I suspect that was the sentiment among those who opposed the feds subsidizing loans to bring electricity to those bumpkins in the rural areas in '36. See Rural Electrification Act of 1936.
The states used to have a lot more autonomy to run their business without interference by the federal government, but some of them screwed that up by letting their majority populations run over their minorities in contrast to the equal protections to all guaranteed by the federal constitution. The feds basically had to invade the South again in the 50's and 60's to finish the job started by the Civil War of 1861 to 1865 to get those states to recognize that the Constitution applied to everyone. Some say that went too far, but living in the South for the last few decades (and born there too, so any other natives can STFU if they don't like it), I'm not so sure.
"Obama... shut-down shuttle operations" -- that's a lie or damn near to it. Obama allowed shuttle operations to be shut down as per the plan for that established by the Bush administration in 2004. By the time Obama took office the shuttle program was winding down. Obama did cancel most of the bloated, overpriced and under funded Constellation program but that was because it was obvious that Constellation wasn't doing anything besides funnelling $$ billions to Morton-Thiokal, Boeing and Lockheed-Martin with almost nothing to show for it.
The people that really care about fuel quality -- the hot rodders -- like ethanol. The following quote is about E85 (85% ethanol) -- "When it comes to using E85 I can’t tell you enough how nice it is to tune for cars with this fuel. Burn temperatures are lower, initial octane rating is much higher than gasoline at ~105, and it’s not uncommon at all to gain 40bhp+ by using E85 alone with no other changes aside from tuning." This is from a professional tuner's article on a popular Volvo site (http://www.matthewsvolvosite.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=54435). Both ethanol and methanol are very high octane fuels which burn extremely well in piston engines. They don't have as much energy per gallon as gasoline but for power output in an engine tuned for them they are better.
"Excep that HCFC turns out to be more of a problem http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2007/September/25090702.asp [rsc.org]" So where in the article you linked does it say that HCFCs are more of a problem than CFCs? All I could find was the following, "They replaced the older and even more ozone-damaging chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the 1990s, but were never meant to be permanent substitutes." No matter what happens with the HCFCs, it seems we are better off without the CFCs. Going to HCFCs seems to have at least bought us more time to implement truly benign substitutes.
"CFCs were replaced with hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) and other alternative solvents with minimal costs. And the problem was economically solved for the most part. " -- Not if you were to believe the wailing and crying at the time the CFC phaseouts were being discussed. It was going to be the end of the civilized world because there were "no substitutes for CFCs". We'd all lose our air conditioners and refrigerators, leading to general collapse. Exactly the same arguments were made (probably by the same people) when the phaseout of leaded gasoline was started -- "we'd have to give up the internal combustion engine", "the environuts were forcing civilization back to postindustrial times!", "Oh, the humanity!". Both of those phaseouts were conducted with minimal suffering as I recall and civilization did not collapse. I realize that fossil fuels are a bigger issue than CFCs and leaded gasoline were, but the alarmists who are crying about the economic costs of change have cried wolf at least twice now in my remembrance, they have lost credibility now because of it.
The new telescope seemed sort of "porky" when I noticed its genesis at the time. The old telescope rusted out and fell over. Money was allocated for the new one really quickly because of (in my opinion) the pull of the two very senior senators from WV, especially Robert Byrd. That doesn't mean there wasn't scientific merit, just that with Byrd as senator there was no doubt that lots of millions of $$ would be sent there to rebuild. Which brings up a point I haven't seen yet -- this observatory must have brought hundreds of millions of federal dollars to WV over the years, dollars which that state couldn't easily do without. I would think that the residents nearby would appreciate that and not complain or make it hard for the site to operate. Those federal research $$ (what few there will be in the future) could easily end up going elsewhere. Robert Byrd isn't senator anymore.
Holy (bleep), did you see the landing sequence of Curiosity? -- that's dancing near the fire! The reason it worked is because of all of those "bureaucratic tests", and there is now a laboratory on Mars which no other nation or agency could have put there. Kudos to the Chinese for the Chang'e-2 mission, but NASA is still so far ahead of anyone else in robot exploration of the solar system, measured by current, operating, successful missions (Cassini, Messenger, Curiosity, New Horizons, etc, etc), that there is really no comparison.
:) you're right about that, but kg is buried pretty deep in there and given the volt's further dependence on m, A, and s you can hardly argue that kg or volt have any special significance. That just shows that electronvolt is arbitrary, too, because of the 'volt' in it. The electron charge does seem to be a non-arbitrary constant/value of nature so that part of ev is OK.
E= mc2 certainly does have an arbitrary constant embedded within it -- if expressed in metric units the speed of light is an arbitrary constant. For this reason most high energy physics uses so called 'natural units' where the speed of light = 1 and units of mass are the same as units of energy (i.e. the electron rest mass is 511 kilo-electronvolts). And what is an electronvolt of energy? -- it's the energy which one electron-charge gains accelerated through one volt. Notice that the only metric unit referenced in this usual measure of mass is the volt; no kilograms or units derived from kilograms. So once you get deep into the 'hardest' of the hard sciences you don't find metric units used for much -- that says something about the arbitrariness of metric units (and their more exactly defined successors, the SI units).
I've read about the missing 'a' controversy for years and was watching live on TV when Neil made his step and statement, but the big news for me from this story is that Neil and his brother were playing Risk a few months before the mission. So was I, how cool is that!
It was the "no money, honey" Americans and NASA which put the Curiosity rover on Mars last August and have the New Horizons spacecraft on trajectory for a 2015 flyby of Pluto. You could have made your same rant ten years ago, yet the missions which no one else could do keep getting done by NASA/USA.
They used to do that a lot. Mariner 3 and 4 to Mars in 1965 -- Mariner 3 failed but Mariner 4 was a success. Mariner 6 and 7 to Mars in 1969 -- both successes. Mariner 8 and 9 to Mars in 1971 -- Mariner 8 failed, Mariner 9 succeeded. Pioneer 10 and 11 to Jupiter. Voyager 1 and 2. Viking 1 and 2. It used to be almost standard procedure and saved a few missions where one of the pair failed, usually on launch. Cassini to Saturn was supposed to have a fraternal twin on a comet/asteroid mission, CRAF, but CRAF was cancelled to save money. Lately they don't do it, to save a few bucks and maybe justify it by saying the launch vehicles are more reliable.
Since China is the world's largest IMPORTER of coal, there is no cheap Chinese coal on the world market. I didn't even have to RTFA to get that from the summary. The coal industry in the US is hurting because cheap natural gas is displacing it (free market at work, but Murray Energy blames it on Obama). Natural gas outside of the North American market is not (yet) so cheap so it is not pressuring coal outside N. America.
" good chunk of the oil, coal and farmland" -- which the red county inhabitants will gladly trade away cheaply to get the precursors for their meth labs.
It is unfair to compare NASA of the '60s to the agency since then. NASA in the '60s had practically a blank check for a few years. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo were part of the Cold War and got military style commitments from the populace and the government. Even with that, Apollo was a flukey and unlikely thing -- before he died Kennedy had gotten cold feet about the dollar cost of his moon goal and was considering asking the Russians to "join together" in going to the moon. Kennedy's assassination made Apollo politically untouchable for just long enough to finish the project. Notice that NASA did not set the moon goal -- it was set by Kennedy and that was only because he needed a goal ambitious enough that the US had a good chance to overtake the Russians' space lead and beat them to it. And most Americans at the time were more concerned with "beating the Russians" than the "noble goals" of space exploration. Give NASA a '60's style goal, budget, and national priority and we will be on Mars in 10-15 years, but I don't see the confluence of events which created Apollo in the '60s ever happening again.
You hit on my main concern in your last paragraph -- taxpayers subsidizing the owners of the geosynch satellites. If there is one space activity which private industry has figured out how to make a profit on it's geosynchronous satellites -- if refueling them is a great idea then the owners of the satellites can invest in developing the technology to do it. Let NASA spend its money going to Mars, etc.
You are totally correct on your statements. I relayed the story in my first post because I had read it a long time ago in an Air and Space Smithsonian magazine and it seemed plausible ("probably", as I posted, is too strong). To an aviation buff, it is interesting whether it is likely that XF-86 really did exceed Mach 1 that day, even if it did, it was not going to go any faster as the X-1 did. The record, of course, goes to Yeager and the X-1. Whichever aircraft did exceed Mach 1 first is immaterial to the subsequent development of aviation. Different aircraft with different missions, both did quite well. And neither was unique -- each had real competitors on their heels.
You are right, you cannot trust airspeed indicators which were not designed for trans or supersonic flight. However, there is no debate that the F-86 could go supersonic (in a dive) so this story is plausible. There a several accounts in a quick Google search of F-86 pilots claiming supersonic flight. One account states that,"One entire training flight in the F-86L was devoted to supersonic flight." (http://sabre-pilots.org/classics/v83mach.htm). So the aircraft was easily capable, just depends on whether Welch pushed it on that first flight or not.
There is a well established legend (story, rumor?) that Yeager's supersonic flight was beaten by a couple of weeks by the F-86 prototype doing flight testing. The pilot, George Welch, was a test pilot for North American aviation and was doing tests including high speed dives before the X-1's supersonic flight. The aircraft was not instrumented to prove it at the time, but later it was conclusively shown that the F-86 would go supersonic in dives. Supposedly the Air Force hushed it all up at the time. Fascinating note in aviation history -- http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/history/q0113.shtml.
More accurately, the American governmental structure has failed in this age of computer generated gerrymandering and microtargeted "news" networks and sites. The voters hear only what reinforces their exiting biases and elect representatives to resist the "evil" of the other side, not compromise. The House can pass fully partisan bills with no cooperation from the minority party so it appears to function, but since the legislation passed in the House can't be passed in the Senate then the House's efforts are only for show. If the House passed more bi-partisan bills, then they may have a chance in the Senate. The Senate has its problems from arcane rules, most glaringly that a minority (and sometimes a single Senator) can block any progress at all. This is all exacerbated by the "winner take all" type of elections the US has where a winner of an election by 50.1% can govern like he got a mandate -- the poster child for this was the first term of GW Bush, who won election with fewer total votes than the loser but governed like he had got 80% of the vote -- his VP famously said, "Elections have consequences". There is no incentive for any lawmaker to compromise any more. The federal system is totally broken. Interestingly, California may have found a way out of this disaster with their new primary system which rewards centrists, we'll see...
Don't know if this contradicts your statement much, but the first US space launches (uncrewed and crewed) were pretty simple affairs. Both (Explorer 1 and Mercury -Redstone 3) used the Redstone IRBM as the basis of the launch vehicle. Since the Redstone was a field deployable ballistic missile its launch support was minimal, not much more than a launch ring to sit on according to a bio of Von Braun I just read. The first Saturns (Saturn I) didn't have much either. Check out the picture of the first one launched (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_I). The two stage Saturn I's had nearly the same payload capability as the Falcon 9. The later Saturns and the Shuttle had a lot of ground support, I'll admit.
The original poster was AC but appears to be American -- so, if it is really as bad a you say then emigrate, there are about 10^9 people in the world who would like to take your place, or try voting for at least the lesser of evils. And for the foreigners who decry American influence around the world -- get off your butts and create a counterweight to American power -- I'm talking to you, Europeans; Europe is richer and more populous than the US -- get together, get your affairs in order, and get busy, instead of whining. If you don't like the status quo there are paths to change, crying about it isn't one of them.
Dang, now I have to go review some GR stuff to go any further. When you get deep into GR, either on cosmological distances or strong gravity fields things get badly non-intuitive. In this particular case I think we will run into the problem of what exactly is meant by "areas of space receding from each other at faster than c". I'll leave with this one question -- if you postulate two objects separating from each other at faster than c due to the cosmological distance between them, and further assert that they will be able to "observe" each other (send a light or other signal), what is the observed doppler shift of that signal when received? Appreciated the discussion.
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I suspect that was the sentiment among those who opposed the feds subsidizing loans to bring electricity to those bumpkins in the rural areas in '36. See Rural Electrification Act of 1936.
The states used to have a lot more autonomy to run their business without interference by the federal government, but some of them screwed that up by letting their majority populations run over their minorities in contrast to the equal protections to all guaranteed by the federal constitution. The feds basically had to invade the South again in the 50's and 60's to finish the job started by the Civil War of 1861 to 1865 to get those states to recognize that the Constitution applied to everyone. Some say that went too far, but living in the South for the last few decades (and born there too, so any other natives can STFU if they don't like it), I'm not so sure.
"Obama ... shut-down shuttle operations" -- that's a lie or damn near to it. Obama allowed shuttle operations to be shut down as per the plan for that established by the Bush administration in 2004. By the time Obama took office the shuttle program was winding down. Obama did cancel most of the bloated, overpriced and under funded Constellation program but that was because it was obvious that Constellation wasn't doing anything besides funnelling $$ billions to Morton-Thiokal, Boeing and Lockheed-Martin with almost nothing to show for it.
The people that really care about fuel quality -- the hot rodders -- like ethanol. The following quote is about E85 (85% ethanol) -- "When it comes to using E85 I can’t tell you enough how nice it is to tune for cars with this fuel. Burn temperatures are lower, initial octane rating is much higher than gasoline at ~105, and it’s not uncommon at all to gain 40bhp+ by using E85 alone with no other changes aside from tuning." This is from a professional tuner's article on a popular Volvo site (http://www.matthewsvolvosite.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=54435). Both ethanol and methanol are very high octane fuels which burn extremely well in piston engines. They don't have as much energy per gallon as gasoline but for power output in an engine tuned for them they are better.
"Excep that HCFC turns out to be more of a problem
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2007/September/25090702.asp [rsc.org]"
So where in the article you linked does it say that HCFCs are more of a problem than CFCs? All I could find was the following, "They replaced the older and even more ozone-damaging chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the 1990s, but were never meant to be permanent substitutes." No matter what happens with the HCFCs, it seems we are better off without the CFCs. Going to HCFCs seems to have at least bought us more time to implement truly benign substitutes.
"CFCs were replaced with hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) and other alternative solvents with minimal costs. And the problem was economically solved for the most part. " -- Not if you were to believe the wailing and crying at the time the CFC phaseouts were being discussed. It was going to be the end of the civilized world because there were "no substitutes for CFCs". We'd all lose our air conditioners and refrigerators, leading to general collapse. Exactly the same arguments were made (probably by the same people) when the phaseout of leaded gasoline was started -- "we'd have to give up the internal combustion engine", "the environuts were forcing civilization back to postindustrial times!", "Oh, the humanity!". Both of those phaseouts were conducted with minimal suffering as I recall and civilization did not collapse. I realize that fossil fuels are a bigger issue than CFCs and leaded gasoline were, but the alarmists who are crying about the economic costs of change have cried wolf at least twice now in my remembrance, they have lost credibility now because of it.
The new telescope seemed sort of "porky" when I noticed its genesis at the time. The old telescope rusted out and fell over. Money was allocated for the new one really quickly because of (in my opinion) the pull of the two very senior senators from WV, especially Robert Byrd. That doesn't mean there wasn't scientific merit, just that with Byrd as senator there was no doubt that lots of millions of $$ would be sent there to rebuild. Which brings up a point I haven't seen yet -- this observatory must have brought hundreds of millions of federal dollars to WV over the years, dollars which that state couldn't easily do without. I would think that the residents nearby would appreciate that and not complain or make it hard for the site to operate. Those federal research $$ (what few there will be in the future) could easily end up going elsewhere. Robert Byrd isn't senator anymore.
Holy (bleep), did you see the landing sequence of Curiosity? -- that's dancing near the fire! The reason it worked is because of all of those "bureaucratic tests", and there is now a laboratory on Mars which no other nation or agency could have put there. Kudos to the Chinese for the Chang'e-2 mission, but NASA is still so far ahead of anyone else in robot exploration of the solar system, measured by current, operating, successful missions (Cassini, Messenger, Curiosity, New Horizons, etc, etc), that there is really no comparison.
:) you're right about that, but kg is buried pretty deep in there and given the volt's further dependence on m, A, and s you can hardly argue that kg or volt have any special significance. That just shows that electronvolt is arbitrary, too, because of the 'volt' in it. The electron charge does seem to be a non-arbitrary constant/value of nature so that part of ev is OK.
E= mc2 certainly does have an arbitrary constant embedded within it -- if expressed in metric units the speed of light is an arbitrary constant. For this reason most high energy physics uses so called 'natural units' where the speed of light = 1 and units of mass are the same as units of energy (i.e. the electron rest mass is 511 kilo-electronvolts). And what is an electronvolt of energy? -- it's the energy which one electron-charge gains accelerated through one volt. Notice that the only metric unit referenced in this usual measure of mass is the volt; no kilograms or units derived from kilograms. So once you get deep into the 'hardest' of the hard sciences you don't find metric units used for much -- that says something about the arbitrariness of metric units (and their more exactly defined successors, the SI units).
I've read about the missing 'a' controversy for years and was watching live on TV when Neil made his step and statement, but the big news for me from this story is that Neil and his brother were playing Risk a few months before the mission. So was I, how cool is that!
It was the "no money, honey" Americans and NASA which put the Curiosity rover on Mars last August and have the New Horizons spacecraft on trajectory for a 2015 flyby of Pluto. You could have made your same rant ten years ago, yet the missions which no one else could do keep getting done by NASA/USA.
They used to do that a lot. Mariner 3 and 4 to Mars in 1965 -- Mariner 3 failed but Mariner 4 was a success. Mariner 6 and 7 to Mars in 1969 -- both successes. Mariner 8 and 9 to Mars in 1971 -- Mariner 8 failed, Mariner 9 succeeded. Pioneer 10 and 11 to Jupiter. Voyager 1 and 2. Viking 1 and 2. It used to be almost standard procedure and saved a few missions where one of the pair failed, usually on launch. Cassini to Saturn was supposed to have a fraternal twin on a comet/asteroid mission, CRAF, but CRAF was cancelled to save money. Lately they don't do it, to save a few bucks and maybe justify it by saying the launch vehicles are more reliable.
Outside of wikipedia the distinction between base and peak is not so clearcut.
Forbes Magazine (outspoken defender of free markets) had these two articles in May of 2012:
"Shale Gas Takes On Coal To Power America's Electrical Plants", May 30, 2012
and "Why Shale Gas Is Closing Coal Plants, So Why Do The Hippies Hate Shale?", May 5, 2012
http://www.forbes.com/sites/energysource/2012/05/30/shale-gas-takes-on-coal-to-power-americas-electrical-plants/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/05/05/why-shale-gas-is-closing-coal-plants-so-why-do-the-hippies-hate-shale/
So the electric utilities in the US are substituting natural gas for coal due to price differences. I read it first in The Economist.
Since China is the world's largest IMPORTER of coal, there is no cheap Chinese coal on the world market. I didn't even have to RTFA to get that from the summary. The coal industry in the US is hurting because cheap natural gas is displacing it (free market at work, but Murray Energy blames it on Obama). Natural gas outside of the North American market is not (yet) so cheap so it is not pressuring coal outside N. America.
" good chunk of the oil, coal and farmland" -- which the red county inhabitants will gladly trade away cheaply to get the precursors for their meth labs.
It is unfair to compare NASA of the '60s to the agency since then. NASA in the '60s had practically a blank check for a few years. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo were part of the Cold War and got military style commitments from the populace and the government. Even with that, Apollo was a flukey and unlikely thing -- before he died Kennedy had gotten cold feet about the dollar cost of his moon goal and was considering asking the Russians to "join together" in going to the moon. Kennedy's assassination made Apollo politically untouchable for just long enough to finish the project. Notice that NASA did not set the moon goal -- it was set by Kennedy and that was only because he needed a goal ambitious enough that the US had a good chance to overtake the Russians' space lead and beat them to it. And most Americans at the time were more concerned with "beating the Russians" than the "noble goals" of space exploration. Give NASA a '60's style goal, budget, and national priority and we will be on Mars in 10-15 years, but I don't see the confluence of events which created Apollo in the '60s ever happening again.
You hit on my main concern in your last paragraph -- taxpayers subsidizing the owners of the geosynch satellites. If there is one space activity which private industry has figured out how to make a profit on it's geosynchronous satellites -- if refueling them is a great idea then the owners of the satellites can invest in developing the technology to do it. Let NASA spend its money going to Mars, etc.
You are totally correct on your statements. I relayed the story in my first post because I had read it a long time ago in an Air and Space Smithsonian magazine and it seemed plausible ("probably", as I posted, is too strong). To an aviation buff, it is interesting whether it is likely that XF-86 really did exceed Mach 1 that day, even if it did, it was not going to go any faster as the X-1 did. The record, of course, goes to Yeager and the X-1. Whichever aircraft did exceed Mach 1 first is immaterial to the subsequent development of aviation. Different aircraft with different missions, both did quite well. And neither was unique -- each had real competitors on their heels.
You are right, you cannot trust airspeed indicators which were not designed for trans or supersonic flight. However, there is no debate that the F-86 could go supersonic (in a dive) so this story is plausible. There a several accounts in a quick Google search of F-86 pilots claiming supersonic flight. One account states that ,"One entire training flight in the F-86L was devoted to supersonic flight." (http://sabre-pilots.org/classics/v83mach.htm). So the aircraft was easily capable, just depends on whether Welch pushed it on that first flight or not.
There is a well established legend (story, rumor?) that Yeager's supersonic flight was beaten by a couple of weeks by the F-86 prototype doing flight testing. The pilot, George Welch, was a test pilot for North American aviation and was doing tests including high speed dives before the X-1's supersonic flight. The aircraft was not instrumented to prove it at the time, but later it was conclusively shown that the F-86 would go supersonic in dives. Supposedly the Air Force hushed it all up at the time. Fascinating note in aviation history -- http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/history/q0113.shtml.
More accurately, the American governmental structure has failed in this age of computer generated gerrymandering and microtargeted "news" networks and sites. The voters hear only what reinforces their exiting biases and elect representatives to resist the "evil" of the other side, not compromise. The House can pass fully partisan bills with no cooperation from the minority party so it appears to function, but since the legislation passed in the House can't be passed in the Senate then the House's efforts are only for show. If the House passed more bi-partisan bills, then they may have a chance in the Senate. The Senate has its problems from arcane rules, most glaringly that a minority (and sometimes a single Senator) can block any progress at all. This is all exacerbated by the "winner take all" type of elections the US has where a winner of an election by 50.1% can govern like he got a mandate -- the poster child for this was the first term of GW Bush, who won election with fewer total votes than the loser but governed like he had got 80% of the vote -- his VP famously said, "Elections have consequences". There is no incentive for any lawmaker to compromise any more. The federal system is totally broken. Interestingly, California may have found a way out of this disaster with their new primary system which rewards centrists, we'll see...
Don't know if this contradicts your statement much, but the first US space launches (uncrewed and crewed) were pretty simple affairs. Both (Explorer 1 and Mercury -Redstone 3) used the Redstone IRBM as the basis of the launch vehicle. Since the Redstone was a field deployable ballistic missile its launch support was minimal, not much more than a launch ring to sit on according to a bio of Von Braun I just read. The first Saturns (Saturn I) didn't have much either. Check out the picture of the first one launched (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_I). The two stage Saturn I's had nearly the same payload capability as the Falcon 9. The later Saturns and the Shuttle had a lot of ground support, I'll admit.
The original poster was AC but appears to be American -- so, if it is really as bad a you say then emigrate, there are about 10^9 people in the world who would like to take your place, or try voting for at least the lesser of evils. And for the foreigners who decry American influence around the world -- get off your butts and create a counterweight to American power -- I'm talking to you, Europeans; Europe is richer and more populous than the US -- get together, get your affairs in order, and get busy, instead of whining. If you don't like the status quo there are paths to change, crying about it isn't one of them.
Dang, now I have to go review some GR stuff to go any further. When you get deep into GR, either on cosmological distances or strong gravity fields things get badly non-intuitive. In this particular case I think we will run into the problem of what exactly is meant by "areas of space receding from each other at faster than c". I'll leave with this one question -- if you postulate two objects separating from each other at faster than c due to the cosmological distance between them, and further assert that they will be able to "observe" each other (send a light or other signal), what is the observed doppler shift of that signal when received? Appreciated the discussion.