ several CG artists and have concerns about security wrt the work that they are doing and often wrt proprietary information that their clients have entrusted to them. Maya expects that different CG specialists will handle different aspects of the production: that there will be a lighting specialist (who is probably most comfortable working in the theater jargon of barn doors, rim lights, etc), and an animator (who thinks in terms of tweens, etc), a rigger (bones), a texture artist (seventeen different words for "grunge"), etc. These persons may never meet face to face, but Maya has to provide the means for keeping all the work organized.
Blender is designed for the solo artist who will take on each of the specialist roles in turn, as his project progresses. And will often want to jump between roles, when he realizes that if he does this neat thing with the texture then he can do another really fine thing with the lights and end up blowing everybody's mind. Blender has no internal provisions for security: it expects the artist to lock the door when he leaves home. Nor does Blender offer any means of internal version control: it expects its user to rename MyArt.blend to MyArt-[today's date].blend every once in a while.
I have worked with Blender for about 5 years and have taken a couple of courses that used Maya. In my experience, Blender allows much easier workflows for the solo artist than could be done in Maya. However it would be impossible for reasons having nothing to do with art to use Blender in a project like Toy Story or Avatar. You would need to have someone who was expert in both CG art and database security to manage the files, and I doubt that there is anyone anywhere as yet who has that kind of skill set. Or that any studio would have the budget to hire him, if they could find him.
Maya = Closed Source software from Autodesk Blender = Open Source software You are comparing orange to apple, two different things...
No. He is comparing two similar pieces of software. The fact that their respective developers are organized and funded differently does not change the fact that these are similar pieces of software. Open source is not some panacea, there is no law of nature that says it will deliver the better product, it will at times suffer from a lack of *capable* volunteers and/or a lack of subsidies/donations to hire paid professionals.
No, again, and a thousand times no.
Maya is being developed by programmer-artists to make money for the Autodesk stockholders by selling artsy tools to commercial artists. Blender is being developed by artist-programmers to make better artsy tools for their own use. There is a world of difference in the results.
From my POV as an artist, Maya is crippled by the security features and database management methodology that it needs to be useful to a commercial art business employing dozens of artists, any of whom could quit at any time and carry away the family jewels in a thumb drive, save for Maya's ways of limiting that. I don't need that kind of protection, and I am not interested in taking on the limitations that Maya has to impose. I don't need a database that is implemented in subdirectory structures where persons with an access to one mesh can be prevented from accessing any textures, rigging, other meshes, etc. But I recognize that some commercial art projects do need that kind of control.
Maya is good if you are running a commercial art business or if you want to work for such a business. (If you are willing to limit your creative development to the confines of your assigned cubicle.) Blender is better for the person who wants to do CG art and is not directly concerned with paying the rent through that activity.
But you really can't compare something like Maya and Photoshop to a free tool like Blender or Gimp simply because of the difference in budget.
Too true. But the overriding reason these two are not comparable is that Maya, Photoshop, and other commercial art software are written to make money for their companies by selling artsy tools to artists. Blender, Gimp, and other FOSS art software are written by artists to make better artsy tools. That core difference in orientation results in massive differences in what can be done, and what will be done.
I have worked with both Maya and Blender. They have different strengths.
The Autodesk (Maya) set of apps is optimized for use by teams that are large enough to have their own sysadmin, who handles everything from backup and version control to the naming conventions that keep the workflows straight. It would be difficult to use Blender in this kind of environment--- the structure of Blender's databases is such that it would be impossible to impose the limitations that are needed in large teams.
Blender is optimized for the solo artist who does everything from mesh building through texturing, rigging, animation, and compositing. Maya and the Autodesk products can also be used this way, but the individual artist has to spend much more time dealing with version control issues and making sure all the files are in the right folders, etc--- the overheads of managing complex data structures. Blender does all that internally, in its object oriented database. The small Maya shop has to devote time that would otherwise be used in making art to keeping the project databases clean and functional. The Blender artist can rely on his software to do all that.
If you want to grow up to become a CG artist, and you plan to do so in the next five years, then you absolutely, positively need to lean Maya--- and you will not have time to learn Blender. The interfaces are too different to easily switch between the two, and there is too much to learn in either one. Maya dominates the market, not because it is intrinsically better, but because it fits the design of current businesses better. This may change if partnerships of Blender artists start emerging as players in the market--- but don't count on that. Putting together partnerships of artists is like herding cats. It happens, but never on a large scale like Pixar, etc.
If you want to develop your talents in CG artwork rather than using it to make a living, then Blender is probably going to be a better choice for you. You have full artistic control over the entire project through the Blender package (the Maya ecosystem will force you to specialize in one aspect only, like modeling OR texturing OR rigging--- fine if you want to develop your art skills within the confines of your assigned cubicle).
At the moment, and for the foreseeable future, Blender is being developed more rapidly than Maya. So Blender is probably the better choice if you want to be on the bleeding edge of things. This is partly because the Blender core code has just been brought through a major refactoring that better fits what we have learned in 20+ years of CG art experience, and which has opened up a lot of new possibilities for development. And partly because Maya (and Autodesk in general) have the incredible inertia of a large installed base that slows down what they can put on the market. And Maya's development is always going to be guided more by where the profits are than by what the artist requires.
The 10 second sound bite: Autodesk is in business to make profits by selling artsy tools to commercial artists; Blender is an association of artists who are developing better artsy tools.
With a station that exists to shoot at asteroids, wouldn't you expect to have to constantly change where the laser is pointing though?
I may be wrong, but the impression I have is that the laser(s) would stay focused on a specific target for months or years before moving to another target. The targets would be closer to aphelion than perihelion, since it would be easier and take less energy to deflect them when they were far from the Sun than when they were closer. So their relative motion is very slow and very easy to track from any Earth orbit whose plane was roughly perpendicular to a line from the Earth to the asteroid.
Except possibly for asteroids that were orbiting in the same plane as the Earth, a satellite orbiting at more than 7,000 miles could be kept on target continuously without changes in its attitude. This is much lower than geosynchronous orbit (although well above what the Space Shuttle was able to achieve, but then you have to realize that the Shuttle was more like a souped up suborbital ballistic object than a true space craft that could attain a stable orbit--- it never fully escaped the Earth's atmosphere).
Good point.
Rather than melting the barrels of all the Bad Guy's tanks, we would rain on his parade. Such a deterrent has never before been considered, as far as I know.
Seriously though, if these lasers would be powerful enough to weaponize weather, then we should certainly agitate to get one built. The ability to shift a Katrina or Sandy hurricane even a degree or two off its projected course could save a lot of lives and damage. We have demonstrated an ability to control nuclear weapons, so I am confident that we can use the same kinds of treaties and strategies to prevent weather wars.
I am guessing that you do not remember that the original plans for the shuttle and the ISS included a "space tug" that would take cargo from the LEO that was all that the shuttle could manage to do and boost it to the ISS, which would actually orbit above the atmospheric envelope, at three times or more the distance to LEO. What a concept, putting a satellite high enough that it did not require frequent re-boosts and course corrections!
The space tug never made it past the concept stage, it died even before the manned, reusable first stage died. Its a wonder that the shuttle actually worked. After Apollo, the whole manned space program became nothing better than the camel designed by a committee.
Put the laser satellite in an appropriate orbit, and the occasional course correction could be folded into the routine maintenance of the flywheel(s). Those would need to be spun down every once in a while for inspection anyway.
The other point about gimbals is perhaps one that I do not understand. Flywheel energy storage is in use today on research ships and in some medical transport vehicles, where it is key to assuring steady power for critical equipment. These systems always use gimbals, and the engineering involved appears to be fully mature, very well understood. I would expect any flywheel used on a satellite would also be within a gimbal, and I would expect that in a microgravity and hard vacuum environment, the engineering of that system would be a lot simpler than what we do now for the oceanographers and EMTs.
But I am not confident that I understand the question about gimbals, so maybe I am not addressing the concern.
Would somebody who knows a bit about laser technology speak to this question:
Would a laser capable of slowly burning off material on a distant asteroid be suitable as a weapon against an enemy on the Earth's surface? I am guessing that beam attenuation in the atmosphere would severely limit the energy delivered to a target on the ground (but the overhead light show might be distracting).
On reflection (pun intended) it seems this question has two parts. The second part:
If an orbital laser weapon is developed, would a simple mirror of stretched mylar be sufficient to protect military assets in its shade? Could a smoke screen or fogger be used to protect areas?
A more direct use of sunlight would be titanium white paintballs, to make one side of the asteroid highly reflective. Then just wait.
We have the technology now to identify worthwhile targets and to hit them with the paintballs. The only thing we might be lacking in is caring enough about future generations to invest in something now that won't pay off for a hundred or more years.
For the DESTAR and similar applications, there is a better method of storage than those mentioned in previous post: storage as kinetic energy in a high speed flywheel.
Flywheel energy density is much higher than batteries, especially in space where friction losses can be minimized and there is no need for a failure containment vessel, so long as the thing is kept oriented in a safe direction (do not build space station modules that cross the plane of flywheel rotation). Energy can be withdrawn very efficiently, at a much higher rate than batteries support, and with much more control than is possible with capacitor storage. Final construction can be done in orbit, making this probably the easiest system to deploy on a large scale.
Look into the A.S. degrees at community colleges.You will find courses that are directly relevant with hands-on experience using today's commercial tools. If you pay attention these courses will offer enough on the theory as well as current practice that you will be in a good position to grow your knowledge as web development continues to evolve. That is, while the courses tend to be focused on getting entry level jobs working with products from Autodesk, Microsoft, etc, a good school will also provide a broad enough approach that you could easily adapt what you learned to other products, or FOSS, or whatever becomes the Big Thing next year.
Since you have 2 years toward a baccalaureate, you have probably taken many of the prerequisite AS courses. This means you could consider taking a broader range of web tech courses or even think about doing a double major: one degree in web dev, and perhaps a second in accounting, project management, etc.
Whether you go with the double major or not, you will have an excellent opportunity to hit the job market with an appropriate degree, AND a solid portfolio.
So how is this concept of "conservation of impulse" useful? It appears to describe a small corner case of the general conservation of energy, in situations where it can be implied that there is no conversion of energy momentum to other forms of energy (including heat of friction). I cannot think of any real world engineering application where it is possible to ignore the sources and sinks that "conservation of impulse" ignores; it looks like a blackboard simplification very much like centrifugal force. It seems to be some kind of bastard descendant between the purely theoretical realm of Newtonian physics and the recognition that in the real world collisions are not between points representing centers of gravity but between boundary layers that deform on the first phase of impact and return more or less to their normals on the last phase.
Certainly the concept has no value at all in a discussion of an acceleration that does not use thrust. Such as acceleration by electric forces, or by exchanging potential energy for momentum. It no more belongs to this discussion than does centrifugal force.
I have never heard of this "conservation of impulse" of which you speak.
I can set two pingpong balls on a billiard table a few inches apart and they will stay there. If I pick one up and rub it with cat fur to build a static charge, then put it down in the same place, lo and behold! Both pingpong balls move toward each other! So evidently there are ways around this "conservation of impulse".
So as usual in capitalist societies, it was all a matter of who screws who.
Parent post exhibits a lack of understanding of reality. There are any number of reasons why Boeing may not be working on Shawyer's approach any more.
Could be that patent law being what it is, Boeing could see no way to monetize the product.
Could be that Boeing needed to reassign the HR resources of this project to something more pressing. Like, perhaps, something related to getting the 787 Dreamliner off the ground.
Boeing is primarily a business, and its primary purpose is to make money for its stockholders. Doing research on something that might be really valuable someday often takes a back seat to doing whatever is necessary to meet the expected profits for next quarter.
The problem with empiricism is that your truths are only as good as your measurements (and they're always a little bit wrong). The problem with rationalism is that given the right set of axioms, you can literally prove anything.
Good, as far as you go. However this only addresses one small corner case of reality.
Guess which epistemology is more useful? Hint: if you pick philosophy/rationalism, you're probably a dumbass. No really, I mean it.
Outside of the small corner case of observable reality, the above rationale has no meaning. But this raises the question of whether reality extends beyond what can be observed. The most narrow-minded and dumbass view of reality is that things that cannot be observed do not exist; that only things that are subject to empiricism, to the scientific method, are real.
This is just so obviously false.... Science is the product of testing hypotheses. Those hypotheses are products of imagination. Imagination is not measurable in any way, and cannot be understood or even explored using any empirical method. At the very least, the universe is composed of things that can be manipulated with empirical methods plus imaginary "things". Since there is no limit to what can be imagined, reality is hugely, immeasurably, larger than the corner case where the scientific method can be effectively used.
One can say "Well, that's only your imagination, that is not real". But that is denying the source of the hypotheses that drive science. Which is a dumbass way of looking at things.
Or one can recognize that all of mathematics is a set of exercises in the disciplined use of imagination. I posit that anyone capable of comprehending this post will have just constructed a mental image of the set of all mathematical exercises--- by using their imagination to do so. Without mathematics, there would be very little science and almost no technology. The disciplined use of imagination is vital to a scientist's world view.
The appropriate question is not whether empiricism or philosophy/rationalism is more useful. That is a dumbass question, since empiricism depends on the disciplined use of imaginary constructs that are developed through various philosophies. It is a dumbass question because empiricism is a subset of philosophy, and a subset that depends on members outside of itself for its continuing evolution.
I do appreciate parent post's unique contribution to the discussion. "Dumbass" is a very effective way of describing a certain kind of thinking, but it is not a word I would have introduced myself. But since it was introduced, I am quite pleased to be able to make use of it.
That link has me buffaloed.
But I think a better example of perfectly fine English that is too slippery to understand comes from Bilbo Baggins' Party speech:
I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you, half as well as you deserve.
I am a native speaker of English, and I do find the the way that sentence was constructed to be somewhat unusual, and not entirely consistent with English grammar.
It does raise a couple of interesting questions: what, exactly, is the "size of a month"? And are months on near Earth asteroids so greatly different in size than other months?
Lotus 1,2,3 was nothing more than a ripoff of VisiCalc. The only way it was "better" was that it had the support of Lotus, then IBM, behind it.
I cannot argue with that, but I do not agree. For one thing, Lotus 1.2.3 was the first major business app to offer a "student version" at an affordable price for students. That had a profound effect on the entire PC ecosystem.
Perl was the first effective glue language (capable of launching and controlling other apps) on microcomputers. It was also the first full featured language to offer regular expressions, making it possible to mine text reports for data and feed the results into spreadsheets or databases.
C was important, too, but it came from the realm of minicomputers. It was not a product of the microcomputer / personal computer revolution. It preceded that by about 10 years (AIR).
The other official backronym is Perfectly Eclectic Rubbish Lister.