I care little how much natural gas or coal the US uses now, or ever, and do not see it as germane to the solar vs nuclear debate we are having.
You're claiming 10k year supply of nuclear, hell I'll even let you have 100k year supply.
According to this article http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-sun-will-eventually-engulf-earth-maybe/ we have approximately 7.6 x 10^9 years of solar power available to us, which mean I win by 4 powers of magnitude.
The interesting thing about pumping more energy into a large fluid system is that it accentuates the amount of difference between the hot spots and the cold spots, making the hot spots hotter and the cold spots colder. (fsvo spot that means a moving 'lump' of fluid)
The main effect of global warming is to increase the violence and variability of the atmospheric stirring (commonly referred to as weather). Raising the temperature of 6 thousand billion tons (nb I use uk billions ie 10^12 so we're talking 6 x 10^15 here) of air by a half of a degree represents a lot of energy, that energy means more stirring, means more extremes of weather. It's hardly amazing to anyone who cares to think about it for a moment or two and who's studied a pan on the stove.
So yes, the cold winter you just experienced IS a product of global warming.
Nuclear Fission: suffers from exactly the same scarcity issues as oil/gas. The only sane fusion to do is to wrest the plutonium from the military and then dispose of it in Fast Breeders. Fisson is not necessarily a power source, we do not know the cleanup cost (in energy terms) as noone has ever successfully fully decommissioned a nuclear power plant and dealt with all the waste
1. The military hardly uses plutonium. Enriched Uranium was eventually where it's at 2. We haven't seen lots of exploration for new uranium sources because we've been running off the military stockpiles for the last 20 or so years. It's depressed the market enough that expanding mining wasn't worth it. That source is coming to an end, ergo more mining operations are starting up. 3. Even without expansion of exploration like we've seen with oil/gas, we have enough Uranium within about double the current price to last several hundred years. 4. Before price increases would make the fuel costs for a nuclear plant 'significant', IE something you'd actually see in your electricity bill, we'd be able to filter the stuff out of sea water profitably.
All this is irrelevant. Uranium, is limited in supply, even if it's a large supply. This limit means we will eventually have to stop using it and use something else. So why bother starting?
Whilst living on this planet the sun will provide us with all the energy we need if we can just work out how to harness it effectively. Save the Fissile materials for when we *really* need them, like if/when we get into deep space exploration.
5. Breeder reactors allow much more complete burn up, which means that about 80-90% of all the 'waste' we currently have sitting around can be turned into new fuel.
Yes, I know, I approve of them as a waste management tool.
I note you've not answered my accusation that we don't know if fission is a power source due to not knowing the costs of decommissioning.
Fusion: you seem to have missed my joke vOv
but a set of decent storage technologies with in-out efficiencies in the 90%s and capable of maintaining that store for a few days,
Now this I don't disagree with. They were talking about how on the radio battery prices have come down so much that using them for grid storage is actually starting to make sense.
Solar wise, they need to get the panels a couple percent more efficient and a couple percent cheaper before they make enough sense for me to bolt them to my house, but then I'm practically within shouting distance of the arctic circle. I seriously looked at them last summer.
That being said, I'm honestly trying to get my parents(in Florida) to invest in them, but the government is interfering there. Heck, I think solar car ports covering parking lots would be nifty. Solar panels(most of them) are structural enough that if you don't need a tight seal they can act as a shade/roof without an underlying layer.
Batteries are still a poor storage option due to in-out effeciencies which are at best in the 80%s, yeah some li-ion get into the 90%s but lithium isn't exactly the most common of materials.
As to your geographic comments, yeah, mankind needs to move back to the Tropics, it's where the power is. Although Iceland manages ok with geothermal.
Nuclear Fission: suffers from exactly the same scarcity issues as oil/gas. The only sane fusion to do is to wrest the plutonium from the military and then dispose of it in Fast Breeders. Fisson is not necessarily a power source, we do not know the cleanup cost (in energy terms) as noone has ever successfully fully decommissioned a nuclear power plant and dealt with all the waste
Nuclear Fusion: The best method of achieving sustainable stable fusion is to get enough Hydrogen together that it collapses under it's own mass, the resulting star will be quite hot tho so it's best to keep a safe distance ~93million miles would appear to be sufficient from my experimentation, but I rather suspect it depends on how much hydrogen you can get your "hands" on to start with.
The thing that renewable requires is not another form of generation, the sun outputs and the earth captures staggering power continually, but a set of decent storage technologies with in-out efficiencies in the 90%s and capable of maintaining that store for a few days, and maybe some others for months. We have these technologies (Pumped Hydro, Tidal Lagoon, Pumped Heat (PHES), flywheels, &c.) we just need to spend the money on the right development.
and that's why I (a member of the solar industry) will not step up an support the hogwash you only want to implement to line the pockets of the 0.0001%
Most free software projects have HORRIBLE documentation and epicly horribly defaults. The problem is that the people that know how to change these things are also too busy doing other work. Yes I do have the skills to fix many parts of matplotlib and numpy but I can also just use MATLAB and get my work done.
Which is fine if you an afford it, but from my experience matlab licenses are not cheap, I worked somewhere were we had one and they were too tight to buy another which meant that one chap got to do all his lovely matlab and the rest of us got to wait until he had the time to do it for us.
If everyone embraced FOSS then everyone could use the best software to solve their problems. The reason the OSS projects lag behind in usability is that they are not used as much.
Seeing software licensing as anything but an impediment is a sure symptom of being deeply infected with capitalism.
It is midday when the sun is dierectly overhead. We conventionally call this 12:00. Likewise at 00:00 the sun should be directly below our feet.
Before the invention of rapid transport, the train, every town run on local meridiam time so there was a 10 minute difference in time between Bristol and London http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/info/bristol-time.htm this caused significant problem with train timetabling. However that's just lazyness in my mind, there's no reason we can't have meridiam time everywhere and watches with gps to compenstate as we move east and west.
Even if we stick with Timezones, there's no reason to budge things by an hour ever. If people want to get up an hour earlier for some part of the year, they're welcome too, just leave me in bed!
SethF said:
Your kid comes to you, and says, "Dad, I want to read news:soc.support.youth.gay-lesbian-bi because I think I might be gay", and you say... --
Sure go ahead son...
what's your problem?? homophobe?? --
Sic Itur Ad Astra
www.gatrell.org
Even the link you gave says so... the first line of that says. "A 400kW variable-pitch air-turbine will shortly be installed, alongside a fixed pitch Wells turbine of similar rating" which clearly states that Well's tubines are fixed pitch and not variable.
iirc a well's turbine is one with a pitch of zero, it's blades are designed so that air flowing over it in either way creates lift in the same diretion (that lift is converted into spin by mounting it on a spindle.) If you understand Bernoulli's effect you would know that lift is caused by pressure differential over the wing due to differing path lenghts (and thus speeds) over the top and bottom of the wing, Top-long path-higher speed-lower pressure. Obviously the path length is the same regarless of which direction the air is flowing, and a zero pitch wing is one which is essentially symetrical, thus getting the maximum efficiency for either direction of airflow.
Well NASA seem to be being sensible on this one.
Now if only we could get some more money for them (and other worldwide space agencies). How about siphoning off some of that Defense money??
Surely it'd be more advantagous to explorer near space thoroughly and remove the single point of failure problem facing humanity, than work out better ways of killing each other.
I dunno the statistics but I'd reckon you could get at least 10 launches out of one Trident sub.
Prolly wishful thinking
M --
Sic Itur Ad Astra
www.gatrell.org
---quote---
I really hope they'll discover some form of life somewhere...even some sludge sucking germ on Titan would have drastic implications.
---quote---
why? how??
surely everyone who understands these things knows that it would be a far more suprising outcome if this *was* the only living planet in the universe than vice-versa...
I've honestly never understood people who say, when we find life on other planets it will change everything... why? it doesn't make a blind bit of difference... I think it'll have more drastic implications if we search the whole galaxy and don't find any life, then we know that we *are* special, and not the result of a natural process... then we really have to wonder where we came from and why...
Sounds like a cunning idea, but with 100's of people an hour pouring through a portal, wouldn't cross contamination be an issue?? surely there is no real way of telling who really triggered the alarm at a reasonable flow rate of people.. I'd have to see this device in action before I became convinced it'd be practical.
The other problem is prior contaimination, how long do the wrong substances hang sround on clothes/skin. Would you have problems with the fact that someone might have spent the previosu night in a legal amsterdam coffee shop and be covered in THC molecules, or had spent the previous day dynamiting something, somewhere and thus a string of false positives.
As for the privacy/DNA thing, well how long was it going to be before we get a DNA test code thang in our passports anyway. Let's face it if you want to travel then you have to subject yourself to all sorts of official privitations, to satisfy the beuarocratic paranoia, which is the norm in immegration departmetns world-wide. Being DNA tested seems no worse, then having to declare wether you have had an HIV test or not (and failing to get is visa if you have had the test, regardless of outcome).
Women actually make better engineers... this is something my father (a Civil Eng. lecturer) bangs on about a fair bit. Whilst not wanting to deny the existence of these traits in some men, I think it's fair to say that women have a more holostic attitude to life, this holoism means that thier approach to problem solving is in many cases much more effective, as they can see past the immediate apparent problem and to the overall picture where the 'real' problem arises.
Actually it's probably fair to say that both directed (male) and holositc (female) approaches work and help each other... but at the current moment there are too few women in engineering/science and thus a somewhat damaging imbalance.
I have read a wonderful book on this but as I can't remember the name/title/publisher/isbn I probably shouldn't bother to mention it;-)
"If you're a girl and you're a geek, find a boss who's into computers more than s/he's into money."
I'd say that this goes without saying for any geek, work for people who understand you, it's taken me a while to realise this, but working for money minded people really sucks.
There are two kinds of people in the world; those who believe the best product comes from people who are payed to do what they do and those who believe that the best product comes from those who do stuff coz they want to. M -- Sic Itur Ad Astra www.gatrell.org
hmmm -Erik... you post to sci.physics a lot?? seem to 'member a bloke from there who was called Erik -- Anyway...
Surely the point is that with a flywhell drivemn car you don't need an onboard motor, surely (especially for in town trips) what you do is plug the car into the mains and thus use a far more effecient (than an smalll engine) power-station as your source and the flywheel for storage.
The thing I've been pondering (for a few years not) is, is it possible to use purely electro-magnetic methods to transfer power on and off the wheel. Obvisously you have the wheel inside an evaquated box, to cut out air-friction and have the bearings mag-lev (possibly superconducting) but can you actually manage to to the transfers on and off without having to have a physical connection to the flywheel?? Or at the very least be able to disconnect from the flywheel whilst not in use so as to minimise the energy loss whilst in 'stand-by' mode. > Anyway, mostly just glad that someone has finally done this.. I read that 1973 SciAm article and have been waiting... M -- Sic Itur Ad Astra www.gatrell.org
I actually think there's more to it than just that... Not only are the numbers easier to deal with in that you can divide by 1,2,3,4 easily without having to think, but the units themselves make more sense. The yard is replicated in the metirc system by the meter, but that's the only sensible unit of length. There is no sensible subdivision for measuring people/chairs and similar sized objects (remember that the cm doens't exist in the SI system you *only* have multiples of 10^3) so no inch or foot equivalent, which is a terrible shame.
As for other units, temperature/energy etc. I think that the SI system has much more integration and is therefore easier to remember and use.
Someone said in a post about it being hard for the change to come... well we managed it here (in the UK) fairly easily, we still use pints (which are 20 fluid ozs 4 more than the US one) for beer and milk and pounds/oz's for cooking, miles and mph for distance, but most English people will understand meters and kilos and litres, the easiest change imho has been temp from F to C, it's easy to understand coz 0C is freezing, and we all no how cold that is, and 100C is boiling, which again... I do still retain the knowledge that 80F is a nice hot day 90F is roasting and over 100F means find a swimming pool, but I have all too easily forgotten the other end of that scale... when does it get cold??
Finally I'd like to point out that what we need to do is have a single system of measurement worldwide, and I don't think using this half arsed French metric system is sensible (did you know that the metre is meant to be an exact division of the world's circumference like a 1,000,000,000th, but they used a totally wrong estimate). We also need to use a sensible consistent numbering system within it, and I'd suggest base 12 (well maybe HEX to fit in with 'puters). This would also require base 12 to be taught in schools as a very good alternative numbering system and for two new symbols to be created for ten and eleven, we already have the words in english to cope with base 12... dozen and gross. so 14 would be doz-two and 24 two-doz and 160 gross-doz-four.
anyway.. just some ramble...:) -- Sic Itur Ad Astra www.gatrell.org
I almost have to agree with you on the fast, cheap, good choices, except... that there is no reason why you cannot make cheap probes which function correctly. I think that Nasa have been remarkably lucky, up to date with thier sucesses. Obviously this has been in part to do with good engineering, but not entirely. The MPL, to use your example, is unlikely to ever have been as 'good' as Galileo, but it could well have been able to achive 10% of that Galileo did. The faster, cheaper, better motto that NASA has now adopted is a good one IMHO, and should enable them to launch more probes, each with an individual chance of success which is lower than on previous, better funded mission, but with an overall chance of sucess (due to there being more of them) which is greater. However I haven't noticed this happen yet, maybe they have forgotten why they went for the faster cheaper better option, or maybe as someone else suggested all the sucessful mission just haven't been reported. imho what they need to do is get more people in space, coz what people want to see is spacemen, real people bouncing around in space doing stuff... now that's news and science!! anyway jus my 10p'orth -- Sic Itur Ad Astra www.gatrell.org
Re:Reminds me of that ATM running Windows ...
on
QNX Crypt Cracked
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, on this side of the pond (the eastern side seeing as you asked) many ATM's run NT4... I've seen a whole bunch Bluescreened and one with the 'a Service or Driver failed to load....' error message on it. Makes you really feel secure about you're money eh!
Slashdot Mirror
I care little how much natural gas or coal the US uses now, or ever, and do not see it as germane to the solar vs nuclear debate we are having.
You're claiming 10k year supply of nuclear, hell I'll even let you have 100k year supply.
According to this article http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-sun-will-eventually-engulf-earth-maybe/ we have approximately 7.6 x 10^9 years of solar power available to us, which mean I win by 4 powers of magnitude.
Why invest in short term solutions?
The interesting thing about pumping more energy into a large fluid system is that it accentuates the amount of difference between the hot spots and the cold spots, making the hot spots hotter and the cold spots colder. (fsvo spot that means a moving 'lump' of fluid)
The main effect of global warming is to increase the violence and variability of the atmospheric stirring (commonly referred to as weather). Raising the temperature of 6 thousand billion tons (nb I use uk billions ie 10^12 so we're talking 6 x 10^15 here) of air by a half of a degree represents a lot of energy, that energy means more stirring, means more extremes of weather. It's hardly amazing to anyone who cares to think about it for a moment or two and who's studied a pan on the stove.
So yes, the cold winter you just experienced IS a product of global warming.
Nuclear Fission: suffers from exactly the same scarcity issues as oil/gas. The only sane fusion to do is to wrest the plutonium from the military and then dispose of it in Fast Breeders. Fisson is not necessarily a power source, we do not know the cleanup cost (in energy terms) as noone has ever successfully fully decommissioned a nuclear power plant and dealt with all the waste
1. The military hardly uses plutonium. Enriched Uranium was eventually where it's at
2. We haven't seen lots of exploration for new uranium sources because we've been running off the military stockpiles for the last 20 or so years. It's depressed the market enough that expanding mining wasn't worth it. That source is coming to an end, ergo more mining operations are starting up.
3. Even without expansion of exploration like we've seen with oil/gas, we have enough Uranium within about double the current price to last several hundred years.
4. Before price increases would make the fuel costs for a nuclear plant 'significant', IE something you'd actually see in your electricity bill, we'd be able to filter the stuff out of sea water profitably.
All this is irrelevant. Uranium, is limited in supply, even if it's a large supply. This limit means we will eventually have to stop using it and use something else. So why bother starting?
Whilst living on this planet the sun will provide us with all the energy we need if we can just work out how to harness it effectively. Save the Fissile materials for when we *really* need them, like if/when we get into deep space exploration.
5. Breeder reactors allow much more complete burn up, which means that about 80-90% of all the 'waste' we currently have sitting around can be turned into new fuel.
Yes, I know, I approve of them as a waste management tool.
I note you've not answered my accusation that we don't know if fission is a power source due to not knowing the costs of decommissioning.
Fusion: you seem to have missed my joke vOv
but a set of decent storage technologies with in-out efficiencies in the 90%s and capable of maintaining that store for a few days,
Now this I don't disagree with. They were talking about how on the radio battery prices have come down so much that using them for grid storage is actually starting to make sense.
Solar wise, they need to get the panels a couple percent more efficient and a couple percent cheaper before they make enough sense for me to bolt them to my house, but then I'm practically within shouting distance of the arctic circle. I seriously looked at them last summer.
That being said, I'm honestly trying to get my parents(in Florida) to invest in them, but the government is interfering there. Heck, I think solar car ports covering parking lots would be nifty. Solar panels(most of them) are structural enough that if you don't need a tight seal they can act as a shade/roof without an underlying layer.
Batteries are still a poor storage option due to in-out effeciencies which are at best in the 80%s, yeah some li-ion get into the 90%s but lithium isn't exactly the most common of materials.
As to your geographic comments, yeah, mankind needs to move back to the Tropics, it's where the power is. Although Iceland manages ok with geothermal.
Bah you're a bunch of killjoys!
I was gunna be all "lol!!!! Land of the Free?!?!?! lol!!!" but you've gone and pissed in me chips by being all sensible and that.
Nuclear Fission: suffers from exactly the same scarcity issues as oil/gas. The only sane fusion to do is to wrest the plutonium from the military and then dispose of it in Fast Breeders. Fisson is not necessarily a power source, we do not know the cleanup cost (in energy terms) as noone has ever successfully fully decommissioned a nuclear power plant and dealt with all the waste
Nuclear Fusion: The best method of achieving sustainable stable fusion is to get enough Hydrogen together that it collapses under it's own mass, the resulting star will be quite hot tho so it's best to keep a safe distance ~93million miles would appear to be sufficient from my experimentation, but I rather suspect it depends on how much hydrogen you can get your "hands" on to start with.
The thing that renewable requires is not another form of generation, the sun outputs and the earth captures staggering power continually, but a set of decent storage technologies with in-out efficiencies in the 90%s and capable of maintaining that store for a few days, and maybe some others for months. We have these technologies (Pumped Hydro, Tidal Lagoon, Pumped Heat (PHES), flywheels, &c.) we just need to spend the money on the right development.
and that's why I (a member of the solar industry) will not step up an support the hogwash you only want to implement to line the pockets of the 0.0001%
>
Most free software projects have HORRIBLE documentation and epicly horribly defaults. The problem is that the people that know how to change these things are also too busy doing other work. Yes I do have the skills to fix many parts of matplotlib and numpy but I can also just use MATLAB and get my work done.
Which is fine if you an afford it, but from my experience matlab licenses are not cheap, I worked somewhere were we had one and they were too tight to buy another which meant that one chap got to do all his lovely matlab and the rest of us got to wait until he had the time to do it for us.
If everyone embraced FOSS then everyone could use the best software to solve their problems. The reason the OSS projects lag behind in usability is that they are not used as much.
Seeing software licensing as anything but an impediment is a sure symptom of being deeply infected with capitalism.
Humans discover they really have been copying the birds all along.
It is midday when the sun is dierectly overhead. We conventionally call this 12:00. Likewise at 00:00 the sun should be directly below our feet.
Before the invention of rapid transport, the train, every town run on local meridiam time so there was a 10 minute difference in time between Bristol and London http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/info/bristol-time.htm this caused significant problem with train timetabling. However that's just lazyness in my mind, there's no reason we can't have meridiam time everywhere and watches with gps to compenstate as we move east and west.
Even if we stick with Timezones, there's no reason to budge things by an hour ever. If people want to get up an hour earlier for some part of the year, they're welcome too, just leave me in bed!
> FYI, Most brand name computers intended for home use come with Microsoft Works (an even more pathetic word processor than ed).
.ps files in ed, you know it makes sense
I agree that works is pathetic... but ed!
no ed is a very good wordprocessor... I prefer using the visual interface to it, but...
Hand hack
M
SethF said: ...
Your kid comes to you, and says, "Dad, I want to read news:soc.support.youth.gay-lesbian-bi because I think I might be gay", and you say
--
Sure go ahead son...
what's your problem?? homophobe??
--
Sic Itur Ad Astra
www.gatrell.org
Er... you're wrong
Even the link you gave says so... the first line of that says. "A 400kW variable-pitch air-turbine will shortly be installed, alongside a fixed pitch Wells turbine of similar rating" which clearly states that Well's tubines are fixed pitch and not variable.
iirc a well's turbine is one with a pitch of zero, it's blades are designed so that air flowing over it in either way creates lift in the same diretion (that lift is converted into spin by mounting it on a spindle.) If you understand Bernoulli's effect you would know that lift is caused by pressure differential over the wing due to differing path lenghts (and thus speeds) over the top and bottom of the wing, Top-long path-higher speed-lower pressure. Obviously the path length is the same regarless of which direction the air is flowing, and a zero pitch wing is one which is essentially symetrical, thus getting the maximum efficiency for either direction of airflow.
M
--
Sic Itur Ad Astra
www.gatrell.org
Well NASA seem to be being sensible on this one.
Now if only we could get some more money for them (and other worldwide space agencies). How about siphoning off some of that Defense money??
Surely it'd be more advantagous to explorer near space thoroughly and remove the single point of failure problem facing humanity, than work out better ways of killing each other.
I dunno the statistics but I'd reckon you could get at least 10 launches out of one Trident sub.
Prolly wishful thinking
M
--
Sic Itur Ad Astra
www.gatrell.org
---quote---
I really hope they'll discover some form of life somewhere...even some sludge sucking germ on Titan would have drastic implications. ---quote---
why? how??
surely everyone who understands these things knows that it would be a far more suprising outcome if this *was* the only living planet in the universe than vice-versa...
I've honestly never understood people who say, when we find life on other planets it will change everything... why? it doesn't make a blind bit of difference... I think it'll have more drastic implications if we search the whole galaxy and don't find any life, then we know that we *are* special, and not the result of a natural process... then we really have to wonder where we came from and why...
M
--
Sic Itur Ad Astra
www.gatrell.org
Sounds like a cunning idea, but with 100's of people an hour pouring through a portal, wouldn't cross contamination be an issue?? surely there is no real way of telling who really triggered the alarm at a reasonable flow rate of people.. I'd have to see this device in action before I became convinced it'd be practical.
The other problem is prior contaimination, how long do the wrong substances hang sround on clothes/skin. Would you have problems with the fact that someone might have spent the previosu night in a legal amsterdam coffee shop and be covered in THC molecules, or had spent the previous day dynamiting something, somewhere and thus a string of false positives.
As for the privacy/DNA thing, well how long was it going to be before we get a DNA test code thang in our passports anyway. Let's face it if you want to travel then you have to subject yourself to all sorts of official privitations, to satisfy the beuarocratic paranoia, which is the norm in immegration departmetns world-wide. Being DNA tested seems no worse, then having to declare wether you have had an HIV test or not (and failing to get is visa if you have had the test, regardless of outcome).
M
--
Sic Itur Ad Astra
www.gatrell.org
Good reasons... but I have another
;-)
Women actually make better engineers... this is something my father (a Civil Eng. lecturer) bangs on about a fair bit. Whilst not wanting to deny the existence of these traits in some men, I think it's fair to say that women have a more holostic attitude to life, this holoism means that thier approach to problem solving is in many cases much more effective, as they can see past the immediate apparent problem and to the overall picture where the 'real' problem arises.
Actually it's probably fair to say that both directed (male) and holositc (female) approaches work and help each other... but at the current moment there are too few women in engineering/science and thus a somewhat damaging imbalance.
I have read a wonderful book on this but as I can't remember the name/title/publisher/isbn I probably shouldn't bother to mention it
M
--
Sic Itur Ad Astra
www.gatrell.org
"If you're a girl and you're a geek, find a boss who's into computers more than s/he's into money."
I'd say that this goes without saying for any geek, work for people who understand you, it's taken me a while to realise this, but working for money minded people really sucks.
There are two kinds of people in the world; those who believe the best product comes from people who are payed to do what they do and those who believe that the best product comes from those who do stuff coz they want to.
M
--
Sic Itur Ad Astra
www.gatrell.org
hmmm -Erik... you post to sci.physics a lot??
seem to 'member a bloke from there who was called Erik -- Anyway...
Surely the point is that with a flywhell drivemn car you don't need an onboard motor, surely (especially for in town trips) what you do is plug the car into the mains and thus use a far more effecient (than an smalll engine) power-station as your source and the flywheel for storage.
The thing I've been pondering (for a few years not) is, is it possible to use purely electro-magnetic methods to transfer power on and off the wheel. Obvisously you have the wheel inside an evaquated box, to cut out air-friction and have the bearings mag-lev (possibly superconducting) but can you actually manage to to the transfers on and off without having to have a physical connection to the flywheel?? Or at the very least be able to disconnect from the flywheel whilst not in use so as to minimise the energy loss whilst in 'stand-by' mode.
>
Anyway, mostly just glad that someone has finally done this.. I read that 1973 SciAm article and have been waiting...
M
--
Sic Itur Ad Astra
www.gatrell.org
I actually think there's more to it than just that... Not only are the numbers easier to deal with in that you can divide by 1,2,3,4 easily without having to think, but the units themselves make more sense. The yard is replicated in the metirc system by the meter, but that's the only sensible unit of length. There is no sensible subdivision for measuring people/chairs and similar sized objects (remember that the cm doens't exist in the SI system you *only* have multiples of 10^3) so no inch or foot equivalent, which is a terrible shame.
:)
As for other units, temperature/energy etc. I think that the SI system has much more integration and is therefore easier to remember and use.
Someone said in a post about it being hard for the change to come... well we managed it here (in the UK) fairly easily, we still use pints (which are 20 fluid ozs 4 more than the US one) for beer and milk and pounds/oz's for cooking, miles and mph for distance, but most English people will understand meters and kilos and litres, the easiest change imho has been temp from F to C, it's easy to understand coz 0C is freezing, and we all no how cold that is, and 100C is boiling, which again... I do still retain the knowledge that 80F is a nice hot day 90F is roasting and over 100F means find a swimming pool, but I have all too easily forgotten the other end of that scale... when does it get cold??
Finally I'd like to point out that what we need to do is have a single system of measurement worldwide, and I don't think using this half arsed French metric system is sensible (did you know that the metre is meant to be an exact division of the world's circumference like a 1,000,000,000th, but they used a totally wrong estimate). We also need to use a sensible consistent numbering system within it, and I'd suggest base 12 (well maybe HEX to fit in with 'puters). This would also require base 12 to be taught in schools as a very good alternative numbering system and for two new symbols to be created for ten and eleven, we already have the words in english to cope with base 12... dozen and gross. so 14 would be doz-two and 24 two-doz and 160 gross-doz-four.
anyway.. just some ramble...
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Sic Itur Ad Astra
www.gatrell.org
I almost have to agree with you on the fast, cheap, good choices, except... that there is no reason why you cannot make cheap probes which function correctly. I think that Nasa have been remarkably lucky, up to date with thier sucesses. Obviously this has been in part to do with good engineering, but not entirely. The MPL, to use your example, is unlikely to ever have been as 'good' as Galileo, but it could well have been able to achive 10% of that Galileo did. The faster, cheaper, better motto that NASA has now adopted is a good one IMHO, and should enable them to launch more probes, each with an individual chance of success which is lower than on previous, better funded mission, but with an overall chance of sucess (due to there being more of them) which is greater. However I haven't noticed this happen yet, maybe they have forgotten why they went for the faster cheaper better option, or maybe as someone else suggested all the sucessful mission just haven't been reported. imho what they need to do is get more people in space, coz what people want to see is spacemen, real people bouncing around in space doing stuff... now that's news and science!! anyway jus my 10p'orth
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Sic Itur Ad Astra
www.gatrell.org
Yeah, on this side of the pond (the eastern side seeing as you asked) many ATM's run NT4... I've seen a whole bunch Bluescreened and one with the 'a Service or Driver failed to load....' error message on it. Makes you really feel secure about you're money eh!