Tamiflu has not been shown to work at all in the prevention or reduction of flu symptoms for the large majority of adults. Some groups with identifiable immunodeficiencies or the elderly find modest, but significant, relief. We cannot slow an epidemic at all with Tamiflu or antivirals for the large majority of healthy adults.
The nature of this research may be fairly well indicated by the other papers he is connected to, and there is nothing particularly cutting edge about them. This isn't a criticism- it is a statement that the nature of this research is a) readily accessible by those who wish to pursue it, and b) publishing the recent research might merely be a less important follow-on to the past published work.
To the commentator who brought up the Fermi paradox, this is exactly correct. If someone is sufficiently motivated, a disaster could have been wrought long ago; there is really nothing but undergraduate molecular and microbiology skills, moderate investments in equipment, and sheer sociopathy standing between them and 'success'. That this hasn't happened, despite its relative ease for the motivated group, leaves only a few rational conclusions possible: that this is harder than it looks (possible, but not probable), that the DHS is fantastically effective at detecting and stopping efforts in secrecy (laughable), or these "terrorists" we spend so much money and cultural capital on stopping simply don't exist (most likely).
...and then place calls to faraway lands or 1-900 numbers. You could probably rack up tens of thousands of dollars in phone or data costs by the time they realized what was going on. Maybe even more...
Running these cellular cards is not difficult. You could also read where it is SMSing the GPS info to...and modify the send positions that are well away from wherever you are. Perhaps even send the location of the police, DEA, FBI, local Republican campaign offices, church...
Then drop the package with the relay off in a nice area in the middle of a very public space and film the escapades with an HD cam.
And remember that literally thousands of perfectly safe Zeppelin inflations were effected prior to the Hindenburg, without a huge amount of safety protocol beyond minimal training and making sure common sense and non-ferritic tools were used in the vicinity of the work.
Hydrogen welding gas is far, far cheaper than helium, available in much larger tanks, and is quite safe. It's used for preheating in industrial welding.
Silly. Even if a pilot had a hard time seeing it (which is likely), it could also be another airplane. Your chanced of hitting it are about the same as if it were another airplane. In other words, you worry about something a lot more threatening, like lightning.
Basically, the reason we don't see more mid-airs in sparse airspace (away from established, busy airspace) isn't so much that pilots are good at picking out other unannounced aircraft, but because it is so unlikely. Seriously. The FAA and the Force separately did studies that indicated a pilot might see a head on collision target well under 50% of the time unless the pilot was vigilant in airspace near an airport or the airspace was announced (radio presence).
Actually, the images streamed at 15 hz well before the unit was thrown. The 20 minutes was for a 3d reconstruction of available images from just a few minutes' random roaming through the apartment. The raw images recorded everything- the rotation of the ball as it was thrown, etc. It used a then-power-hungry 900 MHz link and was severely bandwidth limited. Today, the entire affair could be accomplished at significantly higher frame rates or resolution. We toyed with 1D image planes as well to improve TX speed, but at the time, the fastest practical desktops presented the real-time practicality limit for the 2D reconstruction times. Nowadays, this would not likely be the case. The other interesting thing was the IR visibility. The thing could be thrown into a 100% space and successfully map the place with a small invisible LED for illumination, or be able to filter out heat to look for cooler (victims) in simulated fire rescue applications. Finally, with proper skill in getting a good spin, the ball could be thrown up in the air and give excellent 3D views from one or more vantages of the area around the thrower. We were going to launch it from a tennis ball launcher. Never managed to.
This sort of stuff is handy for a variety of industrial and commercial purposes- not just the pimple-faced military fantasies certain people seem to think of first.
Pipe inspection, fire fighting, biological research, and even home videography.
In the 90's, several programs developed artillery shells that mapped the terrain the shells flew over to a surprisingly usable degree of resolution. There are a lot of images available from these sorts of tests online via Google.
In addition, I helped design a camera that was packaged in a ball. The ball was thrown into a building, and a motorized counterweight moved the ball around more or less randomly. The transmitted video from two separate cameras was used to construct striped images of the interior (rolling down halls, into rooms, under tables, down stairs). Not just any images, however- stripes that overlapped from different vantage points, even points fairly close together, were used to create a 3D model of the environs as much as possible- which turned out to be a surprising percentage (~20% of a very well-mapped apartment became viewable in 3D within about 20 minutes of throwing the ball in through a window).
Seriously. When I take my other half to visit my parents, it costs only slightly more (as in about 15% more than flying commercial coach), takes less time (5 hours instead of 7), and is a heck of a lot more interesting, fun, and memorable. No TSA Stasi involved. All the toothpaste and shampoo ya wanna carry. And decent home-cooked food. And wayyyy more comfortable seats. Less stress.
People are nuts when they obsess on "terrorists" around every corner. If they existed in numbers that were worth even casually thinking about, we would see the results. We don't. Ergo...one could (should) argue that there are other things more worthy of worry. In any 7 1/2 month period in NYC alone, there are more drunk driving victims than victims of 9-11. Fear inc. has a hold on the minds of the lowest common denominator's huevos, and my low expectations of most political outcomes don't anticipate this to change any time soon.
The fact is that in the seven months after "9-11", more people died from *drunk driving* in NYC than from the terrorist attack. Did't even take a week and a half on a national basis.
I don't fly commercially anymore unless it's out of the country. I fly my plane. It costs less for a nice plane than a large SUV, costs about 50% more than flying coach in most cases when I fly with my half, is a heck of a lot more interesting and fun on the way than sitting in a stinky spam can commercial jet, and gets me exactly where I want to go rather than some lemming farm like LAX or DIA. And there are zero restrictions.
The higher latent heat is a large detriment to ethanol as a fuel, not a benefit. As for stoichiometry, ditto. You need a larger volume of ethanol per volume of air (or mass for mass) to balance the equation. Higher compression does two things: improves thermal efficiency, and increases the amount of fuel you can burn per stroke (stuffing more molecules in the cylinder). The thermal efficiency boost *absolutely* does not overcome the latent heat disadvantage of the alcohol. The ability to stuff more reactive molecules in each stroke does not contribute to efficiency. Dragsters (and others) use alcohol because it cools the burn temps (at the expense of efficiency) while allowing specific power to increase. Neither of these things improves overall efficiency. Only power.
"Here are some facts?" Good lord, don't embarrass yourself, especially when you don't know a great deal about what you are talking about. A properly designed ethanol engine will not get better volumetric or mass fuel efficiency than with gasoline. It has 1/3 less energy per gallon, and around 38% less energy per kilo. It does not derive the ability to burn in an Otto cycle with a higher compression ratio via a higher vapor pressure. Completely unrelated. A Diesel cycle doesn't even have these limitations.
As for the numbered items, you are partially correct in a few areas. However, when the most needy nations grow grain, they do not use the same high intensity methods used in the US or Europe...and they starve even if they grow it themselves. If they did, fine- that requires a) political stability to encourage eye-poppingly large investments in infrastructure over extended periods of time, and b) massive land reforms on a scale that would make large tracts of the surface of the earth culturally or politically unrecognizeable. This didn't used to be true, but with arable land in short supply, huge increases in urban populations, and a complete lack of the political stability necessary to entertain thoughts of a sustainable agriculture program like the one America takes for granted, the future looks very dim indeed.
The idea that higher food prices will level the playing field is correct. To make the leap that it will cause local economies to replace the supply is complete, demonstrable tripe...from history, not speculation.
....many times. If you read the original NREL attempts, the key to remember is that the catalysts use any electron donors, including a simple energized grid, to accomplish the electrolysis. The only interesting twist here is that the researchers have eliminated the energized grid and replaced it with a doped silicon wafer. The conversion efficiency is *exactly* what you would expect from such an approach. In short, the approach is to use something closely resembling a conventional solar cell, deposit catalyst material in intimate contact on either side, and voila...you have a solar cell providing donor electrons at ~20% efficiency to a catalyst operating at ~30% efficiency, yielding around 5% efficiency overall.
This is a neat trick, using apparently more stable catalysts than before, but hardly a breakthrough when a person can use the same catalysts and an energized grid to yield ~90%+ efficiency in electrons and the same 30% efficiency for the electrolysis part, yielding 27% overall efficiency. For that matter, direct electrolysis can yield 50%-80% efficiencies from an energy source.
This is part of a larger shell game, as are most "breakthroughs". Read the papers. Read the history of the principals. The rest is hype.
The efficiency of flight is limited by thermodynamics of an actuator surface. Nobody has yet been able to figure out how to pump (change momentum of) air for any trip length that approaches that of terrestrial transportation without rather huge actuator surface sizes. It is a serious performance box to contend with. Pumping air has been a seriously energy intensive endeavor from the start.
This was done years ago with two 360 degree panorama cams. The two spherical panoramic images gave reasonably convincing 3D imaging for a field of view of at least 160 degrees. This means you could dart your eyes anywhere in this field of view with acceptable results. To render subjects outside of this field of view, you had to reformat the subject at a particular area to match the two images well enough to allow viewing. This allowed viewing out to a FOV of nearly 180 degrees. Two pics. A bit of simple software to transform the spherical image to a panorama. Worked with video and stills.
Nice hobby project here, but the old way worked better in many ways. Lots of references on the web.
If there were terrorists who would want to blow all the Americans up, or even several of you, you'd be dead. This doesn't appear to be happening to Americans. Ergo....
The larger question is: does living in a fantasy world, where there are restrictions on who gets to know how the world really works (and profit from it), champion any ethical arguments anyone cares to discuss? If everyone lived with perfect access to information, could we support our world population? Are there "universal" beneficial imperatives as a species at least to have information asymmetries where they allow one subpopulation to exploit resources (and other populations) asymmetrically, and allow tech development and social systems where greater population and "standard of living" is possible for all? Is there such thing as a stable imbalance of information that maximizes any argued benefit, or does a constant process of empire and dismemberment more efficiently keep inevitable corruption form creating collapses?
These leak things are interesting. How long will it be, for example, before a site could openly and safely solicit compromising information...open corporate espionage, whistleblowing, etc. At the moment, the information is unsolicited and broad. What about an infrastructure that could solicit information for a specific purpose...like patent breaking etc is currently done? It cuts both ways. Imagine how it could change politics. I can only imagine privacy will largely become a thing of affluence, and a tool tool wield more broadly and cruelly in the information asymmetry arms race market.
Sigh. Say there were 40 persons directly managing the crisis. Add in a few hundred bucks an hour for the high tech wonder bread vans. It all ads up to perhaps $50k. So if a group of terrorists place 25,000 $4 toys in public, then we will spend trillion borrowed dollars. Let's go over the numbers again: a $100,000 investment could cost us a trillion dollars. As in bankrupt us. As in we would start translating our street signs into chinese.
Ughhh. Wrong. White paints can rival some of te darkest paints for high emissivity. The critical issue is the alpha to epsilon ratio, or the ratio of absorption to emission. I do this for a living...the black is likely used to minimize reflection. In other words, to remain optically stealthy. That's it. Heck, regular white appliance epoxy comes close to.94 emissivity with only around.20 absorptivity. It's gleaming white, and comes close to fancy black coatings by Lockheed or others. The difference? I can see the mission from 300 miles away after launch with a small celestron telescope with no problem...just look for the large flash. If it were black, I doubt I'd ever find it downrange. Nothing fancy or mysterious about hwy they are doing this. The last thing they want is a mission making Iridium-like flashes all over the place. It's a significant part of the design for a lot of these satellites.
Someone I know in the TSA told me that the scanners cannot see past moisture, and that elderly, female, and very young travelers effectively block the scanner around the crotch area. This is apparently part of their training as well.
The answer: install a slightly moist maxi thin just before going through the line, get rid of afterwards.
Some friends and I started a TSA Bingo game a couple years ago. a 4x4 grid of banned items. The winner gets an open tab for a year at the neighborhood brewpub (very dangerous). In any case, I now have three in a row with the toner thing. My card has "inkjet ink", which was close enough.
I cannot bring my mini inkjet with me anymore when I travel for work. in fact, I have no way other than to waste my time using Kinko's et al.
None of this makes us any safer. We were practically incontinent due to laughing when we made these ridiculous bingo cards. How absurd!
Yet as soon as some "official" decides to commit the absurd, it becomes acceptable, and we all feel so googly safe, and say, "geez, I have nothing to hide, therefore...."
Exactly. The MBA-endowed, manically optimistic, pathetically narcissistic rich of the world will always cornucopians. The poor of the world will always be the unfortunate discarded husks that cannibalize the resources from under their feet for the rich. But the tectonic plates simply crawl along.
So it's censorship. Some private organization deals China a tepid slap with a stuffy award. The Chinese public is likely about as concerned about this as the willfull censorship we enforce on ourselves.
After all, the stability of the USA is allegedly threatened by the same footage of our imperial wars abroad that any Italian or French citizen gets on the nightly news. Ours is simply a familiar, comfortng, purposeful censorship that preserves our freedoms and markets. It's for our children, right?
As for China rising, so be it. We rose too. They happen to be in that awkward pubescent stage where their engineers barely know enough to build efficient infrastructure in a centrally controlled economy, where corruption isn't merely rampant, but something to aspire to for their best political class, engineers and scientists (read the retractions in SCIENCE and NATURE lately? more of that to come...). They will get better- and soon they'll be able to perfect their empire on the tasty vulnerable pockets of resources in the world in the same way the USA nearly perfected half a century ago.
Cry me a river. The affluence isn't coming back. The censorship isn't going away. The wars won't end until we are broke. Our parents and grandparents and ourselves have made that absolutely assured. There will come a tme when it will be better on average to seek other places to raise a famly and call home.
Outrage at China? Keep leaving the dream, folks. Hope indignance works for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Tamiflu has not been shown to work at all in the prevention or reduction of flu symptoms for the large majority of adults. Some groups with identifiable immunodeficiencies or the elderly find modest, but significant, relief. We cannot slow an epidemic at all with Tamiflu or antivirals for the large majority of healthy adults.
The nature of this research may be fairly well indicated by the other papers he is connected to, and there is nothing particularly cutting edge about them. This isn't a criticism- it is a statement that the nature of this research is a) readily accessible by those who wish to pursue it, and b) publishing the recent research might merely be a less important follow-on to the past published work.
To the commentator who brought up the Fermi paradox, this is exactly correct. If someone is sufficiently motivated, a disaster could have been wrought long ago; there is really nothing but undergraduate molecular and microbiology skills, moderate investments in equipment, and sheer sociopathy standing between them and 'success'. That this hasn't happened, despite its relative ease for the motivated group, leaves only a few rational conclusions possible: that this is harder than it looks (possible, but not probable), that the DHS is fantastically effective at detecting and stopping efforts in secrecy (laughable), or these "terrorists" we spend so much money and cultural capital on stopping simply don't exist (most likely).
...and then place calls to faraway lands or 1-900 numbers. You could probably rack up tens of thousands of dollars in phone or data costs by the time they realized what was going on. Maybe even more...
Running these cellular cards is not difficult. You could also read where it is SMSing the GPS info to...and modify the send positions that are well away from wherever you are. Perhaps even send the location of the police, DEA, FBI, local Republican campaign offices, church...
Then drop the package with the relay off in a nice area in the middle of a very public space and film the escapades with an HD cam.
Performance art.
And remember that literally thousands of perfectly safe Zeppelin inflations were effected prior to the Hindenburg, without a huge amount of safety protocol beyond minimal training and making sure common sense and non-ferritic tools were used in the vicinity of the work.
Hydrogen welding gas is far, far cheaper than helium, available in much larger tanks, and is quite safe. It's used for preheating in industrial welding.
Silly. Even if a pilot had a hard time seeing it (which is likely), it could also be another airplane. Your chanced of hitting it are about the same as if it were another airplane. In other words, you worry about something a lot more threatening, like lightning.
Basically, the reason we don't see more mid-airs in sparse airspace (away from established, busy airspace) isn't so much that pilots are good at picking out other unannounced aircraft, but because it is so unlikely. Seriously. The FAA and the Force separately did studies that indicated a pilot might see a head on collision target well under 50% of the time unless the pilot was vigilant in airspace near an airport or the airspace was announced (radio presence).
This fact should not scare you.
Actually, diatomic hydrogen is less permeable than monatomic helium. http://usa.dupontteijinfilms.com/informationcenter/downloads/Chemical_Properties.pdf
Actually, the images streamed at 15 hz well before the unit was thrown. The 20 minutes was for a 3d reconstruction of available images from just a few minutes' random roaming through the apartment. The raw images recorded everything- the rotation of the ball as it was thrown, etc. It used a then-power-hungry 900 MHz link and was severely bandwidth limited. Today, the entire affair could be accomplished at significantly higher frame rates or resolution. We toyed with 1D image planes as well to improve TX speed, but at the time, the fastest practical desktops presented the real-time practicality limit for the 2D reconstruction times. Nowadays, this would not likely be the case. The other interesting thing was the IR visibility. The thing could be thrown into a 100% space and successfully map the place with a small invisible LED for illumination, or be able to filter out heat to look for cooler (victims) in simulated fire rescue applications. Finally, with proper skill in getting a good spin, the ball could be thrown up in the air and give excellent 3D views from one or more vantages of the area around the thrower. We were going to launch it from a tennis ball launcher. Never managed to.
This sort of stuff is handy for a variety of industrial and commercial purposes- not just the pimple-faced military fantasies certain people seem to think of first.
Pipe inspection, fire fighting, biological research, and even home videography.
In the 90's, several programs developed artillery shells that mapped the terrain the shells flew over to a surprisingly usable degree of resolution. There are a lot of images available from these sorts of tests online via Google.
In addition, I helped design a camera that was packaged in a ball. The ball was thrown into a building, and a motorized counterweight moved the ball around more or less randomly. The transmitted video from two separate cameras was used to construct striped images of the interior (rolling down halls, into rooms, under tables, down stairs). Not just any images, however- stripes that overlapped from different vantage points, even points fairly close together, were used to create a 3D model of the environs as much as possible- which turned out to be a surprising percentage (~20% of a very well-mapped apartment became viewable in 3D within about 20 minutes of throwing the ball in through a window).
Seriously. When I take my other half to visit my parents, it costs only slightly more (as in about 15% more than flying commercial coach), takes less time (5 hours instead of 7), and is a heck of a lot more interesting, fun, and memorable. No TSA Stasi involved. All the toothpaste and shampoo ya wanna carry. And decent home-cooked food. And wayyyy more comfortable seats. Less stress.
People are nuts when they obsess on "terrorists" around every corner. If they existed in numbers that were worth even casually thinking about, we would see the results. We don't. Ergo...one could (should) argue that there are other things more worthy of worry. In any 7 1/2 month period in NYC alone, there are more drunk driving victims than victims of 9-11. Fear inc. has a hold on the minds of the lowest common denominator's huevos, and my low expectations of most political outcomes don't anticipate this to change any time soon.
The fact is that in the seven months after "9-11", more people died from *drunk driving* in NYC than from the terrorist attack. Did't even take a week and a half on a national basis.
I don't fly commercially anymore unless it's out of the country. I fly my plane. It costs less for a nice plane than a large SUV, costs about 50% more than flying coach in most cases when I fly with my half, is a heck of a lot more interesting and fun on the way than sitting in a stinky spam can commercial jet, and gets me exactly where I want to go rather than some lemming farm like LAX or DIA. And there are zero restrictions.
Stop the silliness.
Ethanol does not burn faster. It burns a lot slower. It also burns slightly cooler, not hotter.
The higher latent heat is a large detriment to ethanol as a fuel, not a benefit. As for stoichiometry, ditto. You need a larger volume of ethanol per volume of air (or mass for mass) to balance the equation. Higher compression does two things: improves thermal efficiency, and increases the amount of fuel you can burn per stroke (stuffing more molecules in the cylinder). The thermal efficiency boost *absolutely* does not overcome the latent heat disadvantage of the alcohol. The ability to stuff more reactive molecules in each stroke does not contribute to efficiency. Dragsters (and others) use alcohol because it cools the burn temps (at the expense of efficiency) while allowing specific power to increase. Neither of these things improves overall efficiency. Only power.
"Here are some facts?" Good lord, don't embarrass yourself, especially when you don't know a great deal about what you are talking about.
A properly designed ethanol engine will not get better volumetric or mass fuel efficiency than with gasoline. It has 1/3 less energy per gallon, and around 38% less energy per kilo. It does not derive the ability to burn in an Otto cycle with a higher compression ratio via a higher vapor pressure. Completely unrelated. A Diesel cycle doesn't even have these limitations.
As for the numbered items, you are partially correct in a few areas. However, when the most needy nations grow grain, they do not use the same high intensity methods used in the US or Europe...and they starve even if they grow it themselves. If they did, fine- that requires a) political stability to encourage eye-poppingly large investments in infrastructure over extended periods of time, and b) massive land reforms on a scale that would make large tracts of the surface of the earth culturally or politically unrecognizeable. This didn't used to be true, but with arable land in short supply, huge increases in urban populations, and a complete lack of the political stability necessary to entertain thoughts of a sustainable agriculture program like the one America takes for granted, the future looks very dim indeed.
The idea that higher food prices will level the playing field is correct. To make the leap that it will cause local economies to replace the supply is complete, demonstrable tripe...from history, not speculation.
....many times. If you read the original NREL attempts, the key to remember is that the catalysts use any electron donors, including a simple energized grid, to accomplish the electrolysis. The only interesting twist here is that the researchers have eliminated the energized grid and replaced it with a doped silicon wafer. The conversion efficiency is *exactly* what you would expect from such an approach. In short, the approach is to use something closely resembling a conventional solar cell, deposit catalyst material in intimate contact on either side, and voila...you have a solar cell providing donor electrons at ~20% efficiency to a catalyst operating at ~30% efficiency, yielding around 5% efficiency overall.
This is a neat trick, using apparently more stable catalysts than before, but hardly a breakthrough when a person can use the same catalysts and an energized grid to yield ~90%+ efficiency in electrons and the same 30% efficiency for the electrolysis part, yielding 27% overall efficiency. For that matter, direct electrolysis can yield 50%-80% efficiencies from an energy source.
This is part of a larger shell game, as are most "breakthroughs". Read the papers. Read the history of the principals. The rest is hype.
The efficiency of flight is limited by thermodynamics of an actuator surface. Nobody has yet been able to figure out how to pump (change momentum of) air for any trip length that approaches that of terrestrial transportation without rather huge actuator surface sizes. It is a serious performance box to contend with. Pumping air has been a seriously energy intensive endeavor from the start.
This was done years ago with two 360 degree panorama cams. The two spherical panoramic images gave reasonably convincing 3D imaging for a field of view of at least 160 degrees. This means you could dart your eyes anywhere in this field of view with acceptable results. To render subjects outside of this field of view, you had to reformat the subject at a particular area to match the two images well enough to allow viewing. This allowed viewing out to a FOV of nearly 180 degrees. Two pics. A bit of simple software to transform the spherical image to a panorama. Worked with video and stills.
Nice hobby project here, but the old way worked better in many ways. Lots of references on the web.
If there were terrorists who would want to blow all the Americans up, or even several of you, you'd be dead. This doesn't appear to be happening to Americans. Ergo....
The larger question is: does living in a fantasy world, where there are restrictions on who gets to know how the world really works (and profit from it), champion any ethical arguments anyone cares to discuss? If everyone lived with perfect access to information, could we support our world population? Are there "universal" beneficial imperatives as a species at least to have information asymmetries where they allow one subpopulation to exploit resources (and other populations) asymmetrically, and allow tech development and social systems where greater population and "standard of living" is possible for all? Is there such thing as a stable imbalance of information that maximizes any argued benefit, or does a constant process of empire and dismemberment more efficiently keep inevitable corruption form creating collapses?
These leak things are interesting. How long will it be, for example, before a site could openly and safely solicit compromising information...open corporate espionage, whistleblowing, etc. At the moment, the information is unsolicited and broad. What about an infrastructure that could solicit information for a specific purpose...like patent breaking etc is currently done? It cuts both ways. Imagine how it could change politics. I can only imagine privacy will largely become a thing of affluence, and a tool tool wield more broadly and cruelly in the information asymmetry arms race market.
Sigh. Say there were 40 persons directly managing the crisis. Add in a few hundred bucks an hour for the high tech wonder bread vans. It all ads up to perhaps $50k. So if a group of terrorists place 25,000 $4 toys in public, then we will spend trillion borrowed dollars. Let's go over the numbers again: a $100,000 investment could cost us a trillion dollars. As in bankrupt us. As in we would start translating our street signs into chinese.
Good luck, folks.
Ughhh. Wrong. White paints can rival some of te darkest paints for high emissivity. The critical issue is the alpha to epsilon ratio, or the ratio of absorption to emission. I do this for a living...the black is likely used to minimize reflection. In other words, to remain optically stealthy. That's it. Heck, regular white appliance epoxy comes close to .94 emissivity with only around .20 absorptivity. It's gleaming white, and comes close to fancy black coatings by Lockheed or others. The difference? I can see the mission from 300 miles away after launch with a small celestron telescope with no problem...just look for the large flash. If it were black, I doubt I'd ever find it downrange. Nothing fancy or mysterious about hwy they are doing this. The last thing they want is a mission making Iridium-like flashes all over the place. It's a significant part of the design for a lot of these satellites.
The answer: maxi thins.
Someone I know in the TSA told me that the scanners cannot see past moisture, and that elderly, female, and very young travelers effectively block the scanner around the crotch area. This is apparently part of their training as well.
The answer: install a slightly moist maxi thin just before going through the line, get rid of afterwards.
Soooo....
Some friends and I started a TSA Bingo game a couple years ago. a 4x4 grid of banned items. The winner gets an open tab for a year at the neighborhood brewpub (very dangerous). In any case, I now have three in a row with the toner thing. My card has "inkjet ink", which was close enough.
I cannot bring my mini inkjet with me anymore when I travel for work. in fact, I have no way other than to waste my time using Kinko's et al.
None of this makes us any safer. We were practically incontinent due to laughing when we made these ridiculous bingo cards. How absurd!
Yet as soon as some "official" decides to commit the absurd, it becomes acceptable, and we all feel so googly safe, and say, "geez, I have nothing to hide, therefore...."
Exactly. The MBA-endowed, manically optimistic, pathetically narcissistic rich of the world will always cornucopians. The poor of the world will always be the unfortunate discarded husks that cannibalize the resources from under their feet for the rich. But the tectonic plates simply crawl along.
The car is likely only ~15% efficient where the rubber meets the road, so that means the 2-3 kW turns up to 13-20 kW.
So it's censorship. Some private organization deals China a tepid slap with a stuffy award. The Chinese public is likely about as concerned about this as the willfull censorship we enforce on ourselves.
After all, the stability of the USA is allegedly threatened by the same footage of our imperial wars abroad that any Italian or French citizen gets on the nightly news. Ours is simply a familiar, comfortng, purposeful censorship that preserves our freedoms and markets. It's for our children, right?
As for China rising, so be it. We rose too. They happen to be in that awkward pubescent stage where their engineers barely know enough to build efficient infrastructure in a centrally controlled economy, where corruption isn't merely rampant, but something to aspire to for their best political class, engineers and scientists (read the retractions in SCIENCE and NATURE lately? more of that to come...). They will get better- and soon they'll be able to perfect their empire on the tasty vulnerable pockets of resources in the world in the same way the USA nearly perfected half a century ago.
Cry me a river. The affluence isn't coming back. The censorship isn't going away. The wars won't end until we are broke. Our parents and grandparents and ourselves have made that absolutely assured. There will come a tme when it will be better on average to seek other places to raise a famly and call home.
Outrage at China? Keep leaving the dream, folks. Hope indignance works for you.