I guess you get what you pay for. If you have a turn-of-the-century fab, then sure you can make flat nanolenses. If all you have is a late-70s CNC, you can make any other lens. CNC is a somewhat more widely available technology, but then if Jeri Ellsworth has her way, it may be nanolenses all the way down soon enough:) It's good work that you're doing, don't get me wrong. Kudos.
From what I recall, dropping union dues would give lowest-paid workers a very nice income boost. The unions do the neutering, not the other way round...
Even then, the 5.5% figure is deceptively low IMHO -- it's hard to make predictions on it without pulling out the calculator. It's a virtually useless number, in that respect. Also, giving it out in % doesn't make much sense, since there's no cap on the 100%. To me, that sort of throws % out of the window right away. % only make sense when the values are between 0 and 100, or perhaps -100 and +100.
It'd make more sense to give out inflations as "years to doubling of the prices", and, as you correctly state, it'd have averaged 13y over the last 13 years. Most people don't realize that x% inflation means prices will "double" in y years. I put double in quotes since inflation got nothing to do with other things that may influence prices.
And what the heck has that got to do with anything?! Gasoline in Ohio costs about 4x as much now as it did back then. If most of my spending was on gasoline, dollar to me would have lost 75% of its value. I obviously spend much less than all my money on gasoline, and with my spending mix, I know that dollar has lost 50% of its value. And that's not an approximation, I keep a fairly good track. That's 50% +/- 0.5% at most. It's a coincidence it's a round number like that, just two months ago it was still 49%, for example.
To me, inflation is defined by the buying power of my money. As far as I'm concerned, the dollar has lost 50% of its buying power since 1999, averaged across what I personally buy (groceries, gas, household items, furniture, some building materials). That "low" inflation is someone's joke.
Those lenses are horrible at chromatic aberration, they are designed for monochromatic light, and there's no trivial way so far to change that. So no dice there.
The issue is not about processing speed, but about sensor manufacturing processes. Your 5 ps figure is correct but meaningless: you don't have to serially "process" pixels like you imply, it'd be useless to do so.
In the current sensors, it's hard to put significant electronics for every pixel without making the pixes less efficient. To have the ultimate sensor, you'd want something like an HP multislope A/D coverter right behind every pixel, so that it wouldn't matter how much light falls on it -- it could be appropriately measured over a dynamic range of more than 6 decades. A multislope A/D is fairly light on transistors, you could probably pull one off in an amortized 1E3 transistors per pixel. The currently-made sensors share an A/D converter across many pixels, and such A/D converters can't be both very fast and have large dynamic range. A camera with 3 decades per pixel (10-12 bits) is about all you get so far, IIRC, and that's where the problem lies.
I'd think that well-performing lenses can be made for the frequencies you cover, as long as sufficiently transparent material is available. Obviously you can take a decent visible-light aspherical lens, scale up the size, select the right material, and voila, you have a lens for RF. So, the question is: what is the frequency range where it's hard to find a material that would pass at least around 10% of the signal, at appropriately selected thickness? Another question: what problems specifically call for lenses instead of mirrors? It's well understood how to make a mirror that reasonably works for, say, visible down to single GHz. The gold coated JWST primary mirror could be used as a communications antenna, if one pointed it to Earth (not that they will, in fact they shield from Earth's radiation).
Pray tell, what was the historical purpose of not eating pork? Is there some magic to how pork behaves post-slaughter vs., say, beef? I presume the argument is that pork is somehow not safe: hey, let me hear that argument. Or is that some other fantasy, too?
That's a crazy argument if there ever was one. Atheists don't claim that god doesn't exist in people's minds, where did you get that from? Obviously people make up a lot of stuff, there's no argument about that -- heck, why would atheists argue about that?! It's not the point! Every mind probably has a whole bunch of made-up stuff that perhaps no one else has imagined before, there's nothing to it. Atheist argument isn't about what people make up, it's about stuff that exists outside of our minds. Just because someone has a mental construct in their head doesn't make it reality in the sense of reality-other-than-a-bunch-of-signals-in-the-brain. The mental god-construct has a meaning, and the meaning is that there is a god "out there", as in outside of our heads, doing stuff in the physical world.
I have absolutely no problem acknowledging that god as a shared mental/thought construct can "act", just as people act on other thoughts not related to god. Anyone who has ever seen a mob form and become violent will easily see how a whole bunch of fairly strong mental changes happens just based on mostly unverbal communications. Nothing to it.
A friend of mine, who had access to an old extruder from a cable factory, has made some for himself, but that was a couple years ago. It wasn't for a gun, but perhaps close. It was for a scale prototype of a pyrotechnic cannon used in a model of a live action show.
As for the fiber alignment: maybe we're thinking of a different reprap, the one I saw might have been under a different name, but it laid a continuous filament of plastic, not "dabs", at least in the particular application I saw it used in. If you were to make a pipe with it, the nozzle would go on small pitch spiral, effectively. With the fibers in the plastic, one had to be a bit creative at the time where the machine was not supposed to dispense the material. What he'd done was to move the nozzle fast away from the material, leaving a thin shard sticking up. Those had to be trimmed before the next layer could be laid down, and methinks he made a trimmer attachment to do just that after getting tired of manually reworking each layer where the filament had to terminate.
+1 Informative.You're right, if a reprap lays down the extrusion, the fibers will follow the extruder path. When making a barrel of a gun, you'll want the reprap's head to go around the barrel -- the axis of the barrel will go up from the baseplate of reprap. That way the fibers take the hoop stresses. For the second and subsequent layers, you need to refixture the barrel in an indexing chuck and lay longitudinal extrusions to make it strong along its length, alternating with spiral extrusions for further hoop stress strength. It can be engineered to work IMHO, even on a reprap. The very second layer will probably be just a long spiralling fill of the outer side of the riflings to make things even, I'd think.
If long thin reprapped pipes happen not to turn out very straight, then probably even the first layer would need to be laid on a mandrel in a 4th axis chuck.
Last time I heard about it from some authority, it was an Ohio regionalism. Now it's west central Scotland-ism, too, yay, how important, for crying out loud you could fit a couple of west central Scotlands in Ohio;)
Alas, it's not proper English to me if it gets edited out of books. So there.
So, it turns out that Nature is gender neutral. Old mothers have increased risk of passing congenital diseases to their offspring, no we know it's the same for the fathers. I'd say that's not very unexpected, although it's good to have some evidence for that -- this study is a step in the right direction.
This is a pipe dream right now, but it doesn't have to be so. Software solutions that aid safety-critical development processes cost big bucks, same as training and really any sort of plain-language knowledge (standards aren't plain language). Compare this to the fact that, say, you can read on enterprise development best practices on many blogs, forums and documentation sites and it's free -- it's commodity. Try reading up something actionable on functional safety aspects of software development, ha ha -- at best you need $100 for one of Exida books just to get an overview of what's involved. Tools like Scade cost tens of thousands of USD per seat. Techniques and tools for developing reliable software will eventually become commodities, and as the knowledge hopefully permeates the industry, it will become a non-issue. It's like source revision control systems or parametric CAD systems -- once a big deal, right now they are either free (the former) or affordable (a couple hundred USD for a basic Alibre setup).
AFAIK, anything that uses extrusion can be fed with glass-reinforced plastic. The plastic melts, glass fibers are short and not a problem -- they don't have to melt, merely deform with the extrusion.
The plastic could be reinforced with an additive, like perhaps glass fibers. What's also important is that plastic mix may be designed to ablate instead of melting. Ablation takes more heat away per unit volume than melting. It'd wear out as it's heated up, instead of just melting away. Sure thermal management becomes very important on such a design, and you do need to do some finite element thermal and mechanical modeling before anything gets manufactured. To mechanically withstand the stresses, all it takes it to throw enough plastic at the problem, as long as said plastic doesn't deform "too much". It'll be probably necessary to have a statically underbored design, with smallest bore diameter closest to the shell. If you measure it, the bullet "won't" pass through the bore. But in presence of the hot gas, it'll stretch to correct geometry. The gas pressure will be highest at the rear of the barrel, thus you'll want it most underbored right there. This is a similar approach to modeling the machining stresses and passing a deformed shape to the CNC mill such that it will acquire correct shape when machined under presence of hold-down and cutter stresses.
You could probably do something funny with hot gas scavenging, perhaps trading off some of the bullet's kinetic energy to suck some cool air into the barrel to cool it off.
Slashdot Mirror
Not funny, not sarcastic, just confused. Thoroughly.
I guess you get what you pay for. If you have a turn-of-the-century fab, then sure you can make flat nanolenses. If all you have is a late-70s CNC, you can make any other lens. CNC is a somewhat more widely available technology, but then if Jeri Ellsworth has her way, it may be nanolenses all the way down soon enough :) It's good work that you're doing, don't get me wrong. Kudos.
From what I recall, dropping union dues would give lowest-paid workers a very nice income boost. The unions do the neutering, not the other way round...
Even then, the 5.5% figure is deceptively low IMHO -- it's hard to make predictions on it without pulling out the calculator. It's a virtually useless number, in that respect. Also, giving it out in % doesn't make much sense, since there's no cap on the 100%. To me, that sort of throws % out of the window right away. % only make sense when the values are between 0 and 100, or perhaps -100 and +100.
It'd make more sense to give out inflations as "years to doubling of the prices", and, as you correctly state, it'd have averaged 13y over the last 13 years. Most people don't realize that x% inflation means prices will "double" in y years. I put double in quotes since inflation got nothing to do with other things that may influence prices.
And what the heck has that got to do with anything?! Gasoline in Ohio costs about 4x as much now as it did back then. If most of my spending was on gasoline, dollar to me would have lost 75% of its value. I obviously spend much less than all my money on gasoline, and with my spending mix, I know that dollar has lost 50% of its value. And that's not an approximation, I keep a fairly good track. That's 50% +/- 0.5% at most. It's a coincidence it's a round number like that, just two months ago it was still 49%, for example.
To me, inflation is defined by the buying power of my money. As far as I'm concerned, the dollar has lost 50% of its buying power since 1999, averaged across what I personally buy (groceries, gas, household items, furniture, some building materials). That "low" inflation is someone's joke.
Those lenses are horrible at chromatic aberration, they are designed for monochromatic light, and there's no trivial way so far to change that. So no dice there.
The issue is not about processing speed, but about sensor manufacturing processes. Your 5 ps figure is correct but meaningless: you don't have to serially "process" pixels like you imply, it'd be useless to do so.
In the current sensors, it's hard to put significant electronics for every pixel without making the pixes less efficient. To have the ultimate sensor, you'd want something like an HP multislope A/D coverter right behind every pixel, so that it wouldn't matter how much light falls on it -- it could be appropriately measured over a dynamic range of more than 6 decades. A multislope A/D is fairly light on transistors, you could probably pull one off in an amortized 1E3 transistors per pixel. The currently-made sensors share an A/D converter across many pixels, and such A/D converters can't be both very fast and have large dynamic range. A camera with 3 decades per pixel (10-12 bits) is about all you get so far, IIRC, and that's where the problem lies.
I'd think that well-performing lenses can be made for the frequencies you cover, as long as sufficiently transparent material is available. Obviously you can take a decent visible-light aspherical lens, scale up the size, select the right material, and voila, you have a lens for RF. So, the question is: what is the frequency range where it's hard to find a material that would pass at least around 10% of the signal, at appropriately selected thickness? Another question: what problems specifically call for lenses instead of mirrors? It's well understood how to make a mirror that reasonably works for, say, visible down to single GHz. The gold coated JWST primary mirror could be used as a communications antenna, if one pointed it to Earth (not that they will, in fact they shield from Earth's radiation).
Agreed. Lower frequency would be correct.
Go to a broker that allows buying fractional shares. I had about 1% of a BRK.A share once, and that's a $100k+ stock.
Just buy some of their stock and shut up, will you :)
I'd think undercooked meat of any sort can kill you...
This would have had merit if it'd be shown that social systems constructed by the faithful fare significantly better. I don't see that just yet.
Pray tell, what was the historical purpose of not eating pork? Is there some magic to how pork behaves post-slaughter vs., say, beef? I presume the argument is that pork is somehow not safe: hey, let me hear that argument. Or is that some other fantasy, too?
That's a crazy argument if there ever was one. Atheists don't claim that god doesn't exist in people's minds, where did you get that from? Obviously people make up a lot of stuff, there's no argument about that -- heck, why would atheists argue about that?! It's not the point! Every mind probably has a whole bunch of made-up stuff that perhaps no one else has imagined before, there's nothing to it. Atheist argument isn't about what people make up, it's about stuff that exists outside of our minds. Just because someone has a mental construct in their head doesn't make it reality in the sense of reality-other-than-a-bunch-of-signals-in-the-brain. The mental god-construct has a meaning, and the meaning is that there is a god "out there", as in outside of our heads, doing stuff in the physical world.
I have absolutely no problem acknowledging that god as a shared mental/thought construct can "act", just as people act on other thoughts not related to god. Anyone who has ever seen a mob form and become violent will easily see how a whole bunch of fairly strong mental changes happens just based on mostly unverbal communications. Nothing to it.
Magically, of course.
Yeah, because the opposite, where hardly any women have college degrees, is obviously fine and dandy.
Oh, BTW, where the heck did you pull this "women [...] problem in the West"?!
A friend of mine, who had access to an old extruder from a cable factory, has made some for himself, but that was a couple years ago. It wasn't for a gun, but perhaps close. It was for a scale prototype of a pyrotechnic cannon used in a model of a live action show.
As for the fiber alignment: maybe we're thinking of a different reprap, the one I saw might have been under a different name, but it laid a continuous filament of plastic, not "dabs", at least in the particular application I saw it used in. If you were to make a pipe with it, the nozzle would go on small pitch spiral, effectively. With the fibers in the plastic, one had to be a bit creative at the time where the machine was not supposed to dispense the material. What he'd done was to move the nozzle fast away from the material, leaving a thin shard sticking up. Those had to be trimmed before the next layer could be laid down, and methinks he made a trimmer attachment to do just that after getting tired of manually reworking each layer where the filament had to terminate.
+1 Informative.You're right, if a reprap lays down the extrusion, the fibers will follow the extruder path. When making a barrel of a gun, you'll want the reprap's head to go around the barrel -- the axis of the barrel will go up from the baseplate of reprap. That way the fibers take the hoop stresses. For the second and subsequent layers, you need to refixture the barrel in an indexing chuck and lay longitudinal extrusions to make it strong along its length, alternating with spiral extrusions for further hoop stress strength. It can be engineered to work IMHO, even on a reprap. The very second layer will probably be just a long spiralling fill of the outer side of the riflings to make things even, I'd think.
If long thin reprapped pipes happen not to turn out very straight, then probably even the first layer would need to be laid on a mandrel in a 4th axis chuck.
Last time I heard about it from some authority, it was an Ohio regionalism. Now it's west central Scotland-ism, too, yay, how important, for crying out loud you could fit a couple of west central Scotlands in Ohio ;)
Alas, it's not proper English to me if it gets edited out of books. So there.
So, it turns out that Nature is gender neutral. Old mothers have increased risk of passing congenital diseases to their offspring, no we know it's the same for the fathers. I'd say that's not very unexpected, although it's good to have some evidence for that -- this study is a step in the right direction.
This is a pipe dream right now, but it doesn't have to be so. Software solutions that aid safety-critical development processes cost big bucks, same as training and really any sort of plain-language knowledge (standards aren't plain language). Compare this to the fact that, say, you can read on enterprise development best practices on many blogs, forums and documentation sites and it's free -- it's commodity. Try reading up something actionable on functional safety aspects of software development, ha ha -- at best you need $100 for one of Exida books just to get an overview of what's involved. Tools like Scade cost tens of thousands of USD per seat. Techniques and tools for developing reliable software will eventually become commodities, and as the knowledge hopefully permeates the industry, it will become a non-issue. It's like source revision control systems or parametric CAD systems -- once a big deal, right now they are either free (the former) or affordable (a couple hundred USD for a basic Alibre setup).
AFAIK, anything that uses extrusion can be fed with glass-reinforced plastic. The plastic melts, glass fibers are short and not a problem -- they don't have to melt, merely deform with the extrusion.
The plastic could be reinforced with an additive, like perhaps glass fibers. What's also important is that plastic mix may be designed to ablate instead of melting. Ablation takes more heat away per unit volume than melting. It'd wear out as it's heated up, instead of just melting away. Sure thermal management becomes very important on such a design, and you do need to do some finite element thermal and mechanical modeling before anything gets manufactured. To mechanically withstand the stresses, all it takes it to throw enough plastic at the problem, as long as said plastic doesn't deform "too much". It'll be probably necessary to have a statically underbored design, with smallest bore diameter closest to the shell. If you measure it, the bullet "won't" pass through the bore. But in presence of the hot gas, it'll stretch to correct geometry. The gas pressure will be highest at the rear of the barrel, thus you'll want it most underbored right there. This is a similar approach to modeling the machining stresses and passing a deformed shape to the CNC mill such that it will acquire correct shape when machined under presence of hold-down and cutter stresses.
You could probably do something funny with hot gas scavenging, perhaps trading off some of the bullet's kinetic energy to suck some cool air into the barrel to cool it off.