don't be foolish, there's nothing at all that has to be slow and 'overrated' about electric cars, the one on that page proves it, it's very fast with extremely quick acceleration. electric motors are fantastic, they have very high torque at low rpms and large working rpm range. by the way where excatly do you think the energy from fuel cell/hydrogen/hybrid etc. cars is going to go? oh yeah, an electric motor. duh. the fact that a car is electric says nothing of its power source.
Electric cars don't NEED to be ugly, slow and have tiny ranges. Take the tZero for instance, 100 mile range, top speed of ~100 mph, 0-60 in 4 seconds; handily beating Ferraris and Porsches in an 1/8 mile. and it's only moderately hideous looking! The price, however, is entirely hideous.
I've recently decided to uninstall SETI and leave the search after staying with it from the begining in '99 because one small graph in an article of Scientific American has kept sticking in my mind. Around 2000-2001 SciAm published an article that included this graph of SETI's search results (negative, natch) for the galaxy.
Even back then you can see that a large portion of the interesting parameter space has been excluded; it's been 3 years and not a peep. SETI's negative result is very, very important but it feels like it's time to move on.
I don't think it was ever claimed that Voyager has reached the heliopause. They claimed it has reached the inside of the termination shock boundary which is expected to take a couple of years to traverse. After which, the craft will be considered to be inside the heliosheath which itself may take several years to pass, where it will only then reach the healiopause and transfer into true interstellar space.
For those looking for a more in depth study of the pioneer missions to the outer planets, this book published in the late 70's (now fully online) is truly a hidden gem from NASA's site. It details every last design aspect of the spacecraft in extremely high detail. We've certianly come a long way in ~30 years from grainy washed out Pioneer photopolarimeter images to super high resolution ultrasharp CCD images from Cassini.
Judging from previous releases from the imaging team(CICLOPS, they seem to be a very, very competent bunch. During the Jupiter flyby 4 years ago, they used the spare seconds between scheduled observations to take extra images of Jupiter in true color which they then stitched together later to form the highest detailed full planet image of Jupiter ever taken. With Cassini actually passing through a gap in the inner rings during its orbit insertion it's hard to imaging the spectacular images that await us.
Photographic indeed. Take a look at the DISR page that details the optics and detectors that are aboard the Huygens probe. There are even some test images taken with the flight spare that give an idea of the images to be returned from the surface of Titan (sans palm trees perhaps). Huygens is expected to relay ~175 MBytes of data through Cassini and back to Earth for a nominal mission, this is almost 500 TIMES the total data returned from the Galileo atmospheric probe!! There are many other experimental devices attached to the bottom of the probe which are beautifully elegant in design that will tell us about just what it hits when it gets to the surface ice...liquid hydrocarbons...etc. The surface science package also contains a piezoelectric transducer to determine the depth of the ocean it may land in using sonar pulses. It can measure the height of waves on the surface with its accelerometers and the density of the liquid with a refractometer to determine the liquid's index of refraction. The amount and quality of information retured from the dim frigid surface of this strange world hundreds of millions of miles away will be positively awe inspiring.
Incidentally, is there something unusual about the type of engine they used on this thing? Maybe I'm just not very familliar with the sound jet engines make, but if you listen close to the clip of the plane in air, the pitch(frequency) of the engine noise seems to decrease when its flying toward the viewer and increase when flying away. The reverse of what you'd expect for the doppler shift of a moving sound source!! Weird. Why is this?
Some lame-o actually did this!! look at this kid's photo (second one down) of the project which he clearly marked "uncool" http://isef.syndetics.net/projects/. The person clearly didn't even understand simple oxidation/reduction potentials of metals. How dreadfully embarrassing when juxtaposed with >a href=http://isef.syndetics.net/projects/C%20-%20La st%20Years%20Winner.JPG>this.
Well, its surface temperature is 95 Kelvins for starters(almost 300F bleow zero or ~20C above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen) there can be no liquid water on the surface. Also I don't think it is believed to have the great geothermal energy like the moons of Jupiter do because of tidal effects, so no energy there either. Finally, the sunlight it recieves is ~100 times weaker than what we get here on earth, with the amount that can actually get through the atmosphere and down to the surface much less than even this tiny amount. Life needs energy, lots of it, and there is precious little on Titan.
It is very difficult to make high quality reflective mirrors in the IR >99% reflective let alone something you could stick on the sides of a missile out in a dirty battlefield and still have reflectivities in the 9x% range. The laser is likely in the megawatt range so even if you had 99% reflectivity you would still be absorbing 10 kilowatts of energy. The reflective properties of any substance will be destroyed very quickly under those high heat conditions, exponentially increasing the absorbed incident energy and making the surfave even more absorbant. I would guess no material could handle even a few seconds of exposure to the lasers' full power. Remember the laser is not intended to explode the rocket, just to ruin its aerodynamic surfaces so it can't be maneuvered and consequently breaks up due to structural stresses.
oops!! mea culpa! That site is rather preposterous, sorry! I merely looked for a site showing an isotope separation facility and didn't read the rest of the site. Here is something right more respectable I think.
"Isotope bombs, which are not even feasible at this point and require a pretty massive technological base "
I do believe isotope bombs are quite feasible indeed. It is the isoMER bomb which I posted a story on that is now in question. Nuclear isotopes contain varying numbers of neutrons with identical numbers of protons in the nucleus. Nuclear ISOMERS contain the same of both but have excitiations of the spins of the nucleons' constituant neutrons and protons.
That sounds right, the energy available from the reaction is NOT more powerfull than nuclear bombs. It is intermediate between conventional and nuclear explosives.
I apologise for only mentioning the negative bomb making aspects of the story in my submission but I didn't want to drag it on too long for fear it would be rejected. The articles I linked to note the possibility of it being used in a kind of highly localized, intense cancer treatment among other things. However, I also think this will never pan out at all, in light of the recent negative results of the national labs and Collins fumbling around trying to explain them away. He now actually has a 'Galileo complex' saying things like "You start talking about expert panels, that's exactly what they did to Bruno, this is the same thing." referring to the monk who was burned to death for claming a sun centered solar system (well...sun centered universe to them).
"By the way, why do people always play the "you don't know what you're talking about" card? Do you honestly think you're the only one who has ever read a physics paper? Or are you so arrogant that you think you're the only one who can really understand one?"
Arrogance is willfull ignorance in the face of overwhelming evidence. Arrogance is a statement like yours, which after a perfectly reasoned and lucid point by point explanation by jpflip, you merely wave off as all so much 'saving face' by scientists, as you rediculously purport. Let me ask, have you considered that people always "play the you don't know what you're talking about card" with you because, perhaps you are a pompous know it all who realy dosen't know what he's talking about!!?
It's worth noting that there are no theories (so far as I've heard anyway) that expressly forbid superconductivity at room temperature. The BCS theory of conventional superconductors forbids Tc's beyond about ~50K if I recall correctly, but high temp. superconductors don't follow BCS and have much higher Tc's, who knows if there's another class of electron superconductors with even higher Tc's. In fact it is thought that certain parts of the insides of neutron stars have superconducting protons floating around in a sea of superfluid neutrons at many millions of Kelvin!!
Yes....and...? MgB2 is a standard low temp. superconductor with a Tc of only ~40 Kelvin....except possibly for digital apps where HTS sucked big time
Whaaa? HTS (high temp. superconductors) are perfectly suited to "digital apps" in many situations. A company called STI makes HT superconducting filters for cell phone antennas in order to increase data bandwidth and and decrease service dropout by making their recievers more sensitive. And Josephson Junctions make up some of the fastest digital IC's in existance at many hundreds of gigahertz.
Yeah! And what if the same crackpots who brought you homeopathy, a flat earth, creationism, phlogiston theory, alchemy and vitalism turn out to be right about the existance of magical dragons?-say it ain't so!!
To think that mere crackpottery is indicitive of actual evidence is a laughable lapse of judgement.
They also laughed at Bozo the clown, to paraphrase Carl Sagan.
Slashdot Mirror
don't be foolish, there's nothing at all that has to be slow and 'overrated' about electric cars, the one on that page proves it, it's very fast with extremely quick acceleration. electric motors are fantastic, they have very high torque at low rpms and large working rpm range. by the way where excatly do you think the energy from fuel cell/hydrogen/hybrid etc. cars is going to go? oh yeah, an electric motor. duh. the fact that a car is electric says nothing of its power source.
right-o forgot about that article. they haven't updated thier site in a while.
Electric cars don't NEED to be ugly, slow and have tiny ranges. Take the tZero for instance, 100 mile range, top speed of ~100 mph, 0-60 in 4 seconds; handily beating Ferraris and Porsches in an 1/8 mile. and it's only moderately hideous looking! The price, however, is entirely hideous.
I've recently decided to uninstall SETI and leave the search after staying with it from the begining in '99 because one small graph in an article of Scientific American has kept sticking in my mind. Around 2000-2001 SciAm published an article that included this graph of SETI's search results (negative, natch) for the galaxy.
Even back then you can see that a large portion of the interesting parameter space has been excluded; it's been 3 years and not a peep. SETI's negative result is very, very important but it feels like it's time to move on.
I don't think it was ever claimed that Voyager has reached the heliopause. They claimed it has reached the inside of the termination shock boundary which is expected to take a couple of years to traverse. After which, the craft will be considered to be inside the heliosheath which itself may take several years to pass, where it will only then reach the healiopause and transfer into true interstellar space.
For those looking for a more in depth study of the pioneer missions to the outer planets, this book published in the late 70's (now fully online) is truly a hidden gem from NASA's site. It details every last design aspect of the spacecraft in extremely high detail. We've certianly come a long way in ~30 years from grainy washed out Pioneer photopolarimeter images to super high resolution ultrasharp CCD images from Cassini.
Judging from previous releases from the imaging team(CICLOPS, they seem to be a very, very competent bunch. During the Jupiter flyby 4 years ago, they used the spare seconds between scheduled observations to take extra images of Jupiter in true color which they then stitched together later to form the highest detailed full planet image of Jupiter ever taken. With Cassini actually passing through a gap in the inner rings during its orbit insertion it's hard to imaging the spectacular images that await us.
Photographic indeed. Take a look at the DISR page that details the optics and detectors that are aboard the Huygens probe. There are even some test images taken with the flight spare that give an idea of the images to be returned from the surface of Titan (sans palm trees perhaps). Huygens is expected to relay ~175 MBytes of data through Cassini and back to Earth for a nominal mission, this is almost 500 TIMES the total data returned from the Galileo atmospheric probe!! There are many other experimental devices attached to the bottom of the probe which are beautifully elegant in design that will tell us about just what it hits when it gets to the surface ice...liquid hydrocarbons...etc. The surface science package also contains a piezoelectric transducer to determine the depth of the ocean it may land in using sonar pulses. It can measure the height of waves on the surface with its accelerometers and the density of the liquid with a refractometer to determine the liquid's index of refraction. The amount and quality of information retured from the dim frigid surface of this strange world hundreds of millions of miles away will be positively awe inspiring.
Incidentally, is there something unusual about the type of engine they used on this thing? Maybe I'm just not very familliar with the sound jet engines make, but if you listen close to the clip of the plane in air, the pitch(frequency) of the engine noise seems to decrease when its flying toward the viewer and increase when flying away. The reverse of what you'd expect for the doppler shift of a moving sound source!! Weird. Why is this?
whoops here's the proper link here
Some lame-o actually did this!! look at this kid's photo (second one down) of the project which he clearly marked "uncool" http://isef.syndetics.net/projects/. The person clearly didn't even understand simple oxidation/reduction potentials of metals. How dreadfully embarrassing when juxtaposed with >a href=http://isef.syndetics.net/projects/C%20-%20La st%20Years%20Winner.JPG>this.
Just straight up and down. In other words they made a sounding rocket. huzzah. welcome to the 1940's.
Sorry, but it's Sulfur. Even the IUPAC agrees. And the Royal Society of Chemistry uses it! You better start using the f word too!
Well, its surface temperature is 95 Kelvins for starters(almost 300F bleow zero or ~20C above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen) there can be no liquid water on the surface. Also I don't think it is believed to have the great geothermal energy like the moons of Jupiter do because of tidal effects, so no energy there either. Finally, the sunlight it recieves is ~100 times weaker than what we get here on earth, with the amount that can actually get through the atmosphere and down to the surface much less than even this tiny amount. Life needs energy, lots of it, and there is precious little on Titan.
It is very difficult to make high quality reflective mirrors in the IR >99% reflective let alone something you could stick on the sides of a missile out in a dirty battlefield and still have reflectivities in the 9x% range. The laser is likely in the megawatt range so even if you had 99% reflectivity you would still be absorbing 10 kilowatts of energy. The reflective properties of any substance will be destroyed very quickly under those high heat conditions, exponentially increasing the absorbed incident energy and making the surfave even more absorbant. I would guess no material could handle even a few seconds of exposure to the lasers' full power. Remember the laser is not intended to explode the rocket, just to ruin its aerodynamic surfaces so it can't be maneuvered and consequently breaks up due to structural stresses.
oops!! mea culpa! That site is rather preposterous, sorry! I merely looked for a site showing an isotope separation facility and didn't read the rest of the site. Here is something right more respectable I think.
"Isotope bombs, which are not even feasible at this point and require a pretty massive technological base "
I do believe isotope bombs are quite feasible indeed. It is the isoMER bomb which I posted a story on that is now in question. Nuclear isotopes contain varying numbers of neutrons with identical numbers of protons in the nucleus. Nuclear ISOMERS contain the same of both but have excitiations of the spins of the nucleons' constituant neutrons and protons.
That sounds right, the energy available from the reaction is NOT more powerfull than nuclear bombs. It is intermediate between conventional and nuclear explosives.
I apologise for only mentioning the negative bomb making aspects of the story in my submission but I didn't want to drag it on too long for fear it would be rejected. The articles I linked to note the possibility of it being used in a kind of highly localized, intense cancer treatment among other things. However, I also think this will never pan out at all, in light of the recent negative results of the national labs and Collins fumbling around trying to explain them away. He now actually has a 'Galileo complex' saying things like "You start talking about expert panels, that's exactly what they did to Bruno, this is the same thing." referring to the monk who was burned to death for claming a sun centered solar system (well...sun centered universe to them).
"By the way, why do people always play the "you don't know what you're talking about" card? Do you honestly think you're the only one who has ever read a physics paper? Or are you so arrogant that you think you're the only one who can really understand one?"
Arrogance is willfull ignorance in the face of overwhelming evidence. Arrogance is a statement like yours, which after a perfectly reasoned and lucid point by point explanation by jpflip, you merely wave off as all so much 'saving face' by scientists, as you rediculously purport. Let me ask, have you considered that people always "play the you don't know what you're talking about card" with you because, perhaps you are a pompous know it all who realy dosen't know what he's talking about!!?
OK then, that clears things up considerably. :)
It's worth noting that there are no theories (so far as I've heard anyway) that expressly forbid superconductivity at room temperature. The BCS theory of conventional superconductors forbids Tc's beyond about ~50K if I recall correctly, but high temp. superconductors don't follow BCS and have much higher Tc's, who knows if there's another class of electron superconductors with even higher Tc's. In fact it is thought that certain parts of the insides of neutron stars have superconducting protons floating around in a sea of superfluid neutrons at many millions of Kelvin!!
Pardon, but wtf are you talking about?
...except possibly for digital apps where HTS sucked big time
Search for MgB2...
Yes....and...? MgB2 is a standard low temp. superconductor with a Tc of only ~40 Kelvin.
Whaaa? HTS (high temp. superconductors) are perfectly suited to "digital apps" in many situations. A company called STI makes HT superconducting filters for cell phone antennas in order to increase data bandwidth and and decrease service dropout by making their recievers more sensitive. And Josephson Junctions make up some of the fastest digital IC's in existance at many hundreds of gigahertz.
And I actually used to work in SCE...
Am I the only one who has no idea what this is?
Yeah! And what if the same crackpots who brought you homeopathy, a flat earth, creationism, phlogiston theory, alchemy and vitalism turn out to be right about the existance of magical dragons?-say it ain't so!!
To think that mere crackpottery is indicitive of actual evidence is a laughable lapse of judgement.
They also laughed at Bozo the clown, to paraphrase Carl Sagan.
From 1882? I don't think so.
Think again. We do have photos of it. A movie has even been made.