This patent will be overturned the first time anyone fights it in court. It is not possible to patent something which has been in commercial use for more than a year.
Vfat has been in commercial versions of Linux for at least 9 years. If Microsoft has spent 10 years getting this patent they have already lost half of its useful life since the patent laws have changed to a 20 year from application total time .
The Patent also fails in court because of obviousness.
This is a classic example of a "lawyer" patent; that is lawyers love to spend money patenting things for companies since they make money by doing so. The bosses at big companies don't realize the patents are worthless, and they get all excited about them.
By the way almost all patents are rejected by the examiners the first time through.
The fundamental idea behind cold fusion is the same as that for Muon catalyzed fusion - reduce the size of deuterium atoms and the nuclear attraction can be increased to the point that fusion occurs.
Palladium will hold more deuterium per unit volume than the same volume of liquid deuterium will. This means that the nuclei are closer to each other than they are in liquid deuterium. With the proper molecular structure of Palladium this increased density is enough that the deuterium will fuse. This does not require any 'new physics' to explain.
What does require some work is why these reactions don't release neutrons like hot fusion does. In hot fusion the nuclei can only get rid of their increased energy by 1. radiation 2. emission of particles. The energy and momentum conservation laws don't allow option one in deuterium fusion. Those same laws require 2 particles be emitted since one fast moving particle could not conserve the pre impact momentum of the colliding atoms. In cold fusion the helium nucleus can and will get rid of its extra energy by means of the increased electric field imparting kinetic energy in the form of heat into the palladium matrix. As a result the helium nucleus does not need to emit a neutron to conserve momentum. Once again, no new physics required.
I have read that part of the reason for the difficulty of duplicating the original experiments is that metallic palladium has 16 or so different atomic structures - only one of which will support cold fusion.
I have also read that there is a fairly easy way to overcome all of the difficulties of the experiment: put Palladium dust into deuterium gas at about 5000 PSI. The extra pressure on the metal evidently moves the nuclei a little closer together causing the container of deuterium to heat up and stay hot from continued fusion events. This was discovered by a Japanese researcher.
Other than stirring up a bunch of Slashdotters these patents will have no effect. Patents are an offensive weapon- unless you have a lot of money in back of you a patent is worthless.
Back in the 70's there was a company which had a patent on memory used as a character generator. They threatened to sue everyone, even sent all of the computer manufacturers letters in an attempt to extort money from the manufacturers. Nobody even bothered to respond to the letters; the company was completely ignored, and the threats simply went away
Up until the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper the automobile industry had never paid one penny in royalties to an outside inventor; they simply stole whatever good ideas those inventors came up with, and otherwise ignored them.
When the.inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper tried to sue them he couldn't find a lawyer who would take the case; the only reason he won was because he stubbornly bucked not only the automobile makers, but the court system - which deeply resents people who don't have lawyers.
It took him many years, but he finally won money from the automakers. As far as I know he remains the only outside inventor to ever get royalties from that industry. HIS ROYALTIES WERE FOR A LEGITIMATE INVENTION WHICH WAS BLATANTLY STOLEN. That is hardly the case here: these guys have patents which would never stand up to any formal scrutiny at all. They are attempting to extort money from the gullible.
Take a look at the orbital track of things like the space station: The station goes around the earth every 90 minutes or so while the earth rotates underneath it. The thing that gets you is the "or so" of the orbital period, and the fact that the rotational period of the earth changes slightly. As a result, given enough orbits, the station does a good job of being over most of the places on earth within its orbital inclination.
As a rule of thumb: if the orbital inclination is 30 degrees then the satellite will reach +/-30 degrees latitude on the earth.
In other words if you erect a stationary tower from the equator high enough satellites will run into it eventually.
To see how silly the idea of 'moving the elevator' is, imagine building a skyscraper which is designed to move out of the way if an airplane is heading toward it. Now make that skyscraper 23000 miles tall. The mechanical wave sent up by the moving base would be interesting, don't you think? At the speed of sound it would take about 32 hours to propagate the length of the elevator. The elevator would have to be a really low loss material for that wave not to dissipate in that time. Once the wave reaches the end how are you going to deal with the reflected energy coming back down the structure? What does that movement do to the people inside the elevator?
I am sorry to be asking these real world questions but those are exactly the issues that have to be addressed if someone is actually going to try building the elevator, or would people rather find out about the satellite problem by having the space station crash into your structure?
The whole elevator concept strikes me as elementary school engineering: "Lets build a giant robot to stomp on everybody!" "Koool, we could give it LASER beams for eyes so they could fry everyone else!" "Yeah, we could paint it purple with yellow lightning bolts on it and everything!"
If the elevator were attacked or sabotaged or breaks, 23000 miles of structural fiber coiling up around the equator won't do any damage will it?
No question that good technical management is both rare and valuable. It is rare because most managers are not very good technically. They seek to hide that fact from themselves by 'proving' that they are better than those they manage by denigrating the importance of technical ability. The thinking is: "If I can't do it, it must not be important."
People who are good technical managers seldom progress very far on the management scale: they are feared by the managers above them who will do anything they can to sabotage their careers.
I have a good friend who is a brilliant technical manager who got great work out of his team for an unnamed major computer manufacturer over a period of 15 years.. The new turd one level up from him purposely assigned his team a task that could not possibly succeed on a schedule no one could have met, When the inevitable failure occurred my friend was relieved, given an "unsatisfactory" performance rating (after 15 years of consistent "superior" ratings) and transferred to the corporate equivalent of Antarctica where he now supervises a couple of penguins.
There is a fundamental rule which corporations ought to follow: anyone who aspires to management should never be allowed to be a manager..
Because managers are largely replaceable the assumption that they make is that technical people are also interchangeable and easily replaceable.
This is simply not true, and it has to do with the Yin and Yang nature of reality. Engineering and Art are a Yin and Yang pair; at the heart of any art form there is a core of technical knowledge that the artist has to learn before they can make art. For example a painter needs to know how to mix paints and how brush strokes change the way art looks in light. Engineering is mostly technical information which the engineer needs to learn before he can do his job - however, in solving a technical problem there are literally millions of possible solutions to the problem. Some work better than others, and it is a matter of artistic choice which one the engineer picks. That is why leading edge solutions are called "State of the Art"
Technical things can be taught, Art can't be. An engineer who is good at creating state of the art solutions to problems people don't know how to solve, is as rare and valuable as an artist is; neither can be easily replaced.
There is a problem with the space elevator that I haven't seen discussed anywhere. If you have a space elevator you can't have any satellites at an altitude lower than or equal to the height of the elevator, since eventually they will run into the elevator with rather unpleasant results.
The current theories on the cause of antibiotic resistant bacteria place the blame on antibiotics and their overuse or under use. These theories utterly fail to explain one simple fact: most people don't come into the hospital with cases of drug resistant bacteria, they acquire those infections while in the hospitals. Some where in the hospital there are conditions which are breeding drug resistant bacteria.
I believe that the real cause of antibiotic resistant bacteria is far more prosaic than anyone has suspected. Before Doctors and Nurses give people injections they are quite properly taught to point the needle up, tap the syringe to force air bubbles to the top of the syringe, then squirt enough of the fluid out of the syringe to insure that the air is cleared from the device and the needle. This is utterly necessary to prevent the injection of air into the patient's blood system where it could cause a fatal embolism.
The antibiotic squirted out of the needle simply falls to the floor and creates a splatter. This splatter kills bacteria on the floor where it is intense enough to do so, but around the edges of the splatter surviving bacteria can breed resistant strains to every type of injectable antibiotic being used in the hospital.
When antibiotic splatter is combined with the modern janitorial practice of a one step floor cleaner, the floor becomes a giant Petri dish for the breeding of drug resistant bacteria. One step floor 'cleaners' can't possibly clean floors; they make the floor look clean and shiny, but since many of them are made of glycerin compounds they simply serve as a growth medium for the Petri dish.
So how do you solve the problem of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria? You do two things: first, keep splatters of antibiotics off of the floor by performing the air clearing of the syringes while the needle is still in the bottle of antibiotics - immediately after filling the syringe- and by using a spillage overflow catcher pan under the syringe while it is being filled. Second, sterilize the hospital floors with bleach and intense ultra violet light sources mounted on the undersides of push broom like devices.
These two simple things will prevent the Petri dish conditions on floors which breed drug resistant bacteria. Both of these steps have very low costs while having very large benefits. They are similar in importance to the now standard practice of surgeons washing their hands before surgery, which was adapted in the 19th century, and which has saved countless lives since.
The economic justification for all of these things is obvious, reducing drug resistant bacteria cases will save insurance companies far more money than the slightly greater costs of better floor cleaning and splatter prevention protocols would cost them.
People haven't changed much since primitive times. On a day after day basis it was not possible to work on hunting more than 4 to 6 hours a day. The same remains true today, the brain can only concentrate for so long.
As the article mentions much of what appears to be 'wasted' time is really subconscious creative time.
In my case I can't design a computer consciously; I bring in the requirements, I talk about them with other engineers, and then I relax, letting my subconscious work on the problem. When it is ready it hands me a completed design. I just transcribe it into the layout program. The whole process is more or less effortless.
It is reasonable to expect that a new car that you buy will last 100,000 miles with no major malfunctions. This is because everything in a car is basically designed (as much as possible) with a 100% safety margin. For example: drive trains can usually handle twice as much power as the engine can produce etc. Experience has shown that this is the way to do engineering of something which can be expected to work reliably.
However race car drivers are pleased if they can get 500 miles out of a race car when the performance is pushing the limits of what the machinery can do.
The shuttle is to a high performance jet fighter what a 21st century Formula 1 car is to a 1947 Ford. The shuttle is by a huge margin the highest performance reusable vehicle every built by anybody anywhere at anytime. There is nothing else even close.- with the possible exception of the Soviet version of the shuttle - which was never flown manned.
Can we make the shuttle as safe as a passenger jet? Absolutely, we know how to do that. What we don't know how to do is make it that safe and still be light enough to get off the ground, let alone lift a crew and cargo into orbit.
Space flight is dangerous, but so was sailing across the ocean in wooden boats - where would we be today if no one had ever possssed the courage to do that?
These are first order "back of the envelope" calculations about the effects of making things small.
For reasons which will become apparent as you read this I doubt that true nano scale weapons will ever exist. What could possibly be built are micro scale robotic devices of a non self replicating type which could possibly be used as weapons. Let us find out how practical they might be.
Let us start by examining the effects of scaling on things. We'll start with my Nissan Maxima and reduce it in size by a factor of ten. Instead of being about 17 feet long the scaled car will be about 1.7 feet long. Instead of weighing about 3000 lbs it will weigh about 3 lbs. Why is that? The answer is that the mass of a scaled object is proportional to its volume - which goes as the cube of the dimensional ratio. Ten times as long, ten times as wide, ten times as high has 1000 times the volume.
The scaled engine would be 3 cc in displacement instead of 3000 cc. Instead of 222 Hp it would produce.222 Hp. Fuel consumption at this level would be one thousandth of that of the full size engine. Since the fuel tank is also one thousandth of the size of the full size vehicle one might be tempted to think that the distance between fill ups would be the same.
However, the fuel consumption of the smaller vehicle is proportionally greater. Why? The smaller vehicle is one thousandth the weight but the frontal area of the vehicle - the size of which determines the drag - is one hundredth of that of the larger vehicle. Thus at the same speed the drag of the smaller vehicle is proportionally ten times as great as the larger vehicle.
The optimal speed of the smaller vehicle is lower than that of the larger vehicle. Because drag goes as the square of the velocity, one thousandth of the fuel consumption will drive the smaller vehicle at a speed which is about 32% of the speed of the larger car and its range will also be about 32% of the full sized car's range.
If we tried to make a car scaled down by a factor of 100 its speed and range would both be only one tenth (square root of a scale factor of 100) that of a full size car. We are forced to conclude that the product of speed and range of any vehicle with an internal fuel supply will scale directly with the scale factor.
For example reducing the size of a jet plane by a factor of 100 makes it fly at one tenth the speed and one tenth as far. By the time we scale to nano sizes we have objects which won't go very far or very fast. A nano device is an exceptionally crappy weapon delivery system compared to a full sized device; it can only move slowly, and it can't go very far.
However there are other things which occur which would effect our attempt to simply scale an engine down in size. The first of these is the change in heat loss. In simplest terms the rate of heat production is proportional to the volume of a heat source, which means that heat production scales with the cube of the scale factor, but heat loss is proportional to the surface area of the object which scales as the square of the scaling factor.
A smaller engine requires much less of a cooling system than a large engine does, if the engine is small enough it doesn't require a cooling system at all - it will lose heat naturally fast enough without one.
Because of the square - cube relationship for heat loss there is a minimum size flame which is possible. A small ball of flame loses heat faster than a large one. If a ball of flame is too small it can't produce enough heat from internal combustion to maintain its temperature above the ignition point, and the flame can't exist.
This means that if we try to scale our engine far enough it will refuse to run, it will lose heat too fast for the fuel to burn. Even making the engine out of heat resistive materials like ceramics only works to a certain size; eventually the heat loss will keep things from burning.
This is part of the reason that biological cells use c
As a contractor who works at JSC, I can assure you that NASA is in charge; neither we nor our companies have any say accept for: "Yes sir". If the contractors are in charge then why did Lockheed, which had been at JSC for more than 40 years, lose the ESCG contract to Jacobs Engineering? Contractors exist because the space agency can get rid of both the companies and the individuals easily; firing a government employee is very difficult.
Contractors in charge is a ridiculous thing to say. From the inside NASA's biggest problem is that during the space race technical people who knew how to accomplish technical tasks were picked to lead and manage the agency at all levels; now most NASA divisions have "professional managers" who couldn't personally build and fly a model rocket - let alone make critical decisions about the real thing. It is these non technical "professional managers" who are the "NASA cultural problem" you have heard so much about. Such people have been directly responsible for most of NASA's technical disasters.
Anyone who has knowledge of a Federal Felony is REQUIRED by law to report that information to federal law enforcement.. Failure to do so makes the person having the knowledge an indictable co-conspirator.
I found out about this several years ago when the company I was working for attempted to get me to file a fraudulent patent application.
Never complain to a company CEO about something like this; they will simply fire you. Always go directly to the Feds. If you do so you are protected by the Federal Whistle blower statutes. Company CEO's involved in illegal activities start gasping for air when they find out the Feds are involved.
The best hope of man kind long term is to burn up as much uranium and plutonium as possible - if there are no nuclear fuels, there won't be any nuclear war.This project not only burns up fuel, it gets it off of the planet - where we don't have to deal with the waste.
Before it is activated the nuclear fuels are not very radioactive so a crash on takeoff doesn't do much.
If we translate the original study into physical terms the stupidity involved becomes obvious.
Suppose that you can pick up 400 lbs. If you pick up 200 lbs, you can now only pick up an additional 200 lbs.
If I now held this up as proof that weight lifting makes you weaker, everyone would quite properly say that I was an idiot for doing so.
That is exactly what this research has done; you only have so much mental capacity, if you use some of it to read an email, the remaining capacity is less than your maximum.
Evidently the original researcher read so many emails that his IQ (which is a measure of intellectual strength) was reduced to the level of a chimp.
Please see my post earlier - the official explanation is probably the correct one.
As to the managment think problems at the root of shuttle disasters, the Columbia is another classic example of it. The shuttle was getting foam impacts since the very first flight (whirr click). This was NEVER safe - it needed to be corrected - instead it was accepted as 'normal' and ignored.Then for politically correct reasons the formulation of the foam was changed which roughly trippled the number of foam impact incidents. The engineers knew that it was dangerous and said so, but the managers won the argument - they weren't right but they thought they were because of the intellecutal falacy I outlined elsewhere. Same thing happened in the Challenger - the engineers were right but lost the argument to a manager.
This thread is an excellent example of the Internet being used correctly as a communication medium; everyone knows more now than they did at the start of the thread. Great work evrybody. .
No argument there! Of course this would not have been news to the tank designers either. It may have been. There is currently a discussion between various groups at NASA on this very subject - is there some minimum value of spark energy which is safe in a pure oxygen athmosphere? We say no, others say there is.
This entire thread is highly instructive of how memory and the human brain work in the real world: When I read the original reports about a year and a half ago I knew and understood the cause of the actual accident - but I remembered the dangerous design of the tank better than I did the pedestrian causes of the actual incident. Why? as a design engineer the design problems were of more interest to me. Over time I forgot the actual cause of the incident and substituted what I did remember about it.
Learn from this error lest it happens to you at some point.As you get older this happens more since you have much more information stored as an older person than you do as a young person. This makes you slower to respond (it takes longer to search through more stuff), and the chances of 'bit errors' increase with the number of bits stored.
Nevertheless my original point can be modified to: "it was a poor design decision to have live electrical circuits inside of a LOX tank". I think most of us can agree with that.
Thanks for the additional data. I had read this a year and a half ago and had forgotten it.
In LOX the wires themselves in the precense of a spark can ignite. This is dependant upon the size of the spark and the size of the wires; does the wire lose heat to the LOX bath faster than the combustion can provide it? If so there is no ignition of the wire - if not then the wire can ignite.
Breaking a wire which is carrying a current is one of the best ways we have found of causing a fire.
Regardless, the design of the LOX tank was a disaster waiting to happen: fly it enough and it will blow up.
The conclusion we have reached in testing is that it is not safe to spark in pure oxygen.
Yes the tank blew up. This could have happened either way - just statistical chance. Basing a conclusion on one test is rather dangerous.
Look, I am not interested in arguing - why? An argument is the intellectual equivalent of a fight. Fights do NOT go to the person who is right or wrong - they go to the person who is the best fighter.
This is the root of the basic intellectual falacy which pervades the academic world - that the winner of an argument is the person who is right.
I really understand fighting - I am a certified experet in the subject - so I know what a waste of time fighting is: people get hurt, and nothing gets achieved.
By the way the statement that sparks can cause ignition in LOX soaked material is not a theory - it is an observed fact - easily duplicated, verified and confirmed.
They didn't use artificial gravity to seperate the LOX; quite the opposite.
In fact, in zero gravity LOX tends to divide up into regions of gas and liquid. If the gas happens to float past the sensor, then they get an incorrect reading of the density, and hence they don't know how much is in there. This was a big problem on previous flights. Stirring the tank mixes it all up and makes it the same density; allowing a reliable reading to be taken.
Yes and no. In zero g the bubbles and liquid have no reason to separate. In a gravity field the bubbles float just like the do in water - so you get a liquid without voids in it - which you can measure.
Aluminum, particularly bulk aluminum is *not* combustible in LOX. It's used on the Space Shuttle main tank fer heavens sake!
Aluminum will burn in air if there is enough energy to break through the surface layer of aluminum oxide which builds up on the surface. In fact aluminum is so reactive with oxygen that this layer forms instantly when the metal is exposed to oxygen. Anything which will burn in air will really burn in LOX.
Graphite can't really burn either; for it to burn it needs to reach ~3000K, and the LOX is pretty keen on it not reaching that temperature.
There was an experiment where a scientist used LOX and charcoal to see how fast it would burn - it esentially flashed in less than a second. DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS. IT IS RIDICULOUSLY DANGEROUS. Your statement is like saying Nitro Glycerin is safe to have in your house. NOTE FOR THE YOUNG AND INEXPERIENCED: DO NOT STORE NITRO GLYCERIN IN YOUR HOUSE. IT WILL BLOW UP AND KILL YOU!!!
Provided the brushes are carefully chosen, this need not be a problem.
This is exactly the sort of thinking which resulted in the original disaster. Brushes are mechanical devices - there is inductance in a motor - when the brush connection is broken the inductance of the motor will cause a spark. We have studied the ignition properties of such sparks in LOX in my group. There is a statistical probability of a given spark igniting the brush material.
That's not actually what caused the explosion anyway.
During testing a relay welded itself shut due to incorrect voltages. In flight, the wiring overheated- and the insulation burnt in the LOX. That caused the LOX tank to overpressure, and it blew away half the side of the vehicle
That is the official theory which was reached by people who knew nothing about the spark ignition problem. The voltage in the GFE power supply used in the test was not enough to weld contacts - the LOX would have cooled the wires so that they wouldn't have reached ignition temperature. The explosion didn't happen until the tank was stirred. The thinking behind reaching that official theory was "Well none of the other tanks blew up so the design was OK so it must have been someing which was done to that particular tank that caused the problem."
Thanks for demonstrating the "Whirr click, whirr click " mind set to everyone.
I had occasion to look at the plans for the oxygen tank that blew up on Apollo 13. There is no great mystery why it blew up, the mystery is why they didn't all blow up.
Trying to figure out how much is left in a liquid oxygen tank in outer space is not an easy task. If you wanted to know that answer here on earth you would weigh the tank - which obviously won't work in free fall.
The idea they came up with was to have a sensor in the tank that could measure the level by resistive means. In order to have a 'level' to measure they had to create an artificial gravity inside the tank by swirling the contents with an internal electric motor and a blade. In the movie "Apollo 13" one of the astronauts talks about "stirring the O2 tank", that is what he is talking about.
Consider what this all means: you have a tank full of liquid Oxygen, you have several pounds of highly combustible aluminum and graphite parts which are soaked in liquid Oxygen, and you have a DC motor with brushes sparking up a storm inside the tank. Another name for such a combination is a "bomb".
NASA's - management driven - engineering has long been full of "Whir click, whir click - OK, Russian Roulette is flight certified as safe" thinking. Nobody does a "how could this all go wrong" analysis.
An engineer I work with at JSC has an actual - legally obtained Space Shuttle flight computer. The government declared it surplus, and he bought it from the surplus section, so he has the paperwork documenting that he is the legal owner. His box is an actual flight unit, which was in space, not a ground test unit or engineering sample. He has the paperwork documenting its complete history.
Every once in a while you can find some incredible things in government surplus.
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The examiners must have been on crack.
This patent will be overturned the first time anyone fights it in court. It is not possible to patent something which has been in commercial use for more than a year.
Vfat has been in commercial versions of Linux for at least 9 years. If Microsoft has spent 10 years getting this patent they have already lost half of its useful life since the patent laws have changed to a 20 year from application total time .
The Patent also fails in court because of obviousness.
This is a classic example of a "lawyer" patent; that is lawyers love to spend money patenting things for companies since they make money by doing so. The bosses at big companies don't realize the patents are worthless, and they get all excited about them.
By the way almost all patents are rejected by the examiners the first time through.
The fundamental idea behind cold fusion is the same as that for Muon catalyzed fusion - reduce the size of deuterium atoms and the nuclear attraction can be increased to the point that fusion occurs.
Palladium will hold more deuterium per unit volume than the same volume of liquid deuterium will. This means that the nuclei are closer to each other than they are in liquid deuterium. With the proper molecular structure of Palladium this increased density is enough that the deuterium will fuse. This does not require any 'new physics' to explain.
What does require some work is why these reactions don't release neutrons like hot fusion does. In hot fusion the nuclei can only get rid of their increased energy by 1. radiation 2. emission of particles. The energy and momentum conservation laws don't allow option one in deuterium fusion. Those same laws require 2 particles be emitted since one fast moving particle could not conserve the pre impact momentum of the colliding atoms. In cold fusion the helium nucleus can and will get rid of its extra energy by means of the increased electric field imparting kinetic energy in the form of heat into the palladium matrix. As a result the helium nucleus does not need to emit a neutron to conserve momentum. Once again, no new physics required.
I have read that part of the reason for the difficulty of duplicating the original experiments is that metallic palladium has 16 or so different atomic structures - only one of which will support cold fusion.
I have also read that there is a fairly easy way to overcome all of the difficulties of the experiment: put Palladium dust into deuterium gas at about 5000 PSI. The extra pressure on the metal evidently moves the nuclei a little closer together causing the container of deuterium to heat up and stay hot from continued fusion events. This was discovered by a Japanese researcher.
Other than stirring up a bunch of Slashdotters these patents will have no effect. Patents are an offensive weapon- unless you have a lot of money in back of you a patent is worthless.
.inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper tried to sue them he couldn't find a lawyer who would take the case; the only reason he won was because he stubbornly bucked not only the automobile makers, but the court system - which deeply resents people who don't have lawyers.
Back in the 70's there was a company which had a patent on memory used as a character generator. They threatened to sue everyone, even sent all of the computer manufacturers letters in an attempt to extort money from the manufacturers. Nobody even bothered to respond to the letters; the company was completely ignored, and the threats simply went away
Up until the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper the automobile industry had never paid one penny in royalties to an outside inventor; they simply stole whatever good ideas those inventors came up with, and otherwise ignored them.
When the
It took him many years, but he finally won money from the automakers. As far as I know he remains the only outside inventor to ever get royalties from that industry. HIS ROYALTIES WERE FOR A LEGITIMATE INVENTION WHICH WAS BLATANTLY STOLEN. That is hardly the case here: these guys have patents which would never stand up to any formal scrutiny at all. They are attempting to extort money from the gullible.
Ignore them and they will simply fade away.
Take a look at the orbital track of things like the space station: The station goes around the earth every 90 minutes or so while the earth rotates underneath it. The thing that gets you is the "or so" of the orbital period, and the fact that the rotational period of the earth changes slightly. As a result, given enough orbits, the station does a good job of being over most of the places on earth within its orbital inclination.
As a rule of thumb: if the orbital inclination is 30 degrees then the satellite will reach +/-30 degrees latitude on the earth.
In other words if you erect a stationary tower from the equator high enough satellites will run into it eventually.
To see how silly the idea of 'moving the elevator' is, imagine building a skyscraper which is designed to move out of the way if an airplane is heading toward it. Now make that skyscraper 23000 miles tall. The mechanical wave sent up by the moving base would be interesting, don't you think? At the speed of sound it would take about 32 hours to propagate the length of the elevator. The elevator would have to be a really low loss material for that wave not to dissipate in that time. Once the wave reaches the end how are you going to deal with the reflected energy coming back down the structure? What does that movement do to the people inside the elevator?
I am sorry to be asking these real world questions but those are exactly the issues that have to be addressed if someone is actually going to try building the elevator, or would people rather find out about the satellite problem by having the space station crash into your structure?
The whole elevator concept strikes me as elementary school engineering: "Lets build a giant robot to stomp on everybody!" "Koool, we could give it LASER beams for eyes so they could fry everyone else!" "Yeah, we could paint it purple with yellow lightning bolts on it and everything!"
If the elevator were attacked or sabotaged or breaks, 23000 miles of structural fiber coiling up around the equator won't do any damage will it?
No question that good technical management is both rare and valuable. It is rare because most managers are not very good technically. They seek to hide that fact from themselves by 'proving' that they are better than those they manage by denigrating the importance of technical ability. The thinking is: "If I can't do it, it must not be important."
People who are good technical managers seldom progress very far on the management scale: they are feared by the managers above them who will do anything they can to sabotage their careers.
I have a good friend who is a brilliant technical manager who got great work out of his team for an unnamed major computer manufacturer over a period of 15 years.. The new turd one level up from him purposely assigned his team a task that could not possibly succeed on a schedule no one could have met, When the inevitable failure occurred my friend was relieved, given an "unsatisfactory" performance rating (after 15 years of consistent "superior" ratings) and transferred to the corporate equivalent of Antarctica where he now supervises a couple of penguins.
There is a fundamental rule which corporations ought to follow: anyone who aspires to management should never be allowed to be a manager..
Because managers are largely replaceable the assumption that they make is that technical people are also interchangeable and easily replaceable.
This is simply not true, and it has to do with the Yin and Yang nature of reality. Engineering and Art are a Yin and Yang pair; at the heart of any art form there is a core of technical knowledge that the artist has to learn before they can make art. For example a painter needs to know how to mix paints and how brush strokes change the way art looks in light. Engineering is mostly technical information which the engineer needs to learn before he can do his job - however, in solving a technical problem there are literally millions of possible solutions to the problem. Some work better than others, and it is a matter of artistic choice which one the engineer picks. That is why leading edge solutions are called "State of the Art"
Technical things can be taught, Art can't be. An engineer who is good at creating state of the art solutions to problems people don't know how to solve, is as rare and valuable as an artist is; neither can be easily replaced.
There is a problem with the space elevator that I haven't seen discussed anywhere. If you have a space elevator you can't have any satellites at an altitude lower than or equal to the height of the elevator, since eventually they will run into the elevator with rather unpleasant results.
The current theories on the cause of antibiotic resistant bacteria place the blame on antibiotics and their overuse or under use. These theories utterly fail to explain one simple fact: most people don't come into the hospital with cases of drug resistant bacteria, they acquire those infections while in the hospitals. Some where in the hospital there are conditions which are breeding drug resistant bacteria.
I believe that the real cause of antibiotic resistant bacteria is far more prosaic than anyone has suspected. Before Doctors and Nurses give people injections they are quite properly taught to point the needle up, tap the syringe to force air bubbles to the top of the syringe, then squirt enough of the fluid out of the syringe to insure that the air is cleared from the device and the needle. This is utterly necessary to prevent the injection of air into the patient's blood system where it could cause a fatal embolism.
The antibiotic squirted out of the needle simply falls to the floor and creates a splatter. This splatter kills bacteria on the floor where it is intense enough to do so, but around the edges of the splatter surviving bacteria can breed resistant strains to every type of injectable antibiotic being used in the hospital.
When antibiotic splatter is combined with the modern janitorial practice of a one step floor cleaner, the floor becomes a giant Petri dish for the breeding of drug resistant bacteria. One step floor 'cleaners' can't possibly clean floors; they make the floor look clean and shiny, but since many of them are made of glycerin compounds they simply serve as a growth medium for the Petri dish.
So how do you solve the problem of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria? You do two things: first, keep splatters of antibiotics off of the floor by performing the air clearing of the syringes while the needle is still in the bottle of antibiotics - immediately after filling the syringe- and by using a spillage overflow catcher pan under the syringe while it is being filled. Second, sterilize the hospital floors with bleach and intense ultra violet light sources mounted on the undersides of push broom like devices.
These two simple things will prevent the Petri dish conditions on floors which breed drug resistant bacteria. Both of these steps have very low costs while having very large benefits. They are similar in importance to the now standard practice of surgeons washing their hands before surgery, which was adapted in the 19th century, and which has saved countless lives since.
The economic justification for all of these things is obvious, reducing drug resistant bacteria cases will save insurance companies far more money than the slightly greater costs of better floor cleaning and splatter prevention protocols would cost them.
People haven't changed much since primitive times. On a day after day basis it was not possible to work on hunting more than 4 to 6 hours a day. The same remains true today, the brain can only concentrate for so long.
As the article mentions much of what appears to be 'wasted' time is really subconscious creative time.
In my case I can't design a computer consciously; I bring in the requirements, I talk about them with other engineers, and then I relax, letting my subconscious work on the problem. When it is ready it hands me a completed design. I just transcribe it into the layout program. The whole process is more or less effortless.
It is reasonable to expect that a new car that you buy will last 100,000 miles with no major malfunctions. This is because everything in a car is basically designed (as much as possible) with a 100% safety margin. For example: drive trains can usually handle twice as much power as the engine can produce etc. Experience has shown that this is the way to do engineering of something which can be expected to work reliably.
However race car drivers are pleased if they can get 500 miles out of a race car when the performance is pushing the limits of what the machinery can do.
The shuttle is to a high performance jet fighter what a 21st century Formula 1 car is to a 1947 Ford. The shuttle is by a huge margin the highest performance reusable vehicle every built by anybody anywhere at anytime. There is nothing else even close.- with the possible exception of the Soviet version of the shuttle - which was never flown manned.
Can we make the shuttle as safe as a passenger jet? Absolutely, we know how to do that. What we don't know how to do is make it that safe and still be light enough to get off the ground, let alone lift a crew and cargo into orbit.
Space flight is dangerous, but so was sailing across the ocean in wooden boats - where would we be today if no one had ever possssed the courage to do that?
These are first order "back of the envelope" calculations about the effects of making things small.
.222 Hp. Fuel consumption at this level would be one thousandth of that of the full size engine. Since the fuel tank is also one thousandth of the size of the full size vehicle one might be tempted to think that the distance between fill ups would be the same.
For reasons which will become apparent as you read this I doubt that true nano scale weapons will ever exist. What could possibly be built are micro
scale robotic devices of a non self replicating type which could possibly be used as weapons. Let us find out how practical they might be.
Let us start by examining the effects of scaling on things. We'll start with my Nissan Maxima and reduce it in size by a factor of ten. Instead of being about 17 feet long the scaled car will be about 1.7 feet long. Instead of weighing about 3000 lbs it will weigh about 3 lbs. Why is that? The answer is that the mass of a scaled object is proportional to its volume - which goes as the cube of the dimensional ratio. Ten times as long, ten times as wide, ten times as high has 1000 times the volume.
The scaled engine would be 3 cc in displacement instead of 3000 cc. Instead of 222 Hp it would produce
However, the fuel consumption of the smaller vehicle is proportionally greater. Why? The smaller vehicle is one thousandth the weight but the frontal area of the vehicle - the size of which determines the drag - is one hundredth of that of the larger vehicle. Thus at the same speed the drag of the smaller vehicle is proportionally ten times as great as the larger vehicle.
The optimal speed of the smaller vehicle is lower than that of the larger vehicle. Because drag goes as the square of the velocity, one thousandth of
the fuel consumption will drive the smaller vehicle at a speed which is about 32% of the speed of the larger car and its range will also be about
32% of the full sized car's range.
If we tried to make a car scaled down by a factor of 100 its speed and range would both be only one tenth (square root of a scale factor of 100) that of a full size car. We are forced to conclude that the product of speed and range of any vehicle with an internal fuel supply will scale directly with
the scale factor.
For example reducing the size of a jet plane by a factor of 100 makes it fly at one tenth the speed and one tenth as far. By the time we scale to nano
sizes we have objects which won't go very far or very fast. A nano device is an exceptionally crappy weapon delivery system compared to a full sized device; it can only move slowly, and it can't go very far.
However there are other things which occur which would effect our attempt to simply scale an engine down in size. The first of these is the change in
heat loss. In simplest terms the rate of heat production is proportional to the volume of a heat source, which means that heat production scales with the cube of the scale factor, but heat loss is proportional to the surface area of the object which scales as the square of the scaling factor.
A smaller engine requires much less of a cooling system than a large engine does, if the engine is small enough it doesn't require a cooling system at all - it will lose heat naturally fast enough without one.
Because of the square - cube relationship for heat loss there is a minimum size flame which is possible. A small ball of flame loses heat faster than a large one. If a ball of flame is too small it can't produce enough heat from internal combustion to maintain its temperature above the ignition point, and the flame can't exist.
This means that if we try to scale our engine far enough it will refuse to run, it will lose heat too fast for the fuel to burn. Even making the engine out of heat resistive materials like ceramics only works to a certain size;
eventually the heat loss will keep things from burning.
This is part of the reason that biological cells use c
As a contractor who works at JSC, I can assure you that NASA is in charge; neither we nor our companies have any say accept for: "Yes sir". If the contractors are in charge then why did Lockheed, which had been at JSC for more than 40 years, lose the ESCG contract to Jacobs Engineering? Contractors exist because the space agency can get rid of both the companies and the individuals easily; firing a government employee is very difficult.
Contractors in charge is a ridiculous thing to say. From the inside NASA's biggest problem is that during the space race technical people who knew how to accomplish technical tasks were picked to lead and manage the agency at all levels; now most NASA divisions have "professional managers" who couldn't personally build and fly a model rocket - let alone make critical decisions about the real thing. It is these non technical "professional managers" who are the "NASA cultural problem" you have heard so much about. Such people have been directly responsible for most of NASA's technical disasters.
Anyone who has knowledge of a Federal Felony is REQUIRED by law to report that information to federal law enforcement.. Failure to do so makes the person having the knowledge an indictable co-conspirator.
I found out about this several years ago when the company I was working for attempted to get me to file a fraudulent patent application.
Never complain to a company CEO about something like this; they will simply fire you. Always go directly to the Feds. If you do so you are protected by the Federal Whistle blower statutes. Company CEO's involved in illegal activities start gasping for air when they find out the Feds are involved.
The best hope of man kind long term is to burn up as much uranium and plutonium as possible - if there are no nuclear fuels, there won't be any nuclear war.This project not only burns up fuel, it gets it off of the planet - where we don't have to deal with the waste.
Before it is activated the nuclear fuels are not very radioactive so a crash on takeoff doesn't do much.
If we translate the original study into physical terms the stupidity involved becomes obvious.
Suppose that you can pick up 400 lbs. If you pick up 200 lbs, you can now only pick up an additional 200 lbs.
If I now held this up as proof that weight lifting makes you weaker, everyone would quite properly say that I was an idiot for doing so.
That is exactly what this research has done; you only have so much mental capacity, if you use some of it to read an email, the remaining capacity is less than your maximum.
Evidently the original researcher read so many emails that his IQ (which is a measure of intellectual strength) was reduced to the level of a chimp.
Please see my post earlier - the official explanation is probably the correct one.
As to the managment think problems at the root of shuttle disasters, the Columbia is another classic example of it. The shuttle was getting foam impacts since the very first flight (whirr click). This was NEVER safe - it needed to be corrected - instead it was accepted as 'normal' and ignored.Then for politically correct reasons the formulation of the foam was changed which roughly trippled the number of foam impact incidents. The engineers knew that it was dangerous and said so, but the managers won the argument - they weren't right but they thought they were because of the intellecutal falacy I outlined elsewhere. Same thing happened in the Challenger - the engineers were right but lost the argument to a manager.
This thread is an excellent example of the Internet being used correctly as a communication medium; everyone knows more now than they did at the start of the thread. Great work evrybody.
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No argument there! Of course this would not have been news to the tank designers either.
It may have been. There is currently a discussion between various groups at NASA on this very subject - is there some minimum value of spark energy which is safe in a pure oxygen athmosphere? We say no, others say there is.
This entire thread is highly instructive of how memory and the human brain work in the real world: When I read the original reports about a year and a half ago I knew and understood the cause of the actual accident - but I remembered the dangerous design of the tank better than I did the pedestrian causes of the actual incident. Why? as a design engineer the design problems were of more interest to me. Over time I forgot the actual cause of the incident and substituted what I did remember about it.
Learn from this error lest it happens to you at some point.As you get older this happens more since you have much more information stored as an older person than you do as a young person. This makes you slower to respond (it takes longer to search through more stuff), and the chances of 'bit errors' increase with the number of bits stored.
Nevertheless my original point can be modified to: "it was a poor design decision to have live electrical circuits inside of a LOX tank".
I think most of us can agree with that.
Thanks for the additional data. I had read this a year and a half ago and had forgotten it.
In LOX the wires themselves in the precense of a spark can ignite. This is dependant upon the size of the spark and the size of the wires; does the wire lose heat to the LOX bath faster than the combustion can provide it? If so there is no ignition of the wire - if not then the wire can ignite.
Breaking a wire which is carrying a current is one of the best ways we have found of causing a fire.
Regardless, the design of the LOX tank was a disaster waiting to happen: fly it enough and it will blow up.
The conclusion we have reached in testing is that it is not safe to spark in pure oxygen.
Yes the tank blew up. This could have happened either way - just statistical chance. Basing a conclusion on one test is rather dangerous.
Look, I am not interested in arguing - why? An argument is the intellectual equivalent of a fight. Fights do NOT go to the person who is right or wrong - they go to the person who is the best fighter.
This is the root of the basic intellectual falacy which pervades the academic world - that the winner of an argument is the person who is right.
I really understand fighting - I am a certified experet in the subject - so I know what a waste of time fighting is: people get hurt, and nothing gets achieved.
By the way the statement that sparks can cause ignition in LOX soaked material is not a theory - it is an observed fact - easily duplicated, verified and confirmed.
They didn't use artificial gravity to seperate the LOX; quite the opposite.
In fact, in zero gravity LOX tends to divide up into regions of gas and liquid. If the gas happens to float past the sensor, then they get an incorrect reading of the density, and hence they don't know how much is in there. This was a big problem on previous flights. Stirring the tank mixes it all up and makes it the same density; allowing a reliable reading to be taken.
Yes and no. In zero g the bubbles and liquid have no reason to separate. In a gravity field the bubbles float just like the do in water - so you get a liquid without voids in it - which you can measure.
Aluminum, particularly bulk aluminum is *not* combustible in LOX. It's used on the Space Shuttle main tank fer heavens sake!
Aluminum will burn in air if there is enough energy to break through the surface layer of aluminum oxide which builds up on the surface. In fact aluminum is so reactive with oxygen that this layer forms instantly when the metal is exposed to oxygen. Anything which will burn in air will really burn in LOX.
Graphite can't really burn either; for it to burn it needs to reach ~3000K, and the LOX is pretty keen on it not reaching that temperature.
There was an experiment where a scientist used LOX and charcoal to see how fast it would burn - it esentially flashed in less than a second. DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS. IT IS RIDICULOUSLY DANGEROUS. Your statement is like saying Nitro Glycerin is safe to have in your house. NOTE FOR THE YOUNG AND INEXPERIENCED: DO NOT STORE NITRO GLYCERIN IN YOUR HOUSE. IT WILL BLOW UP AND KILL YOU!!!
Provided the brushes are carefully chosen, this need not be a problem.
This is exactly the sort of thinking which resulted in the original disaster. Brushes are mechanical devices - there is inductance in a motor - when the brush connection is broken the inductance of the motor will cause a spark. We have studied the ignition properties of such sparks in LOX in my group. There is a statistical probability of a given spark igniting the brush material.
That's not actually what caused the explosion anyway.
During testing a relay welded itself shut due to incorrect voltages. In flight, the wiring overheated- and the insulation burnt in the LOX. That caused the LOX tank to overpressure, and it blew away half the side of the vehicle
That is the official theory which was reached by people who knew nothing about the spark ignition problem. The voltage in the GFE power supply used in the test was not enough to weld contacts - the LOX would have cooled the wires so that they wouldn't have reached ignition temperature. The explosion didn't happen until the tank was stirred. The thinking behind reaching that official theory was "Well none of the other tanks blew up so the design was OK so it must have been someing which was done to that particular tank that caused the problem."
Thanks for demonstrating the "Whirr click, whirr click " mind set to everyone.
Good idea, the problem you need to solve with it is potential for leakage from the fittings.
I think I would use a small Gamma emitter with a radiation sensor to measure absorbtion instead of sonar, since bubbles could affect the sonar.
i would have suggested an external motor with magnetic coupling to an internal stirring blade - similar to what is done in chemistry labs.
Measuring how long the stirrer takes to come up to speed tells you the mass of what you are accelerating.
I believe he has powered it up, and it does work.
I had occasion to look at the plans for the oxygen tank that blew up on Apollo 13. There is no great mystery why it blew up, the mystery is why they didn't all blow up.
Trying to figure out how much is left in a liquid oxygen tank in outer space is not an easy task. If you wanted to know that answer here on earth you would weigh the tank - which obviously won't work in free fall.
The idea they came up with was to have a sensor in the tank that could measure the level by resistive means. In order to have a 'level' to measure they had to create an artificial gravity inside the tank by swirling the contents with an internal electric motor and a blade. In the movie "Apollo 13" one of the astronauts talks about "stirring the O2 tank", that is what he is talking about.
Consider what this all means: you have a tank full of liquid Oxygen, you have several pounds of highly combustible aluminum and graphite parts which are soaked in liquid Oxygen, and you have a DC motor with brushes sparking up a storm inside the tank. Another name for such a combination is a "bomb".
NASA's - management driven - engineering has long been full of "Whir click, whir click - OK, Russian Roulette is flight certified as safe" thinking. Nobody does a "how could this all go wrong" analysis.
An engineer I work with at JSC has an actual - legally obtained Space Shuttle flight computer. The government declared it surplus, and he bought it from the surplus section, so he has the paperwork documenting that he is the legal owner. His box is an actual flight unit, which was in space, not a ground test unit or engineering sample. He has the paperwork documenting its complete history.
Every once in a while you can find some incredible things in government surplus.