I'm sure if I was the one handing out the 'free research money' I wouldn't have come up with the problem of sticky saucepans and inspired Teflon
Which was of course discovered by accident in 1938 by Roy Plunkett of the DuPont Corporation. He was using fluoridated hydrocarbons in experiments on finding alternatives to ammonia which was the most common refrigerant of the period. One of his vessels supposedly containing tetrafluoroethene registered zero pressure, it was opened and they found a waxy polymer inside.
After a lot of analysis, PTFE's properties of extreme slickness and unreactivity were put to use. The first purpose was lining the piping of a nickel refinery, but its first real use was in the uranium enrichment plant at Oak Ridge when it was used to protect metalwork from uranium hexafluoride.
As for the pans, they were invented by the French, not the Americans. Tefal introduced them to the European market in 1955. They weren't sold in the US until 1960, hence the confusion with the Space programme.
Nonsense. 1984 is a description of life under a totalitarian regime, of which there were many examples in Europe when the book was written and for some time thereafter.
It was also a satire on Orwell's time working for the BBC, (also known as Auntie - as in 'Auntie Knows Best'). Orwell loathed the way that the BBC engaged in propaganda during World War II and that it covered up Allied atrocities during the conflict. The Ministry of Truth is a not-very-subtle poke at the BBC.
Room 101 was named after the room at the BBC's Broadcasting House which was used by government agents for many years to vet broadcasts. It is currently being turned into a work of sculpture by the artist Rachel Whiteread before it is demolished as part of major building work.
Every time an emerging system/technology that could potentially endanger privacy rights here in the U.S., someone steps up and mentions that such a system/technology is already in use in Great Britain.
However, for some reason, the U.S. is still considered by many here to be the Micorsoft-of-the-World. Why is that?
Easy. Your raving lunatics have better publicity people than our ones.
After all if Ashcroft can lose an election to a dead man and still end up running America (Rumsfeld does the rest of the World), what chance do the likes of David Blunkett stand? I never thought I'd live long enough to think of Michael 'something of the night' Howard as preferable to the alternative, but somehow New Labour manages to be completely superficial and at the same time violently creepy and deeply oppressive.
New Labour has all the moral certainty of the Bush White House with none of the convictions (in all senses); it's as if central government has been given a make-over by branding experts trained by Kim Jong Il.
At the moment the big argument here boils down to 'would the Prime Minister lie?' Bearing in mind he's a: a politician, and b: has a pretty good track record of telling untruths, that's a dumb question. But anyone who questions it, (say the BBC), is being given the entire Hate Week treatment.
They've taken the worst bits of Thatcherism (and there were plenty of those) and the unpleasant bits of Labour and welded them into something so unholy that Victor von Frankenstein would be asking Igor to hold off on the brain while he thinks it through. Even the name - New Labour smacks of superficiality - give them time and it will be NuLab (now with 55% Conservatism!), or just The Party.
The more I see of Blunkett and his power-mongering control-freakery, the more I'm convinced that he sees '1984' as an inspirational work. Perhaps Blair 'n Blunkett are going to commemorate Orwell's centenary by making sure his greatest work becomes reality?
With the leadership of this country seriously questionable, the developement of these bombers may further encourage irresponsible wars/police actions/whatever.
But it will mean the US will be able to bomb the living crap out of any place in the World and still be back in time for Letterman.
I think we can only hope that thanks to Dubyanomics the entire American economy implodes. If they insist on spending billions of stupid defense (sic) ideas and if no one pays any tax, they will get a phone call from the bank.
'Hello, Mr. Cheney? This is Tracy from the IMF, we've noticed that you've exceeded your credit limit and made some pretty big purchases of late including Saudi Arabia and the 2004 election. You need to make a payment of at least one billion dollars by the end of next week and we are going to have to ask you to cut up all your cards.'
King Solomon's Mines is a fine, fine book by H Rider Haggard that hugely predates Indiana fucking Jones. that there's never been a decent version filmed is merely the fault of the studios involved. I'd recommend the book to anyone.
There would be some problems with it and a modern audience. Haggard was definitely a writer of his time, so there is a lot of talk about dark skinned savages and the like. It's much more racist than the likes of 'Tarzan' (another story which has never been done properly), so it would require some alteration for the modern era.
Why the BBC hasn't tried these stories is a good question - I was rather hoping their rather excellent 'The Lost World' would be the first of a series of classic 19th Century stories.
Naturally cuminating in a top notch costume drama version of 'The War of the Worlds'.
King Charles II of England and Scotland was taken severely ill following an apoplectic episode (probably a stroke). He was bled, had hot irons applied to his skull and force-fed a powder made from human skulls. He still died.
Leeches were used since they could remove large amounts of blood from a body (taking with it the mythical 'humours' that had made the body unwell. What wasn't recognised was that the reason they could remove so much blood was that it failed to clot around a leech bite.
Nowadays we use leeches for the anticoagulant compounds found in their saliva, not as a cure all.
I personally believe that any discovery of life larger than bacteria would lend large credence to evolutionary theory.
Sorry why? Bacteria evolve just like other organisms, in fact their rapid reproduction ensures that they are much faster at evolving into new niches.
Bacteria didn't spontaneously appear from inorganic molecules, they are orders of magnitude more complicated than the simple organic molecules from which the Solar System was formed and are the result of evolution.
To claim that multicellular life is clear evidence of evolution is a false paradigm, multicellular life evolved from pre-existing life which had in turn evolved.
And a single-cell organism can be complicated. As a trivial example, any eukaryotic cell containing mitochondria clearly shows that it is the distant descendant of two ancestral cell lines. The mitochondria carry their own DNA, separate from that of the nucleus.
Any life on Mars will be the product of evolution.
The Creationist will discount any evidence of evolution. If multicellular life was found on Mars, they would immediately raise the threshold once again.
But you are right, evidence for any life on Mars would be astounding.
I think its great these countries are aiming for space but I cant help wonder if this is some sort of Asian rerun of the pissing contest between the US and the USSR back in the day. God knows both these countries could spent the money elsewhere and while a moonbase is a nice idea, how much use is it really?
The space industry is a small part of a larger economic transformaation taking place in both countries. Essentially, both governments are shaking up their economies using Keynesian pump priming.
China and India both need high technology jobs to keep their standards of living rising (happy people are less likely to overthrow the political system). Until now, their economic growth has been based upon cheap, unskilled labour - except in the near future they will be undercut by even cheaper, less skilled workforces. If they are both to continue flourishing they need to move up the economic foodchain and start earning money from skilled jobs.
Billions of dollars are being pushed into the economy, industry is being forced to upgrade to new and demanding technologies and a new workforce is being established.
There is also an aspect of military competition. Should we be surprised? The Soviet Union, America, France and Britain all developed their space programmes on the back of military technology, as did Israel.
There is also the demand for space technology in both countries. Each is unimaginably vast with huge rural populations ill-served by traditional infrastructure. Satellites allow national communication - see India's educational television system and the Indira Ghandi National Open University of India which bring facilities to remote people.
Both countries have enormous agricultural populations who can benefit from access to meteorological data, information about pests, desertification or even the prices of their crops on the market.
Both countries are starting to think of themselves as World Powers with spheres of influence. Not only does space serve as a valuable propaganda tool, but it allows them to reach out across the World. India already regards the Indian Ocean as its own backyard, China the same for the waters off its coast, and both are increasingly turning to the Middle East as an energy source. The Chinese State Petroleum company is already a major player in the Persian Gulf, the Indians are hot on their tails. If they are to maximise their investment, they will need a supply of intelligence obtained by surveillance satellites. After all, that works for the Americans.
And I wouldn't sit here laughing about the relative backwardness of either country, that sounds awfully like the Victorian British who would have been highly amused by the thought that the squabbling German principalities would ever amount to a threat - and as for those Americans - hadn't they just had a Civil War?
That's the one, although the space.edu page is incorrect. The R16 on the pad was an ICBM test and not a Mars mission. Kruschev had just made a boast about Soviet missiles being turned out like "sausages from a machine" and wanted to show off his new missile as the centrepiece of the anniversary of the Soviet Revolution.
Not only that, but the R16 was desperately needed. The American government had been hyping 'the missile gap' when they knew there was nothing of the sort, but the Soviets felt pressurised to build up their arsenal. The R16 would be the first Soviet rocket to use a storable oxidiser (nitric acid) instead of liquid oxygen, which meant it could sit on the pad or in a silo, fully fueled and ready to go for an extended period.
The disaster occurred because the engineers had been pressurised to launch on time. The missile was rolled out to the pad, fuelled and then tests were conducted which showed a series of faults. Desperate to launch, the engineers decided to make the fixes on a fully fuelled missile.
The disaster involves the premature ignition of the second stage of the missile. Normally this was prevented from firing before first stage burn-out. At first stage burn-out, there should be a clean separation, followed by the ignition of the second stage. In the event of the first stage burning out but separation not occuring, the second stage would ignite and blow the first stage off the end of the rocket.
The rocket was sitting on the pad, with its pipes filled with fuel and oxidiser that would ignite on contact. Somehow, they got through a valve into the engine chamber, the second stage ignited, the exhaust burned through the first stage which then exploded catastrophically.
The R16 went on to become the Soviet Union's first successful ICBM, but AFAIK it was never used as a space launcher.
No offense, anyone who has half a clue is fully aware that Apple is particularly fascist and litigious regarding details of product launches leaking out.
Can you be sure that it wasn't a deliberate leak?
I mean if it had been a mistake, surely the entire Pacific Coast should have been able to hear Steve Jobs screaming for blood?
Hmmm I wonder if the G3 machines are long for this world?
It would seem odd to have three processor lines, with the 12" PowerBook now selling for the same price as the iBook was last year, it must be possible to get G4 machines into the sub £1000 market.
Since the original iMac has now gone to the great retailer in the sky, the iBook is a bit of an obvious candidate for abolition / complete revamp.
He's better than he used to be. 'Infinite Loop: How the World's Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane' by Michael S. Malone has many of his famous diatribes against pretty much anyone he met.
Great book BTW, it shows that Apple is a company that couldn't live with Steve Jobs, but certainly couldn't live without him.
A fascinating person (I'm sure psychology students in the future will have him as a case example), without his drive, Woz would never have finished the Apple ][, but his personality alienated people when Apple really needed them.
I thought it was Jobs (hint, hint PARC) who built his business on other people's innovations.
Urban legend alert!
Steve Jobs heard about the work going on at PARC and offered 100 000 Apple shares in exchange for a demonstration of their work. Some of the PARC people (notably Adele Goldberg) were very unhappy to show Apple what they were doing, but Xerox said 'do it.'
They did it.
Jobs saw the Smalltalk environment, the mouse, pop-up windows, pull-down menus and the rest. So yes, he saw the inspiration for Macintosh windowing, but the Mac interface and the Xerox interfaces are different beasts entirely.
Yes it is a heavily modified Soyuz. They got it because Soyuz is cheap, simple, tough as old boots and does the job. And the Russians needed the money - sounds like a perfect match.
Don't forget Soyuz was never just intended for one purpose (like Apollo), it is a family of spacecraft that can be configured to several purposes - including, had the Soviets been able to tame their N1 booster, fly around and orbit the Moon.
In many respects Soyuz was far superior to the Apollo capsule, so it makes a great start for a country with limited resources to get into the manned space program.
If I remember correctly, the Soviet Union is strongly suspected to have covered up deaths of astronauts.
Sorry, that was a myth put out by the Americans to make the Soviets look slipshod and backwards. All of the supposed cosmonauts who were killed before the flight of Yuri Gagarin have been found to be fictional and all of the flights since then have been accounted for.
The Soviets have lost 4 men in space and no more. They were Vladimir Komarov on Soyuz 1 on April 24, 1967. Soyuz 1 flew well before the ship was ready, it was known to be faulty, but Brezhnev insisted that it was launched to keep up the pace against the Americans. Soyuz 1 suffered a series of faults ending in her parachutes becoming entangled, she crashed to Earth killing Komorov instantly.
The second group of fatalities were Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev on-board Soyuz 11. They were the second crew of Salyut 1, the World's first space station (Skylab was second). After 23 days in orbit, Soyuz 11 returned to Earth, but a pyrotechnic malfunctioned during separation of the orbital and re-entry modules; an air valve was stuck open and the module gradually depressurised. The ship landed automatically, but the crew were found to be dead when the capsule was opened.
Binary isn't THAT efficient if you want to store information in a small space. Quaternary systems (like DNA) are more efficient space-wise.
(Simplifying wildly) DNA stores 3 base pair 'words' called codons. Each codon either codes for an amino acid (each amino acid is coded by more than one codon) - such as the sequence ATG which codes for the acid methionine; or represents a 'start gene' or 'stop gene' switch.
With three letter sequences for a codon and four possible letters for each position you end up with 64 possible codons (there are just 20 amino acids); to store the same amount in binary you would need six bases.
So DNA is actually very efficient at what it does.
But they went on to build the Comet 2, 3 and 4 and the Nimrod which is still in production and will likely be flying a hundred years after the first Comet took to the sky.
Yes I know its all a result of computer-aided design and the quest for efficiency, but don't all planes look alike these days? If they didn't put a label next to the cabin door you'd never know what you're getting on.
Are we doomed to look-alike planes from now on? No more Comets or VC10s?
Hell, even Concorde will soon be out of service - what a dull world.
Oops I just realised all those good-looking planes were British, I'm sure America has produced a good-looking airliner - ummmm... ummmm... help!:)
I refer you to the Brooklyn crash a few months after 9/11 where the tail of an Airbus plane basically fell apart...
Erm no it didn't; the tail was recovered in two pieces, the main structure of the tail and the rudder itself. What was unusual was that the rudder had cleanly separated from the tail.
The tail of that airliner passed all airworthiness checks and has been found to have exceeded its design requirements.
Flight 587 had flown into the wake turbulence of a JAL 747, the pilot followed normal procedures and tried to stabilise his aircraft using the ailerons, which is standard procedure.
When that failed, he used the tail rudder five times to add extra force to his corrections. These imposed enormous strains on the tail structure which was torn off of the aircraft.
Again, the tail did not fail because of any structural weakness, it failed because a load was imposed on the structure that lay outside of the design parameters. Such loads had never been anticipated during the design process, nor had they been experienced before this crash.
American Airlines and Airbus are still fighting over who is to blame. AA claim that Airbus withheld information about the upper limits of forces that can be applied to their airliners, Airbus say that AA did not train their crews correctly.
However, guidelines have been sent to all airlines and the operators of all types of airliner informing them of the possibility of failure of the tail during excessive rudder movements.
And remember that Airbus aren't alone in discovering unexpected behaviours in their airliners. The Boeing 737 seems to have suffered a number of crashes resulting from excessive or abberent rudder movements; notably United flight 585 in Colorado and US Air flight 427 in Pennsylvania.
Slashdot Mirror
Which was of course discovered by accident in 1938 by Roy Plunkett of the DuPont Corporation. He was using fluoridated hydrocarbons in experiments on finding alternatives to ammonia which was the most common refrigerant of the period. One of his vessels supposedly containing tetrafluoroethene registered zero pressure, it was opened and they found a waxy polymer inside.
After a lot of analysis, PTFE's properties of extreme slickness and unreactivity were put to use. The first purpose was lining the piping of a nickel refinery, but its first real use was in the uranium enrichment plant at Oak Ridge when it was used to protect metalwork from uranium hexafluoride.
As for the pans, they were invented by the French, not the Americans. Tefal introduced them to the European market in 1955. They weren't sold in the US until 1960, hence the confusion with the Space programme.
Best wishes,
Mike.
It was also a satire on Orwell's time working for the BBC, (also known as Auntie - as in 'Auntie Knows Best'). Orwell loathed the way that the BBC engaged in propaganda during World War II and that it covered up Allied atrocities during the conflict. The Ministry of Truth is a not-very-subtle poke at the BBC.
Room 101 was named after the room at the BBC's Broadcasting House which was used by government agents for many years to vet broadcasts. It is currently being turned into a work of sculpture by the artist Rachel Whiteread before it is demolished as part of major building work.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Oooh how could I forget? He's married to one as well. No doubt all the little Blairlets will turn into lawyers.
'Invasion of the Bodysnatchers' now seems so prescient.
Best wishes,
Mike.
There looks like there could be enough room under the keyboard for a suit, a change of shoes and a laptop.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Easy. Your raving lunatics have better publicity people than our ones.
After all if Ashcroft can lose an election to a dead man and still end up running America (Rumsfeld does the rest of the World), what chance do the likes of David Blunkett stand? I never thought I'd live long enough to think of Michael 'something of the night' Howard as preferable to the alternative, but somehow New Labour manages to be completely superficial and at the same time violently creepy and deeply oppressive.
New Labour has all the moral certainty of the Bush White House with none of the convictions (in all senses); it's as if central government has been given a make-over by branding experts trained by Kim Jong Il.
At the moment the big argument here boils down to 'would the Prime Minister lie?' Bearing in mind he's a: a politician, and b: has a pretty good track record of telling untruths, that's a dumb question. But anyone who questions it, (say the BBC), is being given the entire Hate Week treatment.
They've taken the worst bits of Thatcherism (and there were plenty of those) and the unpleasant bits of Labour and welded them into something so unholy that Victor von Frankenstein would be asking Igor to hold off on the brain while he thinks it through. Even the name - New Labour smacks of superficiality - give them time and it will be NuLab (now with 55% Conservatism!), or just The Party.
The more I see of Blunkett and his power-mongering control-freakery, the more I'm convinced that he sees '1984' as an inspirational work. Perhaps Blair 'n Blunkett are going to commemorate Orwell's centenary by making sure his greatest work becomes reality?
Best wishes,
Mike, Airstrip One, Oceania.
But it will mean the US will be able to bomb the living crap out of any place in the World and still be back in time for Letterman.
I think we can only hope that thanks to Dubyanomics the entire American economy implodes. If they insist on spending billions of stupid defense (sic) ideas and if no one pays any tax, they will get a phone call from the bank.
'Hello, Mr. Cheney? This is Tracy from the IMF, we've noticed that you've exceeded your credit limit and made some pretty big purchases of late including Saudi Arabia and the 2004 election. You need to make a payment of at least one billion dollars by the end of next week and we are going to have to ask you to cut up all your cards.'
Best wishes,
Mike.
There would be some problems with it and a modern audience. Haggard was definitely a writer of his time, so there is a lot of talk about dark skinned savages and the like. It's much more racist than the likes of 'Tarzan' (another story which has never been done properly), so it would require some alteration for the modern era.
Why the BBC hasn't tried these stories is a good question - I was rather hoping their rather excellent 'The Lost World' would be the first of a series of classic 19th Century stories.
Naturally cuminating in a top notch costume drama version of 'The War of the Worlds'.
Best wishes,
Mike.
King Charles II of England and Scotland was taken severely ill following an apoplectic episode (probably a stroke). He was bled, had hot irons applied to his skull and force-fed a powder made from human skulls. He still died.
Leeches were used since they could remove large amounts of blood from a body (taking with it the mythical 'humours' that had made the body unwell. What wasn't recognised was that the reason they could remove so much blood was that it failed to clot around a leech bite.
Nowadays we use leeches for the anticoagulant compounds found in their saliva, not as a cure all.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Sorry why? Bacteria evolve just like other organisms, in fact their rapid reproduction ensures that they are much faster at evolving into new niches.
Bacteria didn't spontaneously appear from inorganic molecules, they are orders of magnitude more complicated than the simple organic molecules from which the Solar System was formed and are the result of evolution.
To claim that multicellular life is clear evidence of evolution is a false paradigm, multicellular life evolved from pre-existing life which had in turn evolved.
And a single-cell organism can be complicated. As a trivial example, any eukaryotic cell containing mitochondria clearly shows that it is the distant descendant of two ancestral cell lines. The mitochondria carry their own DNA, separate from that of the nucleus.
Any life on Mars will be the product of evolution.
The Creationist will discount any evidence of evolution. If multicellular life was found on Mars, they would immediately raise the threshold once again.
But you are right, evidence for any life on Mars would be astounding.
Best wishes,
Mike.
See once again Bill Gates was right.
If only we'd all been happy with 640kb there would be far fewer places for potential buffer overflows in Microsoft applications.
But, oh no, we insisted on colour and sound and Bob - okay perhaps not that last one; each guzzling Megabytes of RAM, and look where that has led us!
Best wishes,
Mike.
The space industry is a small part of a larger economic transformaation taking place in both countries. Essentially, both governments are shaking up their economies using Keynesian pump priming.
China and India both need high technology jobs to keep their standards of living rising (happy people are less likely to overthrow the political system). Until now, their economic growth has been based upon cheap, unskilled labour - except in the near future they will be undercut by even cheaper, less skilled workforces. If they are both to continue flourishing they need to move up the economic foodchain and start earning money from skilled jobs.
Billions of dollars are being pushed into the economy, industry is being forced to upgrade to new and demanding technologies and a new workforce is being established.
There is also an aspect of military competition. Should we be surprised? The Soviet Union, America, France and Britain all developed their space programmes on the back of military technology, as did Israel.
There is also the demand for space technology in both countries. Each is unimaginably vast with huge rural populations ill-served by traditional infrastructure. Satellites allow national communication - see India's educational television system and the Indira Ghandi National Open University of India which bring facilities to remote people.
Both countries have enormous agricultural populations who can benefit from access to meteorological data, information about pests, desertification or even the prices of their crops on the market.
Both countries are starting to think of themselves as World Powers with spheres of influence. Not only does space serve as a valuable propaganda tool, but it allows them to reach out across the World. India already regards the Indian Ocean as its own backyard, China the same for the waters off its coast, and both are increasingly turning to the Middle East as an energy source. The Chinese State Petroleum company is already a major player in the Persian Gulf, the Indians are hot on their tails. If they are to maximise their investment, they will need a supply of intelligence obtained by surveillance satellites. After all, that works for the Americans.
And I wouldn't sit here laughing about the relative backwardness of either country, that sounds awfully like the Victorian British who would have been highly amused by the thought that the squabbling German principalities would ever amount to a threat - and as for those Americans - hadn't they just had a Civil War?
Best wishes,
Mike.
Not only that, but the R16 was desperately needed. The American government had been hyping 'the missile gap' when they knew there was nothing of the sort, but the Soviets felt pressurised to build up their arsenal. The R16 would be the first Soviet rocket to use a storable oxidiser (nitric acid) instead of liquid oxygen, which meant it could sit on the pad or in a silo, fully fueled and ready to go for an extended period.
The disaster occurred because the engineers had been pressurised to launch on time. The missile was rolled out to the pad, fuelled and then tests were conducted which showed a series of faults. Desperate to launch, the engineers decided to make the fixes on a fully fuelled missile.
The disaster involves the premature ignition of the second stage of the missile. Normally this was prevented from firing before first stage burn-out. At first stage burn-out, there should be a clean separation, followed by the ignition of the second stage. In the event of the first stage burning out but separation not occuring, the second stage would ignite and blow the first stage off the end of the rocket.
The rocket was sitting on the pad, with its pipes filled with fuel and oxidiser that would ignite on contact. Somehow, they got through a valve into the engine chamber, the second stage ignited, the exhaust burned through the first stage which then exploded catastrophically.
The R16 went on to become the Soviet Union's first successful ICBM, but AFAIK it was never used as a space launcher.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Can you be sure that it wasn't a deliberate leak?
I mean if it had been a mistake, surely the entire Pacific Coast should have been able to hear Steve Jobs screaming for blood?
Best wishes,
Mike.
It would seem odd to have three processor lines, with the 12" PowerBook now selling for the same price as the iBook was last year, it must be possible to get G4 machines into the sub £1000 market.
Since the original iMac has now gone to the great retailer in the sky, the iBook is a bit of an obvious candidate for abolition / complete revamp.
Best wishes,
Mike.
He's better than he used to be. 'Infinite Loop: How the World's Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane' by Michael S. Malone has many of his famous diatribes against pretty much anyone he met.
Great book BTW, it shows that Apple is a company that couldn't live with Steve Jobs, but certainly couldn't live without him.
A fascinating person (I'm sure psychology students in the future will have him as a case example), without his drive, Woz would never have finished the Apple ][, but his personality alienated people when Apple really needed them.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Steve Jobs heard about the work going on at PARC and offered 100 000 Apple shares in exchange for a demonstration of their work. Some of the PARC people (notably Adele Goldberg) were very unhappy to show Apple what they were doing, but Xerox said 'do it.'
They did it.
Jobs saw the Smalltalk environment, the mouse, pop-up windows, pull-down menus and the rest. So yes, he saw the inspiration for Macintosh windowing, but the Mac interface and the Xerox interfaces are different beasts entirely.
Oh and Xerox did very nicely out of those shares.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Don't forget Soyuz was never just intended for one purpose (like Apollo), it is a family of spacecraft that can be configured to several purposes - including, had the Soviets been able to tame their N1 booster, fly around and orbit the Moon.
In many respects Soyuz was far superior to the Apollo capsule, so it makes a great start for a country with limited resources to get into the manned space program.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Sorry, that was a myth put out by the Americans to make the Soviets look slipshod and backwards. All of the supposed cosmonauts who were killed before the flight of Yuri Gagarin have been found to be fictional and all of the flights since then have been accounted for.
The Soviets have lost 4 men in space and no more. They were Vladimir Komarov on Soyuz 1 on April 24, 1967. Soyuz 1 flew well before the ship was ready, it was known to be faulty, but Brezhnev insisted that it was launched to keep up the pace against the Americans. Soyuz 1 suffered a series of faults ending in her parachutes becoming entangled, she crashed to Earth killing Komorov instantly.
The second group of fatalities were Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev on-board Soyuz 11. They were the second crew of Salyut 1, the World's first space station (Skylab was second). After 23 days in orbit, Soyuz 11 returned to Earth, but a pyrotechnic malfunctioned during separation of the orbital and re-entry modules; an air valve was stuck open and the module gradually depressurised. The ship landed automatically, but the crew were found to be dead when the capsule was opened.
And that's it.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Binary isn't THAT efficient if you want to store information in a small space. Quaternary systems (like DNA) are more efficient space-wise.
(Simplifying wildly) DNA stores 3 base pair 'words' called codons. Each codon either codes for an amino acid (each amino acid is coded by more than one codon) - such as the sequence ATG which codes for the acid methionine; or represents a 'start gene' or 'stop gene' switch.
With three letter sequences for a codon and four possible letters for each position you end up with 64 possible codons (there are just 20 amino acids); to store the same amount in binary you would need six bases.
So DNA is actually very efficient at what it does.
Best wishes,
Mike.
The A300 isn't a fly-by-wire aircraft, the more modern A320 onwards would have prevented such an action.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Must be an Americanism, over here on the right-hand side of the Pond, Nimrod is the name of a Biblical hunter.
Best wishes,
Mike.
But they went on to build the Comet 2, 3 and 4 and the Nimrod which is still in production and will likely be flying a hundred years after the first Comet took to the sky.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Yes I know its all a result of computer-aided design and the quest for efficiency, but don't all planes look alike these days? If they didn't put a label next to the cabin door you'd never know what you're getting on.
Are we doomed to look-alike planes from now on? No more Comets or VC10s?
Hell, even Concorde will soon be out of service - what a dull world.
Oops I just realised all those good-looking planes were British, I'm sure America has produced a good-looking airliner - ummmm... ummmm... help! :)
Best wishes,
Mike.
Erm no it didn't; the tail was recovered in two pieces, the main structure of the tail and the rudder itself. What was unusual was that the rudder had cleanly separated from the tail.
The tail of that airliner passed all airworthiness checks and has been found to have exceeded its design requirements.
Flight 587 had flown into the wake turbulence of a JAL 747, the pilot followed normal procedures and tried to stabilise his aircraft using the ailerons, which is standard procedure.
When that failed, he used the tail rudder five times to add extra force to his corrections. These imposed enormous strains on the tail structure which was torn off of the aircraft.
Again, the tail did not fail because of any structural weakness, it failed because a load was imposed on the structure that lay outside of the design parameters. Such loads had never been anticipated during the design process, nor had they been experienced before this crash.
American Airlines and Airbus are still fighting over who is to blame. AA claim that Airbus withheld information about the upper limits of forces that can be applied to their airliners, Airbus say that AA did not train their crews correctly.
However, guidelines have been sent to all airlines and the operators of all types of airliner informing them of the possibility of failure of the tail during excessive rudder movements.
And remember that Airbus aren't alone in discovering unexpected behaviours in their airliners. The Boeing 737 seems to have suffered a number of crashes resulting from excessive or abberent rudder movements; notably United flight 585 in Colorado and US Air flight 427 in Pennsylvania.
Best wishes,
Mike.