Hydrolysis is an expensive way to generate hydrogen.
If you remember your chemistry, you'll recall a term called "activation energy." Activation Energy refers to the excess power needed for a reaction to take place and for hydrolysis, it's pretty high.
You have got to be kidding! The Clipper had a design flaw from the get-go. Every pound of fuel it needed to land meant 10 pounds of fuel to reach orbit. The space shuttle and x-33 come back as gliders and so don't waste precious payload space carrying landing fuel. The clipper was an inefficient design that truly deserved to die.
The fact that the x-33 had to overcome difficult design hurdles does not mean they were insurmountable - just difficult. Consider that a single stealth bomber runs $500 million and it's clear that the $1 billion for the x-33 was a shoestring budget. If you're tackling hard problems you've got to have a decent budget to succeed.
A "substantial breakthrough in materials resarch."
Wasn't that what the x-33 was engaged in...materials research with an immediate application in mind? They were trying to build a liquid helium tank out of plastic. Never been done and the second one blistered. Notice I said "second one." The first one is intact. Perhaps the x-33 was one or two revs from release.
I for one am glad to see the project continue. I've seen one of their carbon fiber spars that weighs virtually nothing and yet can withstand attempts to break it. The airspike engine is a completely different machine that eliminates the need for gimbaled exhaust structures. No gimbals mean a lighter craft. The engine was undergoing final qa testing when the money ran out.
If the Air Force can finish the project why not finish it instead of quitting and ending up with a 3/4 built craft that ends up as scrap?
Pt 1. Submarines show us what happens when civilians go on military bases. Not sure what they show us, the Navy has resumed taking VIPs on board subs. The Navy does it because they want to keep folks interested in supporting submarines. Seems to me the same strategy just might pay off for the ISS.
Pt 2. Not a tourist destination. No, but it may as well be one. There isn't a hell of lot of science taking place up there and if you look at Nasa's web site, not much of anything else except keeping the thing aloft.
Pt 3. The Russians should get out of the project. Why? If they chose to fund it by selling seats, who are you to tell them to get out of the project? Will you replace the hundreds of millions they're kicking in if they follow your advice and get out?
Pt 4. Bad and dangerous. Bad? Not sure why. Dangerous. Probably but that's Tito's call, not yours.
Nasa looks like a bunch of "my way or the highway" freaks trying to control who, and when, they let people on board. The fundamentals are they don't want Americans to hear the equivalent of the Japanese journalist saying he hates the ride. They've had astronauts puke in space and you didn't hear about it because Nasa made sure you didn't. Now they can't control what Tito says so they're damned if they'll let him go. They don't see an upside and they're scared he'll make Nasa look like fools. Only problem is, given the way they're handling Tito, they're doing a good job of looking foolish all by themselves.
Either way Nasa has lost this fight - they either cave in and let him on board or they hold their ground and look like idiots who are wasting $20 million. Maybe a letter to my congressman asking why we spend so much on Nasa when they turn down paying customers is in order. I'm sure there are more Mr. Titos would much rather ride the shuttle to the ISS.
I was looking around the site and ended up at the purchase screen. Up pops a "Certificate Expired" window telling me either their certificate is dead or my clock is mis-set. My clock is fine so what gives?
One of the finest photos NASA has is
the earth at night.
The photo shows major trade routes across all the continents. You can pick out the Silk Road that Marco Polo followed and even I-80 as it snakes from New Jersey to San Francisco. The more heavily travelled routes show up as thicker lines.
The odd thing is if you look at Las Vegas, you see a skinny, tenous tendril reaching between Vegas and LA and a much thicker pipe reaching up to Salt Lake City.
"And where did you spend your weekend Elder Smith?" "In the desert wasteland refreshing my soul..."
Perhaps. Or perhaps some terrestial process forms buckyballs and perhaps buckyballs preferentially absorb HE3. Buckyballs were only identified 10 years ago and there's a heck of lot that we don't know about them.
The other unanswered question is where is the iridium? The KT layer is loaded with iridium which was one of the signposts of an extra-terrestial delivery that ended the Cretacious. The Permian event doesn't have any iridium associated with it. Iridium dust is presumed to be abundant in space and rare on earth.
It may be that the hypothetical Permian asteroid was iridium poor and buckyball rich but it's going to take more than HE3 rich buckyballs to make a convincing case.
This was by design; CALTRANS built the high bridges when the freeway went in, even though the traffic level didn't yet justify them, intending to finish the interchange when traffic increased.
Not true. The freeway construction came to a halt when Jerry Brown appointed Adriane Gianturco as the head of Caltrans. She thought freeways were a terrible idea and suspended construction. It wasn't until Brown was kicked out of office 4 years later that it was possible to finish construction. That debacle cost California taxpayers millions. Course, inflation being what it is, the latest state sponsored debacle is going to cost us billions.
Back to hacks My favorite hack involved a Caltech student who returned to his dorm room really late one Friday night. 8 AM Saturday morning...BANG BANG BANG . "Move out of my parking spot!"
The techie goes downstairs and looks at an almost empty parking lot with his car and the secretary's whose reserved parking he had appropriated a few hours earlier. He moves the car, and then later rounds up some friends. They re-blacktop and re-stripe the parking lot making each parking spot fractionally larger. After they repaint the reserved names on the respective slots seems one obnoxious secretary lost her reserved parking.
Monday morning, the maintenance crew and secretary were trying to figure out where the missing parking spot was.
Powell and Danby, the maglev inventors, won the Franklin Prize last year for their contribution to engineering practice. During his acceptance speech, Powell outlined a variety of advantages of maglev over steel-on-steel. Hyper-speed transit in an evacuted tunnel was one of them.
The astonishing aspect of evacuated tunnel transit is the tremendous fuel savings. The train itself is only consuming energy during the 20 minutes of acceleration and decceleration - the rest of the trip is free. Of course, you have to initially evacuate the tunnel but if the tunnel is properly built, you do that once.
Transrapid is the worst maglev system you can conceive. Their system relies on attraction which changes exponentially as the magnets move closer together or further apart. That means the control circuitry has to be spot on to keep the train the correct distance from the track. Moreover, the track has to be very carefully built and can't allow for much settling.
Powell and Danby, the original inventors of maglev, have come up with enhancements to their original patents involving quadrature magnets that achieve several goals:
The magnets, unlike Transrapid's, are arranged to repel each other so the system self-stabilizes.
The quadrature windings are layed out so the magnetism within the cabin is no higher than background magnetism.
The magnets are arrayed across the entire train floor so loading isn't limited to a few outboard magnets. That means more even loading.
The even loading means very low track flexing as the train passes over which translates into very low track wear.
The trains can be configured to carry fully loaded trucks as well as people. That option which is not possible in the original design that was implemented by the Japanese, means that freight charges can make the train self-supporting. They estimate that they can carry trucks at 6 cents/ton-mile vs. 30 cents/ton-mile it costs to drive the truck on an interstate.
The best comes last...build a trans-continental tunnel and evacuate it. Accelerate the maglev train at.2 gee for 10 minutes, coast for 25, decelerate at.2 gee for 10 minutes. You've used the equivalent of 20 gallons of gasoline and moved 1000 people from San Francisco to New York in 45 minutes. If you use $7 million/mile to cost the tunnel (about what the Swedes just paid for >40km tunnel) you're looking at about $14 Billion to build the tunnel shell. That's less than 1/3rd the cost of the initial estimates for the National Missile Defense Rumsfield wants to build and we end up with something the country can actually use.
The trans-continental tunnel option is a future that simply isn't available for steel wheels on steel track trains and blows away any envisioned air transport.
If you were to ask Steve Bobker and he was honest,
he'd have to tell you Crystal Quest. We published
it in November 1987 for the Mac and it went over the top in sales after MacUser published a seven page feature article on it the following February. It was no accident that the February issue was the slimest MacUser ever published - the whole staff was busy playing CQ.
There were a lot of aspects that made the game fun but for most players, a notable feature was the reward you got when you cleared a level. You scooted down a little tunnel and heard what sounded like a woman having an orgasm. The "woman" was Patrick Buckland, the game's author, using a sound editor to kick his voice up an octave.
Who is Steve Bobker? He was the MacUser Editor-in-Chief who lost his job shortly after the February issue came out.
(nobody had the foresight to sign long-term deals, locking in prices).
PG&E was prohibited by the PUC from signing long term contracts because there was a period where spot prices tended to be lower than long-term prices. The PUC never took into account that they were looking at an aberation in pricing and that the situation might change.
Another factor taking plants offline is they've reached their pollution allowance for the year.
The Christmas lights aren't blameless. The State Christmas Tree in Sacramento eats 25KW. I live in a neighborhood where a lot of my neighbor's electricity bill jumps between 20-100% The homeowner's association sponsors an annual christmas competition and more than a few of my neighbors go all out in an attempt to win a dinner for two. Just suggesting that maybe they hold off till 7 before they light up is considered Grinchiness.
"We're between the dog and the fire hydrant." - Florida Senator King
Cisco wants to build a
huge campus south of San Jose but doesn't want
to be neighbors with a proposed power plant in the same area. Cisco and San Jose would much rather export the pollution to places like Moss Landing on the Monterey Bay than deal with the fact that electricity requires power plants.
The really ironic part about Cisco fighting the proposed power plant is Cisco produces products that raise the baseline power requirements - Cisco's products are almost *always* on.
With neighbors like Cisco who needs Betty and Goober?
Re:I find the indirect approach much more satisfyi
on
Cube Farm Ordnance?
·
· Score: 1
A co-worker routinely came in late and would sneak in. Once he was settled, he would pretend he'd been there all along. One day, we set up a series of booby traps for him using the party poppers that explode when you pull them apart.
Back door opened...BAM!
Pulled his chair out from under his desk...BAM!
Came storming into my empty office (I was the obvious culprit...)BAM!
Didn't break him of the habit of sloughing off but it's been fun ever since talking about how things tend to explode around him..
While he was the director of the Sierra Club from 1952 to 1969, he succeeded in blocking construction of several major dams in national monuments and parks, most notably the Grand Canyon.
One of the last things he did was to cast a vote for Ralph Nader, one activist for another.
A few years ago, Bruce Lehman, the then head of the USPO, blew into San Jose and held "hearings" on whether the US Patent Office should grant software patents. It was a farcical hearing - developer after developer denigrated software patents.
Then the corporate attorneys would speak. I specifically remember Borland's corp attorney saying what a wonderful thing software patents would be. Towards the end of the "hearing", a developer pointed out the fact that the overwhelming majority of developers present had testified against the idea and Lehman, an attorney, mused about how interesting that was. Damn lot of good it did - he knew a great welfare-for-attorneys scam when he saw one.
They really shouldn't call them "hearings" - "ventings" would be a better term since the outcomes tend to be pre-determined.
Software patents - did I mention I'm agin em?"
Why I'm not voting for Gore or Bush
on
Should You Vote?
·
· Score: 1
I'm not voting for Gore because I don't trust him. He has lied, and been caught at it, more times than I can remember. Never mind the spin doctors trying to revise what he meant when he lies - just read exactly what he says and then compare that to the truth. For my taste, his tendency to lie outweighs my ability to trust him.
Bush doesn't pass because he's stupid enough to believe that we can spend $50-200 billion on a missle defense and get something useful in return. Moreover, he thinks it's ok to abrogate the ABM treaty we initiated in 1972. Back then, we were smart enough to realize that a missle defense is pointless. You either overwhelm it like Eisenhower overwhelmed Hitler's Atlantic Wall or you go around it like Hitler circumvented the Maginot line. This country doesn't need another arms race and yet Bush is stupid enough to think our abrogating the ABM treaty won't start one.
So in a nutshell, the two main candidates this year are not getting my vote. I will vote this year, but it'll be for one of the minority candidates.
Gore's claim on an interview on CNN aired Tuesday, Mar 11, 1999:
"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
DARPA got going in 1969, email was a reality by the early 70's. Gore was 21 years old at the time, too young to be in Congress.
We have the Democrats pushing an habitual liar, and the Republicans pushing a guy who thinks starting another missle arms race is a good idea. Nevermind a "Rogue Nation" would use an attack similar to the one on the USS Cole rather than a "Look at me! I just shot that nuclear missle at you!!!" kind of attack.
Jeese... We've reached such a nadir- I'm voting for Nader. At least he's honest.
Slashdot Mirror
If you remember your chemistry, you'll recall a term called "activation energy." Activation Energy refers to the excess power needed for a reaction to take place and for hydrolysis, it's pretty high.
- A mig, not a spy plane.
- The pilot was defecting - he wasn't forced to land.
Next time, get your facts straight.The fact that the x-33 had to overcome difficult design hurdles does not mean they were insurmountable - just difficult. Consider that a single stealth bomber runs $500 million and it's clear that the $1 billion for the x-33 was a shoestring budget. If you're tackling hard problems you've got to have a decent budget to succeed.
Wasn't that what the x-33 was engaged in...materials research with an immediate application in mind? They were trying to build a liquid helium tank out of plastic. Never been done and the second one blistered. Notice I said "second one." The first one is intact. Perhaps the x-33 was one or two revs from release.
I for one am glad to see the project continue. I've seen one of their carbon fiber spars that weighs virtually nothing and yet can withstand attempts to break it. The airspike engine is a completely different machine that eliminates the need for gimbaled exhaust structures. No gimbals mean a lighter craft. The engine was undergoing final qa testing when the money ran out.
If the Air Force can finish the project why not finish it instead of quitting and ending up with a 3/4 built craft that ends up as scrap?
-
Pt 1. Submarines show us what happens when civilians go on military bases. Not sure what they show us, the Navy has resumed taking VIPs on board subs. The Navy does it because they want to keep folks interested in supporting submarines. Seems to me the same strategy just might pay off for the ISS.
-
Pt 2. Not a tourist destination. No, but it may as well be one. There isn't a hell of lot of science taking place up there and if you look at Nasa's web site, not much of anything else except keeping the thing aloft.
-
Pt 3. The Russians should get out of the project. Why? If they chose to fund it by selling seats, who are you to tell them to get out of the project? Will you replace the hundreds of millions they're kicking in if they follow your advice and get out?
-
Pt 4. Bad and dangerous. Bad? Not sure why. Dangerous. Probably but that's Tito's call, not yours.
Nasa looks like a bunch of "my way or the highway" freaks trying to control who, and when, they let people on board. The fundamentals are they don't want Americans to hear the equivalent of the Japanese journalist saying he hates the ride. They've had astronauts puke in space and you didn't hear about it because Nasa made sure you didn't. Now they can't control what Tito says so they're damned if they'll let him go. They don't see an upside and they're scared he'll make Nasa look like fools. Only problem is, given the way they're handling Tito, they're doing a good job of looking foolish all by themselves.Either way Nasa has lost this fight - they either cave in and let him on board or they hold their ground and look like idiots who are wasting $20 million. Maybe a letter to my congressman asking why we spend so much on Nasa when they turn down paying customers is in order. I'm sure there are more Mr. Titos would much rather ride the shuttle to the ISS.
I was looking around the site and ended up at the purchase screen. Up pops a "Certificate Expired" window telling me either their certificate is dead or my clock is mis-set. My clock is fine so what gives?
The odd thing is if you look at Las Vegas, you see a skinny, tenous tendril reaching between Vegas and LA and a much thicker pipe reaching up to Salt Lake City.
"And where did you spend your weekend Elder Smith?"
"In the desert wasteland refreshing my soul..."
The other unanswered question is where is the iridium? The KT layer is loaded with iridium which was one of the signposts of an extra-terrestial delivery that ended the Cretacious. The Permian event doesn't have any iridium associated with it. Iridium dust is presumed to be abundant in space and rare on earth.
It may be that the hypothetical Permian asteroid was iridium poor and buckyball rich but it's going to take more than HE3 rich buckyballs to make a convincing case.
Not true. The freeway construction came to a halt when Jerry Brown appointed Adriane Gianturco as the head of Caltrans. She thought freeways were a terrible idea and suspended construction. It wasn't until Brown was kicked out of office 4 years later that it was possible to finish construction. That debacle cost California taxpayers millions. Course, inflation being what it is, the latest state sponsored debacle is going to cost us billions.
Back to hacks My favorite hack involved a Caltech student who returned to his dorm room really late one Friday night. 8 AM Saturday morning ...BANG BANG BANG . "Move out of my parking spot!"
The techie goes downstairs and looks at an almost empty parking lot with his car and the secretary's whose reserved parking he had appropriated a few hours earlier. He moves the car, and then later rounds up some friends. They re-blacktop and re-stripe the parking lot making each parking spot fractionally larger. After they repaint the reserved names on the respective slots seems one obnoxious secretary lost her reserved parking.
Monday morning, the maintenance crew and secretary were trying to figure out where the missing parking spot was.
The astonishing aspect of evacuated tunnel transit is the tremendous fuel savings. The train itself is only consuming energy during the 20 minutes of acceleration and decceleration - the rest of the trip is free. Of course, you have to initially evacuate the tunnel but if the tunnel is properly built, you do that once.
Powell and Danby, the original inventors of maglev, have come up with enhancements to their original patents involving quadrature magnets that achieve several goals:
- The magnets, unlike Transrapid's, are arranged to repel each other so the system self-stabilizes.
- The quadrature windings are layed out so the magnetism within the cabin is no higher than background magnetism.
- The magnets are arrayed across the entire train floor so loading isn't limited to a few outboard magnets. That means more even loading.
- The even loading means very low track flexing as the train passes over which translates into very low track wear.
- The trains can be configured to carry fully loaded trucks as well as people. That option which is not possible in the original design that was implemented by the Japanese, means that freight charges can make the train self-supporting. They estimate that they can carry trucks at 6 cents/ton-mile vs. 30 cents/ton-mile it costs to drive the truck on an interstate.
- The best comes last...build a trans-continental tunnel and evacuate it. Accelerate the maglev train at
.2 gee for 10 minutes, coast for 25, decelerate at .2 gee for 10 minutes. You've used the equivalent of 20 gallons of gasoline and moved 1000 people from San Francisco to New York in 45 minutes. If you use $7 million/mile to cost the tunnel (about what the Swedes just paid for >40km tunnel) you're looking at about $14 Billion to build the tunnel shell. That's less than 1/3rd the cost of the initial estimates for the National Missile Defense Rumsfield wants to build and we end up with something the country can actually use.
The trans-continental tunnel option is a future that simply isn't available for steel wheels on steel track trains and blows away any envisioned air transport.There were a lot of aspects that made the game fun but for most players, a notable feature was the reward you got when you cleared a level. You scooted down a little tunnel and heard what sounded like a woman having an orgasm. The "woman" was Patrick Buckland, the game's author, using a sound editor to kick his voice up an octave.
Who is Steve Bobker? He was the MacUser Editor-in-Chief who lost his job shortly after the February issue came out.
PG&E was prohibited by the PUC from signing long term contracts because there was a period where spot prices tended to be lower than long-term prices. The PUC never took into account that they were looking at an aberation in pricing and that the situation might change.
Another factor taking plants offline is they've reached their pollution allowance for the year.
The Christmas lights aren't blameless. The State Christmas Tree in Sacramento eats 25KW. I live in a neighborhood where a lot of my neighbor's electricity bill jumps between 20-100% The homeowner's association sponsors an annual christmas competition and more than a few of my neighbors go all out in an attempt to win a dinner for two. Just suggesting that maybe they hold off till 7 before they light up is considered Grinchiness.
"We're between the dog and the fire hydrant." - Florida Senator King
Cisco wants to build a huge campus south of San Jose but doesn't want to be neighbors with a proposed power plant in the same area. Cisco and San Jose would much rather export the pollution to places like Moss Landing on the Monterey Bay than deal with the fact that electricity requires power plants.
The really ironic part about Cisco fighting the proposed power plant is Cisco produces products that raise the baseline power requirements - Cisco's products are almost *always* on.
With neighbors like Cisco who needs Betty and Goober?
Back door opened ...BAM!
Pulled his chair out from under his desk...BAM!
Came storming into my empty office (I was the obvious culprit...)BAM!
Didn't break him of the habit of sloughing off but it's been fun ever since talking about how things tend to explode around him..
One of the last things he did was to cast a vote for Ralph Nader, one activist for another.
Then the corporate attorneys would speak. I specifically remember Borland's corp attorney saying what a wonderful thing software patents would be. Towards the end of the "hearing", a developer pointed out the fact that the overwhelming majority of developers present had testified against the idea and Lehman, an attorney, mused about how interesting that was. Damn lot of good it did - he knew a great welfare-for-attorneys scam when he saw one.
They really shouldn't call them "hearings" - "ventings" would be a better term since the outcomes tend to be pre-determined.
Software patents - did I mention I'm agin em?"
Bush doesn't pass because he's stupid enough to believe that we can spend $50-200 billion on a missle defense and get something useful in return. Moreover, he thinks it's ok to abrogate the ABM treaty we initiated in 1972. Back then, we were smart enough to realize that a missle defense is pointless. You either overwhelm it like Eisenhower overwhelmed Hitler's Atlantic Wall or you go around it like Hitler circumvented the Maginot line. This country doesn't need another arms race and yet Bush is stupid enough to think our abrogating the ABM treaty won't start one.
So in a nutshell, the two main candidates this year are not getting my vote. I will vote this year, but it'll be for one of the minority candidates.
"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
DARPA got going in 1969, email was a reality by the early 70's. Gore was 21 years old at the time, too young to be in Congress.
We have the Democrats pushing an habitual liar, and the Republicans pushing a guy who thinks starting another missle arms race is a good idea. Nevermind a "Rogue Nation" would use an attack similar to the one on the USS Cole rather than a "Look at me! I just shot that nuclear missle at you!!!" kind of attack.
Jeese... We've reached such a nadir- I'm voting for Nader. At least he's honest.