The "investment" he is talking about is public funding for private launch capabilities, not private space exploration. In the end, their policy ideas seem to be largely "give NASA more funding, just change a little what they do":
NASA getting out of the launch business and dedicating its budget purely to science is the ideal way to maximize science. If you're dreaming of the day where Joe Blow from Statesville Tech launches his own Cassini, you're going to be dreaming for a very, very long time. In the foreseeable future, apart from perhaps extremely limited cubesats and the like, basic interplanetary research is only going to come from entities like NASA.
That is just NASA giving money and resources to aerospace companies so that those companies can then develop overpriced launch capabilities
Overpriced? Commercial Crew has led to - after decades of stagnation - a sudden and massive drop in launch prices. How is it not something to be heralded?
Electric circuits aren't that simple. When you put a load on a battery there's a voltage drop. NiMH have much lower internal resistance than alkaline and experience much less voltage drop and are thus able to handle higher current loads much better. When you see a figure of "1.2V" or "1.5V", that's in a no-load state. A "1.3V alkaline battery" will yield a much lower voltage in almost any realistic load state than a 1.2V NiMH.
Leaks or overheating is something that would concern me. If you're compensating for reduced voltage by drawing more current then that means more ohmic heating.
How much of a problem this would be in the real world, I really don't know. I assume (or at least hope) they have limits on their product to prevent overheating.
Yes, I am. Because if people go into it expecting an 8x increase and only get a 50% increase they write terrible reviews for it everywhere and the idea spreads that it's snake oil. If they go into it expecting a 50% increase and get it, they'll be quite happy.
One shoots themselves in the foot by going too far with their claims. Often it's better to underpromise and overdeliver.
Anyway, I can think of some applications where you might get 8x, or even more. I've owned electronics which don't run on alkalines at all and require NiMH because regular alkalines suffer too much voltage drop under high peak current loads and thus you can't turn the device on at all. In such a case the battery life increase of a voltage booster could be basically "infinite", in that useful life goes from "zero" to "nonzero". I've also had electronics that work with alkalines, but just barely. In such cases you might get 8x (or 2x, or 50x... it all depends on the device).
On the other hand, if people use one of these in, say, a TV remote or flashlight, yeah, they'll be really disappointed with the 8x claim.
I can't watch a Tyson video from here. But your Nye link says:
What NASA should be: "The report, to me, is getting to an old problem of what we want to do. I believe, as a country, we want to move NASA from [being] an engineering organization to a science organization, and this is going to take years, decades. Now, through investment, we have companies emerging that are exploring space on their own and will ultimately lower the cost of access to low-Earth orbit, which will free up NASA to go to these new and exciting places.”
That's not just "certainly an improvement", that's the very thing that I think almost all of us here want to see. And this is the chief executive officer of the Planetary Society speaking. So...? Whatever Tyson said (Tyson just being a board member), you're letting that ruin your view of the Planetary Society as a whole? We can see clearly what the Planetary Society is advocating for. It's in line with what Nye calls for. So what's the problem?
I've never seen "speaking out against private space exploration" on their site. Quite to the contrary seen complaints about cuts to Commercial Crew, and a lot of excitement about what SpaceX is doing (Planetary Society blogger Jason Davis in particular has been covering it well).
It sounds like you have a gripe with Tyson, not the Planetary Society.
What are you talking about? The Planetary Society has been opposing cuts to the Commercial Crew, which is the program that helped get the Ares 1 cancelled. "Commercial Crew" can be seen as the "NASA, Get The Heck Out Of The Launch Business" program. By contrast, in all of their posts about the new budget the Planetary Society has not once said anything positive about the increase in the budget for the SLS.
The Planetary Society just wants to see space exploration and the advances in technology that make it possible. They really don't give a rat's arse who does it, although they're enough realists to recognize that NASA does, and will for the forseeable future, do the lion's share of it. And they want to see as large of a share of NASA's budget as possible go toward actual science. They're in love with missions like Galileo, Cassini, the MERs, MSL, Messenger, New Horizons, Rosetta, and on and on. Giant super-expensive rockets to launch craft to carry people around to make a big show for the cameras? Not so much.
On the subject of solar sails, does anyone know whether it'd be possible to hybridize the solar sail and mini-magnetospheric propulsion concepts? I was thinking about the concept of deploying a fine, highly reflective superconducting dust from the spacecraft and letting it expand up to the point where it begins to lose opacity, then developing the magnetic field - the concept being that superconductors get naturally pinned to magnetic field lines, so they won't just drift off, and if they have a high enough reflectivity then they'll be cold and thus hit their critical temperature needed to be in a superconducting state.
The idea is to completely lose the need for hundreds of square kilometers of structural reinforcements for the sail and to allow the sail to need no more thickness than that required to be mostly opaque rather than the thickness needed to not tear to shreds in assembly, on deployment, or due to spacecraft movements / oscillations / etc.
When I think of "reducing costs", adding a couple turbofans to something doesn't jump to mind. Even if it gives them a better mass ratio than Falcon 9, that's a second powertrain to build and maintain. And then they have to rebuild the tank and re-mate it (although it saves some transportation costs).
And on that front, do the French even buy butter by "livre"? I went on Google Images and searched for "beurre". Here's what I can read on the packages: "250g", "1kg", and "1.0kg", "250g", "250g", "1lb 464g" (but it's Canadian, not French), "250g", "250g", "2kg", "250g", "250g". Apart from the Canadian one, "livre" or "pound" is not mentioned anywhere that I see.
Children who are behind need high-quality adult guidance more than anything else.
Couldn't technology help facilitate that, potentially at lower cost? "Hello my name is Sanjay^H^H^H^H^H^HBrian and I would be glad to assist you with your maths lessons today, what seems to be the problem?"
Citation needed. I can assure you that in at least our case, that's not true. We have a word for pound - pund. Nobody refers to butter by the "pund". Recipes call for it in grams. Here's what a typical Icelandic recipe looks like. Butter is "smjör".
Oh yeah, that's another that we use that's (sort of) not metric - teaspoons! Now I have two examples:) But ours is exactly 5 ml, so it's no challenge to increase recipie sizes because you can convert straight to litres easily. We don't use standard "cups" or the like in recipes, we just use grams or ml. In fact, recipies that use cups sometimes confuse people;)
Q&A: "I always have trouble when quantities in recipes are govem ið om cups. What is one cup in grams? I've been checking out various recipe books and in one it's said that a cup is 250 grams, in another 125 grams.
(The answerer has to explain that it's a measure of volume, not mass;) He goes into the problems that when people ever do use cups here, they're generally literal "cups", as in "my grandmother's blue coffee cup", aka not formal measures, and strongly advises against doing this when publishing recipes)
2x4s, of course, aren't 2" by 4". They're approximately 1,5 by 3,5 inches. As for lengths, here in Iceland it's sold in meters. We refer to our weights in kilograms and our heights in centimeters. Butter is sold in 500 gram bars. Cans and bottles of beer are in millilitres; I don't know what they call the size of a glass at a pub because I don't drink. Anyway, it's really hard to think of things we use imperial units on. The one that comes to mind is TVs, they're in inches. I'm sure there's others - they just don't come to mind at the moment.
The British are famously not-metric (they even use miles for distance), and Canada has a reputation for only being half switched over, so you picked two of the worst examples you could. I found this map which seems to be more detailed than a simple "metric: yes or no?", although I don't know what the color codes mean (red is clearly "effectively 100% metric").
And no, people will not "use whatever they are used to". They'll use what's on the package and all of the road signs. They're not going to pull out a calculator and start running conversions. You move to a metric country, you just get used to how things "feel". You don't need to know the conversion factor for miles to kilometers, you just get used to the fact that a kilometer is basically a "short mile" and the like. You get used to "0C = freezing, 10C = jacket weather / layers, 20C = light long sleeves, 30C = short sleeves" etc. You don't run conversions, you just get used to the norms.
Did you read what I wrote? The fact that he tried to hide what he did with his money is not a crime. Your pointing this out means nothing as I made the exact same comment. But it is a simple fact that making suspicious financial transactions triggers investigations, as they should. The police can and should investigate when it looks like people are trying to launder money. And then he made false statements to the police during the investigation, which is a crime. You never have the right to lie to the police, even if you feel you've done nothing wrong.
It's his bed that he's made and he has to lie in it.
The stupid thing is all he had to do was plead the fifth. Which any lawyer would have advised him to do. But he was so concerned with trying to sweep this thing under the rug that he didn't want to do anything that might make it look like he had something to hide and decided that lying to the police was the best option.
Be careful with water. Don't get me wrong, I plan to incorporate water features into my house. But humidity has profoundly negative effects on many aspects of housing, from the walls to your furniture to your books and so forth, and a water feature with inadequate circulation is a good recipe for high humidity. In a bad case (as a plant nut I've had this happen), in a cold winter it can make its way through the ceiling and the insulation and freeze out on the roof, and then when it warms up melt back into your house.
Water can be nice, but don't skimp on the ventilation!:)
I saw a somewhat related concept that was sort of cool for the kitchen where there were large drawers with outlets. The concept was that instead of having to choose between too many appliances on the countertops, or having to get out and plug in your appliances on the countertop everytime you want to use them, you could just leave your appliances plugged in and pull them out just by opening the drawer, all ready to use.
If you want to go full-on nerdy, a pneumatic tube system can't go awry...;) Bonus points if it connects to your mailbox. Extra bonus points if there's an outlet on your roof that you can fire things from.
I'm in the early stages of building an underground steampunk cave home, and "futureproofing" is one of my design principles. I'm going with a very open floor plan, on the concept that it's easier for people to add in walls than to take out walls that were never designed to be removed (and may consequently be providing structural support). I'm not including any drywall; the exterior walls, a pozzolonic concrete, will be pressure-washed to remove the cement from the surface, exposing the aggregate. All piping / conduits will not only be visible, but shown off as part of the style (as is typical for steampunk). If someone wants to change something that they can't just feed into an existing conduit, they won't have to rip out the drywall, change what they want to change, reinstall the drywall, and then repaint. Plus, there can be no "critters" living in the crawlspace when there is no crawlspace.
Even if I never want to change the house, I want it to significantly outlive me, and whatever future owners are around may want to change things. Plus, it's kind of fun when you keep future owners in mind. For example, I plan to paint a really creepy, gigantic (meters across) blood-red sigil underneath the flooring - an inverse of the ægishjálmur (protection against all evil), pointing inwards as if to trap evil in, with some runic writing along the lines of "All May Enter, None May Leave" (hopefully my Old Icelandic is passable:) ). I hope that whoever owns the house after me and decides to redo the flooring gets a kick out of that one.;)
Wherein the person being persecuted files a malicious prosecution case. Malicious prosecution being illegal is an entirely different issue than the question of whether a person being investigated has a right to interfere with the investigation simply because they believe themselves to be innocent. And furthermore, in what way was investigating a person who appears to be laundering money "malicious prosecution"? The police are supposed to investigate reports of money laundering.
You no more have the right to interfere with an ongoing investigation than you have the right to punch the officer doing it. If you think the investigation is persecution, bring it to court. If you don't want to talk, plead the fifth. What you don't have the right to do is lie to the police who are doing their job investigating suspicious financial transactions.
... interfering with a police investigation should be legal if the person being investigated feels they've done nothing wrong? Good luck getting widespread buy-in with that concept.
1) The FBI found just cause to suspect a crime; what the subject was doing appeared to be money laundering, which - as it should - triggers an investigation. 2) They began to investigate the crime. 3) They found no crime, and thus did not prosecute for it. However, in the process, the subject deliberately interfered with the investigation and made false statements to the police, which is a crime. 4) The FBI prosecutes for the crime committed in #3.
I fail to see the problem here.
That said, I'm not surprised that Greenwald does. And I can just imagine the riot he'll throw if they ever go after him for his long-time lack of payment of the court-imposed levies concerning his tax evasion for his porn business.
Other things too, from thinking about modern birds: can we assume that theropods had a syrinx rather than a larynx? Then they would be able to have very tonally-complex sounds, including vocalizing multiple different frequencies at the same time.
I assume they had a similar lung layout? Birds have a really brilliant respiratory system. The lungs are rigid and more like tubes for the passage of air rather than storing it. On inhalation, half the air goes directly into one air sac and the other straight through the lung into a different air sac; then on exhalation the sacs reverse so that the "used" air goes straight out and the "unused" air goes through the lung on the way out. So they get fresh air moving through their lungs both on inhalation and exhalation, and they never mix fresh air with used air. This means that the oxygen content of air in their lungs is much higher, which means that the oxygen levels in their blood can be much higher. It helps sustain them during high metabolic activity such as flight; I'm sure their giant predatory ancestors made good use of that oxygen as well.
I wonder if their ancestors had a similar sort of relatively inefficient fast-through digestive system, or whether that's an adaptation their descendents have made for flight? It's known for a fact at the very least that some dinosaurs consumed rocks to aid in digestion (gizzard stones) in the same way birds consume grit. Hmm, so theropods would likely have some sort of a crop then? I mean, there is evidence that at least some theropods cared for their young. Picture a bunch of baby velociraptors reaching their heads into a parent's jaw to get a meal!
It takes no imagination to picture correspondence between the legs / feet, bird legs and feet already look positively dinosaurian.
Even the evidence of fossilized prints of rough scaly skin from some tyrranosaurids (in addition to evidence of feathers, and some completely feathered) shouldn't be a real shock because we see that in modern bird species. For example, look at the head of a bald ibis or turkey vulture.
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NASA getting out of the launch business and dedicating its budget purely to science is the ideal way to maximize science. If you're dreaming of the day where Joe Blow from Statesville Tech launches his own Cassini, you're going to be dreaming for a very, very long time. In the foreseeable future, apart from perhaps extremely limited cubesats and the like, basic interplanetary research is only going to come from entities like NASA.
Overpriced? Commercial Crew has led to - after decades of stagnation - a sudden and massive drop in launch prices. How is it not something to be heralded?
Electric circuits aren't that simple. When you put a load on a battery there's a voltage drop. NiMH have much lower internal resistance than alkaline and experience much less voltage drop and are thus able to handle higher current loads much better. When you see a figure of "1.2V" or "1.5V", that's in a no-load state. A "1.3V alkaline battery" will yield a much lower voltage in almost any realistic load state than a 1.2V NiMH.
Leaks or overheating is something that would concern me. If you're compensating for reduced voltage by drawing more current then that means more ohmic heating.
How much of a problem this would be in the real world, I really don't know. I assume (or at least hope) they have limits on their product to prevent overheating.
Yes, I am. Because if people go into it expecting an 8x increase and only get a 50% increase they write terrible reviews for it everywhere and the idea spreads that it's snake oil. If they go into it expecting a 50% increase and get it, they'll be quite happy.
One shoots themselves in the foot by going too far with their claims. Often it's better to underpromise and overdeliver.
Anyway, I can think of some applications where you might get 8x, or even more. I've owned electronics which don't run on alkalines at all and require NiMH because regular alkalines suffer too much voltage drop under high peak current loads and thus you can't turn the device on at all. In such a case the battery life increase of a voltage booster could be basically "infinite", in that useful life goes from "zero" to "nonzero". I've also had electronics that work with alkalines, but just barely. In such cases you might get 8x (or 2x, or 50x... it all depends on the device).
On the other hand, if people use one of these in, say, a TV remote or flashlight, yeah, they'll be really disappointed with the 8x claim.
I can't watch a Tyson video from here. But your Nye link says:
That's not just "certainly an improvement", that's the very thing that I think almost all of us here want to see. And this is the chief executive officer of the Planetary Society speaking. So...? Whatever Tyson said (Tyson just being a board member), you're letting that ruin your view of the Planetary Society as a whole? We can see clearly what the Planetary Society is advocating for. It's in line with what Nye calls for. So what's the problem?
I've never seen "speaking out against private space exploration" on their site. Quite to the contrary seen complaints about cuts to Commercial Crew, and a lot of excitement about what SpaceX is doing (Planetary Society blogger Jason Davis in particular has been covering it well).
It sounds like you have a gripe with Tyson, not the Planetary Society.
What are you talking about? The Planetary Society has been opposing cuts to the Commercial Crew, which is the program that helped get the Ares 1 cancelled. "Commercial Crew" can be seen as the "NASA, Get The Heck Out Of The Launch Business" program. By contrast, in all of their posts about the new budget the Planetary Society has not once said anything positive about the increase in the budget for the SLS.
The Planetary Society just wants to see space exploration and the advances in technology that make it possible. They really don't give a rat's arse who does it, although they're enough realists to recognize that NASA does, and will for the forseeable future, do the lion's share of it. And they want to see as large of a share of NASA's budget as possible go toward actual science. They're in love with missions like Galileo, Cassini, the MERs, MSL, Messenger, New Horizons, Rosetta, and on and on. Giant super-expensive rockets to launch craft to carry people around to make a big show for the cameras? Not so much.
On the subject of solar sails, does anyone know whether it'd be possible to hybridize the solar sail and mini-magnetospheric propulsion concepts? I was thinking about the concept of deploying a fine, highly reflective superconducting dust from the spacecraft and letting it expand up to the point where it begins to lose opacity, then developing the magnetic field - the concept being that superconductors get naturally pinned to magnetic field lines, so they won't just drift off, and if they have a high enough reflectivity then they'll be cold and thus hit their critical temperature needed to be in a superconducting state.
The idea is to completely lose the need for hundreds of square kilometers of structural reinforcements for the sail and to allow the sail to need no more thickness than that required to be mostly opaque rather than the thickness needed to not tear to shreds in assembly, on deployment, or due to spacecraft movements / oscillations / etc.
Of course there's a justification for SLS: jobs in congressmen's congressional districts.
Quite likely. The question is what congress will mandate has to be developed next to keep those people employed.
When I think of "reducing costs", adding a couple turbofans to something doesn't jump to mind. Even if it gives them a better mass ratio than Falcon 9, that's a second powertrain to build and maintain. And then they have to rebuild the tank and re-mate it (although it saves some transportation costs).
Might prove more economical, but I doubt it.
And on that front, do the French even buy butter by "livre"? I went on Google Images and searched for "beurre". Here's what I can read on the packages: "250g", "1kg", and "1.0kg", "250g", "250g", "1lb 464g" (but it's Canadian, not French), "250g", "250g", "2kg", "250g", "250g". Apart from the Canadian one, "livre" or "pound" is not mentioned anywhere that I see.
So apparently France is "most of Europe"?
But, based on this part:
Couldn't technology help facilitate that, potentially at lower cost? "Hello my name is Sanjay^H^H^H^H^H^HBrian and I would be glad to assist you with your maths lessons today, what seems to be the problem?"
Citation needed. I can assure you that in at least our case, that's not true. We have a word for pound - pund. Nobody refers to butter by the "pund". Recipes call for it in grams. Here's what a typical Icelandic recipe looks like. Butter is "smjör".
Oh yeah, that's another that we use that's (sort of) not metric - teaspoons! Now I have two examples :) But ours is exactly 5 ml, so it's no challenge to increase recipie sizes because you can convert straight to litres easily. We don't use standard "cups" or the like in recipes, we just use grams or ml. In fact, recipies that use cups sometimes confuse people ;)
(The answerer has to explain that it's a measure of volume, not mass ;) He goes into the problems that when people ever do use cups here, they're generally literal "cups", as in "my grandmother's blue coffee cup", aka not formal measures, and strongly advises against doing this when publishing recipes)
And my point is that while 2x4 is just a name disconnected from their actual size, so it's not a "measure" of anything.
2x4s, of course, aren't 2" by 4". They're approximately 1,5 by 3,5 inches. As for lengths, here in Iceland it's sold in meters. We refer to our weights in kilograms and our heights in centimeters. Butter is sold in 500 gram bars. Cans and bottles of beer are in millilitres; I don't know what they call the size of a glass at a pub because I don't drink. Anyway, it's really hard to think of things we use imperial units on. The one that comes to mind is TVs, they're in inches. I'm sure there's others - they just don't come to mind at the moment.
The British are famously not-metric (they even use miles for distance), and Canada has a reputation for only being half switched over, so you picked two of the worst examples you could. I found this map which seems to be more detailed than a simple "metric: yes or no?", although I don't know what the color codes mean (red is clearly "effectively 100% metric").
And no, people will not "use whatever they are used to". They'll use what's on the package and all of the road signs. They're not going to pull out a calculator and start running conversions. You move to a metric country, you just get used to how things "feel". You don't need to know the conversion factor for miles to kilometers, you just get used to the fact that a kilometer is basically a "short mile" and the like. You get used to "0C = freezing, 10C = jacket weather / layers, 20C = light long sleeves, 30C = short sleeves" etc. You don't run conversions, you just get used to the norms.
Please read what you're replying to. The crime is NOT "doing things with his own property that are not illegal". The crime is lying to the police.
Did you read what I wrote? The fact that he tried to hide what he did with his money is not a crime. Your pointing this out means nothing as I made the exact same comment. But it is a simple fact that making suspicious financial transactions triggers investigations, as they should. The police can and should investigate when it looks like people are trying to launder money. And then he made false statements to the police during the investigation, which is a crime. You never have the right to lie to the police, even if you feel you've done nothing wrong.
It's his bed that he's made and he has to lie in it.
The stupid thing is all he had to do was plead the fifth. Which any lawyer would have advised him to do. But he was so concerned with trying to sweep this thing under the rug that he didn't want to do anything that might make it look like he had something to hide and decided that lying to the police was the best option.
Be careful with water. Don't get me wrong, I plan to incorporate water features into my house. But humidity has profoundly negative effects on many aspects of housing, from the walls to your furniture to your books and so forth, and a water feature with inadequate circulation is a good recipe for high humidity. In a bad case (as a plant nut I've had this happen), in a cold winter it can make its way through the ceiling and the insulation and freeze out on the roof, and then when it warms up melt back into your house.
Water can be nice, but don't skimp on the ventilation! :)
I saw a somewhat related concept that was sort of cool for the kitchen where there were large drawers with outlets. The concept was that instead of having to choose between too many appliances on the countertops, or having to get out and plug in your appliances on the countertop everytime you want to use them, you could just leave your appliances plugged in and pull them out just by opening the drawer, all ready to use.
You'll eventually run out of ammo. If you really want to zombie-proof your house you need automatic steel shutters.
If you want to go full-on nerdy, a pneumatic tube system can't go awry... ;) Bonus points if it connects to your mailbox. Extra bonus points if there's an outlet on your roof that you can fire things from.
This.
I'm in the early stages of building an underground steampunk cave home, and "futureproofing" is one of my design principles. I'm going with a very open floor plan, on the concept that it's easier for people to add in walls than to take out walls that were never designed to be removed (and may consequently be providing structural support). I'm not including any drywall; the exterior walls, a pozzolonic concrete, will be pressure-washed to remove the cement from the surface, exposing the aggregate. All piping / conduits will not only be visible, but shown off as part of the style (as is typical for steampunk). If someone wants to change something that they can't just feed into an existing conduit, they won't have to rip out the drywall, change what they want to change, reinstall the drywall, and then repaint. Plus, there can be no "critters" living in the crawlspace when there is no crawlspace.
Even if I never want to change the house, I want it to significantly outlive me, and whatever future owners are around may want to change things. Plus, it's kind of fun when you keep future owners in mind. For example, I plan to paint a really creepy, gigantic (meters across) blood-red sigil underneath the flooring - an inverse of the ægishjálmur (protection against all evil), pointing inwards as if to trap evil in, with some runic writing along the lines of "All May Enter, None May Leave" (hopefully my Old Icelandic is passable :) ). I hope that whoever owns the house after me and decides to redo the flooring gets a kick out of that one. ;)
Wherein the person being persecuted files a malicious prosecution case. Malicious prosecution being illegal is an entirely different issue than the question of whether a person being investigated has a right to interfere with the investigation simply because they believe themselves to be innocent. And furthermore, in what way was investigating a person who appears to be laundering money "malicious prosecution"? The police are supposed to investigate reports of money laundering.
You no more have the right to interfere with an ongoing investigation than you have the right to punch the officer doing it. If you think the investigation is persecution, bring it to court. If you don't want to talk, plead the fifth. What you don't have the right to do is lie to the police who are doing their job investigating suspicious financial transactions.
... interfering with a police investigation should be legal if the person being investigated feels they've done nothing wrong? Good luck getting widespread buy-in with that concept.
1) The FBI found just cause to suspect a crime; what the subject was doing appeared to be money laundering, which - as it should - triggers an investigation. 2) They began to investigate the crime. 3) They found no crime, and thus did not prosecute for it. However, in the process, the subject deliberately interfered with the investigation and made false statements to the police, which is a crime. 4) The FBI prosecutes for the crime committed in #3.
I fail to see the problem here.
That said, I'm not surprised that Greenwald does. And I can just imagine the riot he'll throw if they ever go after him for his long-time lack of payment of the court-imposed levies concerning his tax evasion for his porn business.
Other things too, from thinking about modern birds: can we assume that theropods had a syrinx rather than a larynx? Then they would be able to have very tonally-complex sounds, including vocalizing multiple different frequencies at the same time.
I assume they had a similar lung layout? Birds have a really brilliant respiratory system. The lungs are rigid and more like tubes for the passage of air rather than storing it. On inhalation, half the air goes directly into one air sac and the other straight through the lung into a different air sac; then on exhalation the sacs reverse so that the "used" air goes straight out and the "unused" air goes through the lung on the way out. So they get fresh air moving through their lungs both on inhalation and exhalation, and they never mix fresh air with used air. This means that the oxygen content of air in their lungs is much higher, which means that the oxygen levels in their blood can be much higher. It helps sustain them during high metabolic activity such as flight; I'm sure their giant predatory ancestors made good use of that oxygen as well.
I wonder if their ancestors had a similar sort of relatively inefficient fast-through digestive system, or whether that's an adaptation their descendents have made for flight? It's known for a fact at the very least that some dinosaurs consumed rocks to aid in digestion (gizzard stones) in the same way birds consume grit. Hmm, so theropods would likely have some sort of a crop then? I mean, there is evidence that at least some theropods cared for their young. Picture a bunch of baby velociraptors reaching their heads into a parent's jaw to get a meal!
It takes no imagination to picture correspondence between the legs / feet, bird legs and feet already look positively dinosaurian.
Even the evidence of fossilized prints of rough scaly skin from some tyrranosaurids (in addition to evidence of feathers, and some completely feathered) shouldn't be a real shock because we see that in modern bird species. For example, look at the head of a bald ibis or turkey vulture.