I think you're thinking of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. TN failed because of a wind-induced oscillation which eventually ripped the deck apart.
TN had two problems. The first was that the deck of the bridge was very narrow in relation to its width (the span was 2800 feet long, but only 39 feet wide). The second was that the engineers had made the deck very thin, partly because of the light traffic expected on the route, but also to make the bridge appear 'lighter'.
Both of these factors made the bridge extremely flexible, allowing it to twist, bounce and eventually fail.
Immediately afterwards, bridges were redesigned with much deeper decks and less extreme length-width ratios. More recent bridges have also tended to have aerodynamic decks which allow the wind to pass over them more easily.
But I must admit that my first thought was this bridge would have an insane length-width ratio and how were they going to deal with it?
Amazingly, the cable is constructed on site. First of all they send over a single strand of cable from tower to tower (an achievement in itself). Then they use a 'cable spinner' which shuttles across the bridge carrying another length of cable behind it. As the spinner moves along, it twists the new cable round the existing cable, building it up a strand at a time.
When the cable is finished its clad to protect it from corrosion.
I'd love to know who thought of it, because it is just an incredibly elegant solution.
I think he's referring to Osaka's fabulous Kansai International airport, which is not only huge, but a breathtaking piece of architecture.
Japan has a thing about megastructures and land reclamation. I was there in January and we drove across Tokyo Bay on the new Aqualine. A combination of a bridge (4.5 km long) and tunnel (9.5 km). The two meet at a huge artificial island in the middle of the bay.
Incredibly the whole thing was deserted when we were there. Very eerie, driving mile after mile and not seeing another vehicle.
It's even more surreal when you've just arrived from broken down old Blighty and you find a country full of magnificent roads that are almost empty.
Fortunately Messina is about 90km from Etna and faces the less active side of Etna.
It's in a seismically active area, but suspension bridges are pretty good at surviving 'quakes. The Japanese have enormous experience of building huge bridges and San Francisco has two of the most beautiful suspension bridges in the World, both of which are in fine shape.
You're quite right, the tides extract energy from the Moon's orbit. To compensate, the Moon is moving away from the Earth at about 4 centimetres a year.
The only major nuclear disaster in history is Chernobyl, which was not a nuclear reaction but a chemical reaction; the graphite coolant caught fire. The graphite reactor was a bad design, and all reactors today are water-cooled. Further, Chernobyl had no containment building to speak of, and was run by idiots.
Close enough for half a cigar. The cause of the explosion was hydrogen. The RMBK reactor is almost unique in that it uses a graphite moderator and a water coolant (which also acts as a moderator).
When the control rods were removed, there were more neutrons in the reactor, more power was produced. Steam formed in the water system, steam absorbs fewer neutrons than water, the reaction increased.
Eventually a coolant pipe failed, steam was sprayed on to a mixture of red hot graphite, hit uranium and hot zirconium - all of these produce hydrogen (and in the case of graphite, carbon monoxide). There was a hydrogen explosion that blew the core apart and started the graphite fire which pumped the volatile radionucleides into the atmosphere.
As for being idiots. Hmmm a tricky one. Certainly the experiment was badly designed, and they definitely did the wrong thing. But the experiments needed to be done.
The Soviet plants relied on diesel generators to provide electrical power to the pumps in the event of a powergrid failure (nuclear power plants rely on off-site power for driving their pumps), however no one knew how long it would take to start the diesels. So they did the experiment.
And there are a number of reactors that are not water-cooled. Whilst the US PWR is clearly the most common design in the World, there is a substantial generation from gas-cooled reactors. Mainly in the UK, which has the Magnox and Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors (AGR).
Magnox was designed to provide plutonium for the British Bomb (it allows on-line refuelling which ensures that the plutonium has a low percentage of Pu240) and is now being phased out. The AGRs are the mainstay of British power production, but have turned out to be economic disasters. Britain was moving to the PWR when the entire programme was cancelled because of its spiralling costs. One station was completed at Sizewell on the East Coast.
And finally, those people who are talking about reprocessing as being clean. Sorry, the British have more experience of this than anyone else, and it is a nightmare. Environmentally, you are left with huge amounts of high-level waste that needs to be stored, low-level waste is produced in enormous quantities (most of which has gone down the pipe into the Irish Sea). You produce plutonium that no one wants (MOX fuel will age reactors faster than uranium fuel) and the recycled uranium is far more expensive than fresh fuel.
If it wasn't for (Uranium) Jack Cunningham MP, a senior minister in the 1997 Labour government (who happens to have the Sellafield reprocessing plant in his constituency), Britain would probably have closed down its reprocessing operations. Now after a scandal involving faked quality control at the MOX plant, we can't sell fuel to Japanese power plants which was the justification for THORP and MOX in the first place.
Sellafield is a scandal which is poisoning the whole nuclear industry. British Nuclear Fuels Limited (inspiration for IIF in 'Edge of Darkness'*) would dearly love to sell its Westinghouse reactors around the World, but no one trusts it. Well apart from the US DoE who is employing it to clean up Hanford in Washington State.
Oh and Tony Blair, who wants to privatise the profitable bits and leave the taxpayer to clean up BNFL's mess.
Best wishes,
Mike.
* What do you mean you haven't seen it - go get it now! Trust me, it is one of the best TV programmes ever made.
It's a logical fallacy to assume that object A was once a part of object B simply because they share the same composition; in fact it's a bad idea to blindly assume object A came from B even if A is identical to an object you know came from object B!
You have a point, but the so-called Martian meteorites have been subject to a series of tests that make their origin all but certain. Their radio-date conforms to the cratering dates on Mars, their composition is in-line with Martian rocks analysed by landers, and most remarkably, gas bubbles in the rock have the same inert gas composition as readings taken by Viking.
Again the lunar meteorites have the same unique ratios of rare-Earth elements as known lunar samples.
These meteorites all come from places that have been subject to considerable geological processing - which is not the case for the vast majority of meteorites. Geological processing implies that the planets were hot and active for a long period of time, which implies large bodies. And there aren't many candidates.
Seriously, though, it does sound awfully ambitious to me, unless they know something we don't, like how to set up a self-contained environment on an alien body without constant resupply from Earth. *That's* the real rub here. Getting the ore or whatever back to Earth or up into geosynchronous or L5 orbit is child's play compared to the problem of the "Berlin airlift" that would be required to keep them alive.
Good point Steve,
And what is China planning to use to get to the Moon? Have any of the Long March rockets got escape stages? There is no sign of a Saturn-sized rocket, nor a lunar lander in their programme.
To do this in eight years would require something on the scale of the Apollo programme, and could the Chinese economy cope?
Unless of course they're planning on dusting off an N1.
In which case, let's all pray for the poor bugger on top of the rocket.
Well, they are going to the moon to build a mining station, and our national capital seems to be fleeing to off-shore tax havens with the blessings of the administration.
Mining what though? The Moon seems to be pretty dull geologically, it certainly doesn't seem to have anything worth mining that can't be mined more cheaply on Earth.
And when you start talking about the cost of sending things to the Moon (and back again), the cost of extracting materials from the oceans look positively tempting.
The only thing I can think of is Helium 3 which is the solar wind trapped in the regolith. For all those fusion reactors we don't have and probably won't ever need.
And even if the economics made sense (which they don't appear to), the whole thing could be done with robots or teleoperated machines - like the Soviet Lunokhod c.1971. Why send people?
Because they can (or will be able to).
Manned spaceflight is a pointless exercise to show a nation's technological prowess and for propaganda. The Chinese should at least be open about it.
But if they want to throw their money into the graveyard that is manned spaceflight - well good luck to them.
What isn't being made clear is that robot football is a great activity for motivating small groups of children. RoboCup Junior is intended specifically for schoolchildren, with regional, national and international competitions.
Football is a relatively familiar domain (most children have played football), encourages them to work in a group and the goals (sorry - bad pun) are clear. This is in contrast to much computer and technology teaching dealing with abstract problems which is offputting to girls and those who are less numerate/logical.
Children (and adults) identify with their robot and get much more involved than with pure software projects.
Experiments with children show that girls as well as boys enjoy the activity of building their robots and watching them compete. A number of projects have allowed children to program robot teams at a very high level - making them concentrate on strategies of winning the game and not the mechanics.
Check out the RoboCup Junior site for more details. RoboCup Junior has now added other competitions, such as line-following and dance competitions for those people who do not wish to become involved with the football.
It's great fun, we're in the early stages of organising similar events here in Milton Keynes and there is plenty of interest from local schools.
I own an XBox, a PS2 and a Dreamcast. In every market some products win, some fail - not everyone can win. The Xbox hasn't even been out a year yet and everyone is expecting its demise - I would have to give the product at least a year from now to more properly speculate what its life will be like. Only time will tell. The best we can hope for if the Xbox fails is that by some grace of god M$ gives regular users what they need to 'hack' the box. Fat chance.
The scary fact is that this could be enough to kill the machine. Bad word of mouth and ignorance did for Dreamcast. Those of us who had one loved it, but the average person, if they had even heard of Dreamcast assumed that PS2 would be a much better console - simply by virtue of being later.
Dreamcast was out on the streets while Sony issued blatantly false 'screenshots' from PS2 and hyped the emotion engine. When the games arrived, they looked much worse than Dreamcast.
People want to see the games before buying - had Sega shown just how good Soul Calibur was on Dreamcast they would have sold machines left right and centre. Instead we got army barbers...
Yet Microsoft is using the same advertising tactics as Sega. We have the 'Play More' campaign of a baby aging into middle age and then into the grave, the pubes on the bar of soap - but next to no game footage.
Of course what XBox really needs is Chu Chu Rocket. Then all of its problems are solved.
Have you been to Japan? Japanese stores are filled with goods from elsewhere. The one thing that they have in common is that they appeal to the Japanese and that they work. XBox has failed in both fields.
The Japanese launch line-up was not very inspiring, particularly compared to the stuff out on PS2 and Gamecube at the same time. The strongest title, HALO, isn't even out in Japan. XBox didn't have the all-important out-of-the-box DVD compatibility that boosted initial PS2 shipments. It simply wasn't an attractive purchase.
The second problem is that there have been glitches. The Japanese are very unforgiving of such problems. MS cocked up when they denied there was a problem, then said there was a problem - but it didn't matter and so on. They could have learned all this from Intel's handling of the Pentium bug - but MS didn't.
XBox needs Japanese content fast if it is to survive in that market. Hopefully Sega will do the job and other major coding houses will follow. But MS don't have much time to dissociate XBox from its problems.
And yes, I've been to Japan and I have an XBox. It's a nice piece of kit, but the upcoming titles aren't the most inspiring out there. I might have to get a Gamecube to supplement my gaming intake.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Of course what the article neglects to point out is that Edison did not invent the incandescent light bulb. Indeed at the time of his patent he had not even created a workable filament.
In reality the light bulb was created by Joseph Swan who had already demonstrated an incandescent bulb 10 years before Edison and patented his device more than a year before Edison's patent.
Swan was well ahead technologically. He had first tried using carbonised paper for a filament, but the best available vacuum pump could't extract enough oxygen from the bulb. Later when the pumps improved, Swan found that adsorbed oxygen on the filament continued to cause them to burn out. Additionally, exisiting materials were too irregular, with hot-spots and weaknesses. Swan turned to synthetics. He produced some of the first synthetic cellulose fibres, carbonised them and made a working filament. (I seem to recall that some of the fibres were made into lace by his wife).
The synthetic carbon filament remained the best available until the invention of the tungsten filament in the US around 1910.
Edison lost patent cases for the light bulb in both the UK and the US. In the UK, Edison was forced to co-name Swan in the Edison-Swan United Electric Light Company which made bulbs on Swan's design. In the US Edison's patents were ruled invalid as it was deemed he had based his work on that of William Sawyer.
Edison was a genius, but let's attribute his inventions correctly.
Re:Its funny our attitude about success...
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Soviet Moon Rocket
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Actually the Tu-144 went into service on internal flights to Kazakhstan. It never did Trans-Atlantic service probably because it would have required refuelling en-route thanks to some very thirsty engines.
There were apparently negotiations at one point to offer Concorde services to Japan via a refuelling stop in the Soviet Union. Simulators were built to train Concorde pilots for the route, but it all came to naught.
The remaining Tu-144s are either rotting or one has been assigned to NASA for high speed flight testing.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Re:Its funny our attitude about success...
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Soviet Moon Rocket
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Err actually it was the Tu-144 that was redesigned.
There was a long gap between the test flights and the Tu-144 appearing in the West. The reason? It was essentially rebuilt along Concorde lines.
Originally its engines were mounted in a single belly box, but they didn't provide enough differential thrust so they were moved away from the centre-line (like Concorde).
The Tu-144 was also retro-fitted with canards to help lift during take-off and landing. (These were never fitted to Concorde, but the French were very keen to find out about them. So much so, that there are allegations that a French fighter, spying on the Tu-144 was the cause of the Paris Air crash)
It still retained the double-delta wings which made it much less efficient at lower speeds than Concorde.
There was a problem in the former Soviet Union with building large engine engine chambers so they had to use a cluster of smaller engines (albeit of a very advanced design).
In fact the N1 launches clearly show that the Soviets were debugging the design bit by bit. They never had the funds to establish a fixed test platform so they had to go with live launches.
It must be remembered that the N1 was never just a Moon rocket, Korolev had always forseen it as a general purpose heavy lift rocket, only one mission would have been the Soviet Moon programme. As such it was probably a bit of a camel - not ideal for anything, but better than nothing. That there were a multitude of different designs (including ones with nuclear upper stages) did not help.
Additionally, the Soviets never spent as much on their Moon programme as the US - and then they spent much of it in competing projects, N1 was just one of at least three alternatives. We might think of the Soviet Union as a monolith, but it really had many design bureaux squabbling over money and political access. When Korolev died, the N1 was very much an unloved child and his rivals quickly moved in.
The first launch was scrubbed in mid 1968 when the booster developed cracks on the pad (this was a recurring problem with Soviet rockets), the whole stack was dismantled.
Launch 1 (February 1969) was destroyed after a complex fire. Metal particles entered a turbine on one of the engines. The turbine began to shake, weakening fuel lines and allowing fuel to burn inside the rocket. The rocket's KORD engine management system detected the fire, but incorrectly order all engines to be shut down. The rocket crashed.
The second launch (July 1969) used a modified system. The KORD was reasoned to have failed because of extreme temperatures and was moved away from the engine compartment. However this launch was even more disastrous. A metal particle (again!), possibly slag from a weld entered a pump causing an explosion and fire less than a second after launch. Again KORD detected the fire and began to shut down engines. So many engines were closed down the rocket crashed back down on to the pad, utterly destroying the facility.
This was such a profound failure that the Soviets began a massive redesign of the engines. That and the loss of the pad meant it was two years before they tried again. There were three main modifications - firstly, filters were installed on the intakes to prevent particle ingestion, secondly the KORD was redesigned to prevent unnecessary shutdowns, and thirdly, the rocket would steer away from the pad. During this time the Soviets moved away from an Apollo style Moon landing to the establishment of a lunar base.
The third launch was in June 1971. The rocket was launched successfully, but the new maneuvre caused the rocket to roll. As it accelerated, the stresses caused the N1 to go out of control. It was destroyed about 50 seconds into the flight. HOWEVER - there were no mechanical failings.
The fourth launch (November 1972) was a very near success. The rocket fired successfully and was within seven seconds of first stage separation when another failue occurred. The first stage engines were shut down in stages, immediately after the first engines were stopped there was an explosion. The rocket was destroyed from the ground. The cause of the failure was never determined.
There were plans to launch a fifth N1, but the Politburo intervened first, Vasily Mishin was removed as the head of the space programme and with him went the last champion of the N1.
In short, the Soviets knew they were dealing with a complex system and did their best to fix problems as they arose. This is what we expect of engineers. Had they been better resourced they would have done more ground testing and probably had a better history of launches.
The N1 was a better general purpose rocket than Saturn V - BUT it could never have beaten Saturn to the Moon, even if the resources had been available.
What's not been made clear is that MAGNA is a science museum with lots of hands-on exhibits. Physical robots are much more attractive to visitors than a simulation.
Perhaps one of the kids watching the robots zoom around will take some interest in AI and go on to do something more useful.
The Addison Bain theory for the burning of HINDENBURG is in no way proven. Whilst it makes a convincing case when read alone, it is less good when considered in context.
Firstly, the aluminium powder was not novel, it had been used in the dope of airships by the British in 1911 and had been included in most airships since the end of World War II - including on GRAF ZEPPELIN and all the US Navy airships. It was never linked to the destruction of any ship.
Secondly, the operators of HINDENBURG were quite familiar with the properties of the cover. The ship used heavy diesel engines which had a habit of spitting out large chunks of hot carbon that had accumulated in the exhaust. The carbon would scorch or even burn through the cover - but it never ignited.
Bain was right the ship would have burned long before she did.
At the end of the day, the peculiar characteristics of the disaster make it most likely that HINDENBURG was destroyed by sabotage. After all, it's hardly as if she was coming from a popular country and threats had been made against her in the past.
Has AltaVista UK broken any laws by advertising a service that it couldn't provide and then sending out misleading emails (that the service was available) and press releases?
If so, who do we take this to? Oftel or trading standards?
I wonder if the head of AV UK is going to jump or be pushed with the upcoming flotation on all their minds.
Best wishes,
Mike.
A Cable and Wireless Internet user who now pays NTL for the service, but isn't allowed to use NTL's unmetered access... sigh.
Slashdot Mirror
TN had two problems. The first was that the deck of the bridge was very narrow in relation to its width (the span was 2800 feet long, but only 39 feet wide). The second was that the engineers had made the deck very thin, partly because of the light traffic expected on the route, but also to make the bridge appear 'lighter'.
Both of these factors made the bridge extremely flexible, allowing it to twist, bounce and eventually fail.
Immediately afterwards, bridges were redesigned with much deeper decks and less extreme length-width ratios. More recent bridges have also tended to have aerodynamic decks which allow the wind to pass over them more easily.
But I must admit that my first thought was this bridge would have an insane length-width ratio and how were they going to deal with it?
Best wishes,
Mike.
When the cable is finished its clad to protect it from corrosion.
I'd love to know who thought of it, because it is just an incredibly elegant solution.
Anyone know?
Best wishes,
Mike.
Japan has a thing about megastructures and land reclamation. I was there in January and we drove across Tokyo Bay on the new Aqualine. A combination of a bridge (4.5 km long) and tunnel (9.5 km). The two meet at a huge artificial island in the middle of the bay.
Incredibly the whole thing was deserted when we were there. Very eerie, driving mile after mile and not seeing another vehicle.
It's even more surreal when you've just arrived from broken down old Blighty and you find a country full of magnificent roads that are almost empty.
Best wishes,
Mike.
It's in a seismically active area, but suspension bridges are pretty good at surviving 'quakes. The Japanese have enormous experience of building huge bridges and San Francisco has two of the most beautiful suspension bridges in the World, both of which are in fine shape.
Best wishes,
Mike.
You're quite right, the tides extract energy from the Moon's orbit. To compensate, the Moon is moving away from the Earth at about 4 centimetres a year.
Best wishes,Mike.
Close enough for half a cigar. The cause of the explosion was hydrogen. The RMBK reactor is almost unique in that it uses a graphite moderator and a water coolant (which also acts as a moderator).
When the control rods were removed, there were more neutrons in the reactor, more power was produced. Steam formed in the water system, steam absorbs fewer neutrons than water, the reaction increased.
Eventually a coolant pipe failed, steam was sprayed on to a mixture of red hot graphite, hit uranium and hot zirconium - all of these produce hydrogen (and in the case of graphite, carbon monoxide). There was a hydrogen explosion that blew the core apart and started the graphite fire which pumped the volatile radionucleides into the atmosphere.
As for being idiots. Hmmm a tricky one. Certainly the experiment was badly designed, and they definitely did the wrong thing. But the experiments needed to be done.
The Soviet plants relied on diesel generators to provide electrical power to the pumps in the event of a powergrid failure (nuclear power plants rely on off-site power for driving their pumps), however no one knew how long it would take to start the diesels. So they did the experiment.
And there are a number of reactors that are not water-cooled. Whilst the US PWR is clearly the most common design in the World, there is a substantial generation from gas-cooled reactors. Mainly in the UK, which has the Magnox and Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors (AGR).
Magnox was designed to provide plutonium for the British Bomb (it allows on-line refuelling which ensures that the plutonium has a low percentage of Pu240) and is now being phased out. The AGRs are the mainstay of British power production, but have turned out to be economic disasters. Britain was moving to the PWR when the entire programme was cancelled because of its spiralling costs. One station was completed at Sizewell on the East Coast.
And finally, those people who are talking about reprocessing as being clean. Sorry, the British have more experience of this than anyone else, and it is a nightmare. Environmentally, you are left with huge amounts of high-level waste that needs to be stored, low-level waste is produced in enormous quantities (most of which has gone down the pipe into the Irish Sea). You produce plutonium that no one wants (MOX fuel will age reactors faster than uranium fuel) and the recycled uranium is far more expensive than fresh fuel.
If it wasn't for (Uranium) Jack Cunningham MP, a senior minister in the 1997 Labour government (who happens to have the Sellafield reprocessing plant in his constituency), Britain would probably have closed down its reprocessing operations. Now after a scandal involving faked quality control at the MOX plant, we can't sell fuel to Japanese power plants which was the justification for THORP and MOX in the first place.
Sellafield is a scandal which is poisoning the whole nuclear industry. British Nuclear Fuels Limited (inspiration for IIF in 'Edge of Darkness'*) would dearly love to sell its Westinghouse reactors around the World, but no one trusts it. Well apart from the US DoE who is employing it to clean up Hanford in Washington State.
Oh and Tony Blair, who wants to privatise the profitable bits and leave the taxpayer to clean up BNFL's mess.
Best wishes,
Mike.
* What do you mean you haven't seen it - go get it now! Trust me, it is one of the best TV programmes ever made.
Of course the real problem with a rifle that fires 1500 RPM is keeping the soldier equipped with enough bullets!
Can I have a jetpack now?
Best wishes,
Mike.
There is an explanation of the Pioneer plaque (and it is a work of genius) at: http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/pioneer/other/plaq ue.gif
Best wishes,
Mike.
Sounds like an advance on the eMarker from Sony which lets you know the tracks played on the radio.
Nice idea, not sure if it ever made it to the UK. But I'll be first in the queue if you do make your device!
Best wishes,Mike.
Best wishes,
Mike.
You have a point, but the so-called Martian meteorites have been subject to a series of tests that make their origin all but certain. Their radio-date conforms to the cratering dates on Mars, their composition is in-line with Martian rocks analysed by landers, and most remarkably, gas bubbles in the rock have the same inert gas composition as readings taken by Viking.
Again the lunar meteorites have the same unique ratios of rare-Earth elements as known lunar samples.
These meteorites all come from places that have been subject to considerable geological processing - which is not the case for the vast majority of meteorites. Geological processing implies that the planets were hot and active for a long period of time, which implies large bodies. And there aren't many candidates.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Good point Steve,
And what is China planning to use to get to the Moon? Have any of the Long March rockets got escape stages? There is no sign of a Saturn-sized rocket, nor a lunar lander in their programme.
To do this in eight years would require something on the scale of the Apollo programme, and could the Chinese economy cope?
Unless of course they're planning on dusting off an N1.
In which case, let's all pray for the poor bugger on top of the rocket.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Mining what though? The Moon seems to be pretty dull geologically, it certainly doesn't seem to have anything worth mining that can't be mined more cheaply on Earth.
And when you start talking about the cost of sending things to the Moon (and back again), the cost of extracting materials from the oceans look positively tempting.
The only thing I can think of is Helium 3 which is the solar wind trapped in the regolith. For all those fusion reactors we don't have and probably won't ever need.
And even if the economics made sense (which they don't appear to), the whole thing could be done with robots or teleoperated machines - like the Soviet Lunokhod c.1971. Why send people?
Because they can (or will be able to).
Manned spaceflight is a pointless exercise to show a nation's technological prowess and for propaganda. The Chinese should at least be open about it.
But if they want to throw their money into the graveyard that is manned spaceflight - well good luck to them.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Football is a relatively familiar domain (most children have played football), encourages them to work in a group and the goals (sorry - bad pun) are clear. This is in contrast to much computer and technology teaching dealing with abstract problems which is offputting to girls and those who are less numerate/logical.
Children (and adults) identify with their robot and get much more involved than with pure software projects.
Experiments with children show that girls as well as boys enjoy the activity of building their robots and watching them compete. A number of projects have allowed children to program robot teams at a very high level - making them concentrate on strategies of winning the game and not the mechanics.
Check out the RoboCup Junior site for more details. RoboCup Junior has now added other competitions, such as line-following and dance competitions for those people who do not wish to become involved with the football.
It's great fun, we're in the early stages of organising similar events here in Milton Keynes and there is plenty of interest from local schools.
Best wishes,
Mike.
The scary fact is that this could be enough to kill the machine. Bad word of mouth and ignorance did for Dreamcast. Those of us who had one loved it, but the average person, if they had even heard of Dreamcast assumed that PS2 would be a much better console - simply by virtue of being later.
Dreamcast was out on the streets while Sony issued blatantly false 'screenshots' from PS2 and hyped the emotion engine. When the games arrived, they looked much worse than Dreamcast.
People want to see the games before buying - had Sega shown just how good Soul Calibur was on Dreamcast they would have sold machines left right and centre. Instead we got army barbers...
Yet Microsoft is using the same advertising tactics as Sega. We have the 'Play More' campaign of a baby aging into middle age and then into the grave, the pubes on the bar of soap - but next to no game footage.
Of course what XBox really needs is Chu Chu Rocket. Then all of its problems are solved.
Best wishes, Mike.
The Japanese launch line-up was not very inspiring, particularly compared to the stuff out on PS2 and Gamecube at the same time. The strongest title, HALO, isn't even out in Japan. XBox didn't have the all-important out-of-the-box DVD compatibility that boosted initial PS2 shipments. It simply wasn't an attractive purchase.
The second problem is that there have been glitches. The Japanese are very unforgiving of such problems. MS cocked up when they denied there was a problem, then said there was a problem - but it didn't matter and so on. They could have learned all this from Intel's handling of the Pentium bug - but MS didn't.
XBox needs Japanese content fast if it is to survive in that market. Hopefully Sega will do the job and other major coding houses will follow. But MS don't have much time to dissociate XBox from its problems.
And yes, I've been to Japan and I have an XBox. It's a nice piece of kit, but the upcoming titles aren't the most inspiring out there. I might have to get a Gamecube to supplement my gaming intake. Best wishes, Mike.
In reality the light bulb was created by Joseph Swan who had already demonstrated an incandescent bulb 10 years before Edison and patented his device more than a year before Edison's patent.
Swan was well ahead technologically. He had first tried using carbonised paper for a filament, but the best available vacuum pump could't extract enough oxygen from the bulb. Later when the pumps improved, Swan found that adsorbed oxygen on the filament continued to cause them to burn out. Additionally, exisiting materials were too irregular, with hot-spots and weaknesses. Swan turned to synthetics. He produced some of the first synthetic cellulose fibres, carbonised them and made a working filament. (I seem to recall that some of the fibres were made into lace by his wife).
The synthetic carbon filament remained the best available until the invention of the tungsten filament in the US around 1910.
Edison lost patent cases for the light bulb in both the UK and the US. In the UK, Edison was forced to co-name Swan in the Edison-Swan United Electric Light Company which made bulbs on Swan's design. In the US Edison's patents were ruled invalid as it was deemed he had based his work on that of William Sawyer.
Edison was a genius, but let's attribute his inventions correctly.
There were apparently negotiations at one point to offer Concorde services to Japan via a refuelling stop in the Soviet Union. Simulators were built to train Concorde pilots for the route, but it all came to naught.
The remaining Tu-144s are either rotting or one has been assigned to NASA for high speed flight testing.
Best wishes,
Mike.
There was a long gap between the test flights and the Tu-144 appearing in the West. The reason? It was essentially rebuilt along Concorde lines.
Originally its engines were mounted in a single belly box, but they didn't provide enough differential thrust so they were moved away from the centre-line (like Concorde).
The Tu-144 was also retro-fitted with canards to help lift during take-off and landing. (These were never fitted to Concorde, but the French were very keen to find out about them. So much so, that there are allegations that a French fighter, spying on the Tu-144 was the cause of the Paris Air crash)
It still retained the double-delta wings which made it much less efficient at lower speeds than Concorde.
Handsome plane though.
Best wishes,
Mike.
In fact the N1 launches clearly show that the Soviets were debugging the design bit by bit. They never had the funds to establish a fixed test platform so they had to go with live launches.
It must be remembered that the N1 was never just a Moon rocket, Korolev had always forseen it as a general purpose heavy lift rocket, only one mission would have been the Soviet Moon programme. As such it was probably a bit of a camel - not ideal for anything, but better than nothing. That there were a multitude of different designs (including ones with nuclear upper stages) did not help.
Additionally, the Soviets never spent as much on their Moon programme as the US - and then they spent much of it in competing projects, N1 was just one of at least three alternatives. We might think of the Soviet Union as a monolith, but it really had many design bureaux squabbling over money and political access. When Korolev died, the N1 was very much an unloved child and his rivals quickly moved in.
The first launch was scrubbed in mid 1968 when the booster developed cracks on the pad (this was a recurring problem with Soviet rockets), the whole stack was dismantled.
Launch 1 (February 1969) was destroyed after a complex fire. Metal particles entered a turbine on one of the engines. The turbine began to shake, weakening fuel lines and allowing fuel to burn inside the rocket. The rocket's KORD engine management system detected the fire, but incorrectly order all engines to be shut down. The rocket crashed.
The second launch (July 1969) used a modified system. The KORD was reasoned to have failed because of extreme temperatures and was moved away from the engine compartment. However this launch was even more disastrous. A metal particle (again!), possibly slag from a weld entered a pump causing an explosion and fire less than a second after launch. Again KORD detected the fire and began to shut down engines. So many engines were closed down the rocket crashed back down on to the pad, utterly destroying the facility.
This was such a profound failure that the Soviets began a massive redesign of the engines. That and the loss of the pad meant it was two years before they tried again. There were three main modifications - firstly, filters were installed on the intakes to prevent particle ingestion, secondly the KORD was redesigned to prevent unnecessary shutdowns, and thirdly, the rocket would steer away from the pad. During this time the Soviets moved away from an Apollo style Moon landing to the establishment of a lunar base.
The third launch was in June 1971. The rocket was launched successfully, but the new maneuvre caused the rocket to roll. As it accelerated, the stresses caused the N1 to go out of control. It was destroyed about 50 seconds into the flight. HOWEVER - there were no mechanical failings.
The fourth launch (November 1972) was a very near success. The rocket fired successfully and was within seven seconds of first stage separation when another failue occurred. The first stage engines were shut down in stages, immediately after the first engines were stopped there was an explosion. The rocket was destroyed from the ground. The cause of the failure was never determined.
There were plans to launch a fifth N1, but the Politburo intervened first, Vasily Mishin was removed as the head of the space programme and with him went the last champion of the N1.
In short, the Soviets knew they were dealing with a complex system and did their best to fix problems as they arose. This is what we expect of engineers. Had they been better resourced they would have done more ground testing and probably had a better history of launches.
The N1 was a better general purpose rocket than Saturn V - BUT it could never have beaten Saturn to the Moon, even if the resources had been available.
Best wishes,
Mike.
StratSat is from Advanced Technologies Group and will sit at 20km altitude for up to 5 years, using photovoltaics for power.
Hopefully it will be a bit more successful than the last big British airship...
Perhaps one of the kids watching the robots zoom around will take some interest in AI and go on to do something more useful.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Should read:
If Bain was right the ship would have burned long before she did.
Apologies.
Mike.
The Addison Bain theory for the burning of HINDENBURG is in no way proven. Whilst it makes a convincing case when read alone, it is less good when considered in context.
Firstly, the aluminium powder was not novel, it had been used in the dope of airships by the British in 1911 and had been included in most airships since the end of World War II - including on GRAF ZEPPELIN and all the US Navy airships. It was never linked to the destruction of any ship.
Secondly, the operators of HINDENBURG were quite familiar with the properties of the cover. The ship used heavy diesel engines which had a habit of spitting out large chunks of hot carbon that had accumulated in the exhaust. The carbon would scorch or even burn through the cover - but it never ignited.
Bain was right the ship would have burned long before she did.
At the end of the day, the peculiar characteristics of the disaster make it most likely that HINDENBURG was destroyed by sabotage. After all, it's hardly as if she was coming from a popular country and threats had been made against her in the past.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Has AltaVista UK broken any laws by advertising a service that it couldn't provide and then sending out misleading emails (that the service was available) and press releases?
If so, who do we take this to? Oftel or trading standards?
I wonder if the head of AV UK is going to jump or be pushed with the upcoming flotation on all their minds.
Best wishes,
Mike.
A Cable and Wireless Internet user who now pays NTL for the service, but isn't allowed to use NTL's unmetered access... sigh.