I thought about and planned on getting a Masters in some branch of mechanical engineering right after my BS degree, but during my last year, I realized I needed to just finish my BS and get a job. I had had enough. So I get my job at a medium sized aerospace company and several years pass. My supervisor recommends getting an MS (and not a PhD, unless I had a personal interest) in a technical field and lets me know that the lack of one will limit my career choices at the company. The company pays for tuition if I keep working fulltime. I take the deal. It takes me three years to get a Masters in Material Science (emphasizing meturllagy, fatigue, fracture mechanics, and composites) working full time. During that same time, I got married, bought a house, and had the first of my children.
It was difficult at times, but I'm glad I did it. Frankly, to do my job well takes more background knowledge than a BS will cover. We now recommend that all of our incoming structures analysts get a Masters if they don't hire in with one. It is a massive plus that my company will pay for school and be flexible with schedules, etc.
The path I took was get a basic degree in engineering, get a job at a firm with good benefits, find out what I like doing and am good at in the industry, and then use the company's resources to make myself more valuable to the company now that I have a clue. I will say, that academically, grad school wasn't difficult after working as an structures analyst in industry. I made much better grads in grad school than as an undergrad. The biggest problem was just fitting it all in. But working full time and getting a technical masters or an MBA is entirely possible, even with a family. Even if tuition hadn't been covered, it really wasn't all that expensive. I wouldn't have needed a loan, for instance, based on my pre-masters salary.
Basically, you just have to knuckle down and do it.
As a poster comments below, DU dust does burn. I don't know about tungsten. Tungsten is hard to work with, melts at a higher temperature and can't really be cast easily. Most tungsten products are sintered instead of cast and then forged, I think. The other issue is the government has tons of DU laying around with few other obvious uses.
If I had a nickel for everytime I heard someone suggest replacing a tungsten weight with uranium, I'd have a buck or so. Uranium (238 anyway) isn't denser than tungsten. Tungsten is the densist material for semi-practical applications. It's more available than iridium or osmium, and far less expensive than platinum, three more dense elements. For a few reasonably obvious reasons, neptunium and plutonium aren't really good alternatives to tungsten if you just want a dense lump of metal.
Actually, this particular chunck of foam IS relevant and an important event. Yes, lots of debris strikes the shuttles on lift-off, but most are quite small, much less than 1 lb or the "size of a suitcase" like the chunk that doomed Columbia. This piece they are concerned about was a similar size, but missed the orbiter. A strike from a similar sized piece of foam is a serious deal, unlike the 1" deep or less gouges to the tiles that are common. 1+ lb foam strikes will cause damage that is beyond the ability of NASA's still experimental repair methods.
So the big deal is not that some random foam bits came off, it's that a very large foam bit came off above the shuttle of comparable size to the one that popped a (non-repairable) hole in Columbia. This wasn't supposed to happen again.
A more sure-fire fix than better quality control would be to place a single layer of fiberglass/kevlar/(or maybe carbon) composite over the troublesome areas of the tank. Use a room-temp cure system and a layer a few thousandths thick. We use a woven "B" cloth at work that would do the trick. Yes, it'd add weight, but would solve the foam problem by adding some structure to work as a net to keep dislodged foam pieces with the tank and not flying towards the shuttle.
Then launch the few remaining shuttles to get thier work done and can the whole program.
I agree that Hubble's cost/benefit ratio is high for a space program. I wonder if anyone at NASA has considered what to me is an obvious proposal... sell it. Perhaps some other country or company would like it. Maybe it is worth saving... just not to NASA?
I am sick and tired of people claiming the V-22 "doesn't work." That's a load of ignorant bull. Bell-Bell/Boeing has been developing and flying tiltrotors since 1953 and has sucessfully flown 6 different tiltrotors in the last half century. The V-22 is performing well in flight test and are rolling off the production assembly line. The causes of the crashes a few years ago are understood. One was a pilot error that took the aircraft a factor of three beyond the allowed descent rate. The other was a hydraulic/computer problem that has been fixed. The VRS state has been mapped and found to match predictions. Exiting the VRS state is easier in a tiltrotor than in a helicopter (just tilt the nacelles a few degrees).
In the end, I suspect the V-22 will be more like the C-130 than the Commanche. They'll be modded again and again and used all over the world for a wide variety of missions instead of cancelled with only a handful of flight vehicles. Besides, you want quiet rotorcraft... try and hear a V-22 in airplane mode 200 AGL. A single engine Cessna 172 at 500 feet AGL is much louder than until the V-22 is only a hundred feet away or so. Tiltrotors in airplane mode are very, very stealthy platforms vis a vis dudes with RPGs.
What the hell are you talking about? Tiltrotors have been flying for 50 years. Bell and/or Boeing has now designed and flown 6 tiltrotor aircraft, 4 of them fly-by-wire, ranging from the small Pointer and Eagle Eye UAVS, to the midsized XV-15 and BA609, and the larger V-22. The single piston engine XV-3 was the first in this line of aircraft, flown in the 1950s. The technical challenges of tiltrotors are well understood by Bell.
The modern twin engine tiltrotors have two engines and a drive shaft connecting the two so that either engine can power both rotors. The engines are widely (!) spaced which against some threats actually increases survivability. They are no more vulnerable to "dirt and one bullet" than any other aircraft, and more robust than most.
The point is simple: helicopters are good for hovering, bad for distance or speed. This is a solution that trancends the limitation of helicopters. Twice the speed at 2-3 times the range. Tiltrotors are more efficient for transport/business missions and will be very effective in search and rescue. They also make good UAVs for ship board use since they can have the long range of a fixed wing without having to land in a net.
Just because the cold war is over doesn't mean that troops don't need to get from point A to point B quickly, and doesn't mean that people don't need to get to far offshore wells, find people in danger in ocean, patrol our shores, fly from city center to city center or in general provide another option for the aviation industry
You are correct that VRS is common to all rotorcraft. In fact, when normalized to thrust, rotor geometry, etc. the VRS characteristic of tiltrotors are the same as conventional helos, proving that it is not a unique situation. However, it is not hard to escape from on a tiltrotor. All that is required is a few degrees of tilt on the nacelles and the VRS condition is eliminated. There is a zone of VRS instability that results in vibration and roll rate changes. The computers now detect this, warn the pilot, and the pilot can either slide to the side laterally, increase forward speed, or tilt the nacelles and exit the VRS state. As far as I know, the V-22 is the only rotor craft that warns the pilot of VRS and has so many ways of exiting the condition.
The crash that killed 19 Marines in Arizona was due to flying well outside the approved flight envelope at the time. 800 ft/s at any forward airspeed was approved and the ship was decending at 2100 ft/s at 40knts forward airspeed. This state was later flown and simulated and shown to be around the onset of dangerous VRS conditions. This portion of the flight envolope has been explored and expanded so that now the V-22 and other tiltrotors are capable of quick decent profiles.
The biggest problem here was a question of tactics. Army doctrine (now being adjusted) still called for coming to a hover before firing weapons. This obviously exposes the aircraft to high risk small arms fire. Marine doctrine on the other hand has helo pilots firing on the run, not slowing below 60 knots in combat. This difference accounts for much of the combat robustness of the Cobra over the Apache. In fact, before the war, I believe the Marines upped their minimum combat speed.
That said, landing involves stopping, and is always risky. The V-22 has the ability to enter and egress an LZ faster and quiter than any other current rotary wing aircraft. I doubt many on/. have seen/heard a V-22 approach an LZ at 100 feet AGL in airplane mode. It is nearly silent until a 100 or so yards away. Transition can be quick (15s) land, dump cargo, and transition to forward flight again. Because of this reduced exposure/announcement time, the V-22 is more survivable than an old CH-47 or CH-46.
You of course realize that by going with smaller ducted fans you've dramatically decreased the lifting efficiency of the aircraft, increased the horsepower and thus engine weight required and turned a system with two crosslinked rotors (similar to CH-46, CH-47, and several other old and new helos) into a system with 6 crosslinked lift devices. Or were you going to just not link them together and hope that each fan carried enough excess power to compensate for differential thrust? You'll be hard pressed to convince anyone paying the fuel bill that this is a better way to go. The Moller Skycar is fine and all, but it's small. It will have nearly 800 hp to lift something like 3000 lb or about 3.75lb/hp. The BA609 does about 6lb/hp. A decent rule of thumb for smallish helos is 10lb/hp.
The V-22 or any other Bell twin engined tiltrotor to date can fly on one engine. The two rotors are cross shafted together so that both rotors remain in synch and powered at all times. A quad tiltrotor has been considered and that aircraft (C-130 sized) would have all four engines and rotors cross-shafted so that several engines could be lost without losing the aircraft.
That said, the V-22 will not be a A-10 replacement. That simply makes no sense. A gunship version has been proposed but it's more along the lines of an AC-130 gunship. Orbit higher and a little futher away from the targets. More of an area weapon for softer targets not getting down and dirty with heavy armor. The 'Hog is tops for that.
Early test V-22s did have ejection seats. The rotors do not pass above the cockpit so there is a small path in VTOL mode and obviously a larger path in airplane mode for a safe ejection. Current production ships no longer carry this feature and like any other cargo ship, there were never plans to eject all the passengers.
The cause of the Arizona accident that killed 19 Marines was a form of vortex ring state that formed around one proprotor that caused an imbalance of lift from one side to the other. The ship rolled sharply and nosed in. All helos are susceptible to VRS and it forms when you are travelling down too fast in combination with low forward airspeed. At the time, the Osprey had a vertical descent rate limit of 800 ft/min at low forward airspeeds. The ship in question was descending at ~2100 ft/min, almost three times the recommended rate. Pilot error. The other crash later that year was due to a combination of hydraulic and software failures that reduced the redundancy of some control systems.
The VRS has now been shown to not be a symptom of tiltrotors only, its boundaries have been mapped out, warning sensors have been installed, and VRS exit strategies developed. In a helo, you just gain some forward speed or sideward speed. In a tiltrotor you have the additional option of tilting the nacelles a few degrees. In addition, plenty of improvements have been made to all sorts of subsystems and the computers have been through the cleaners to check for more bugs.
The commuter ship, the BA609, will also benefit from these studies. It's target certification date is late 2007. That date is so distance for a variety of reasons, most of them non-technical.
Tiltrotors are complicated, but I've flown the BA609 sim, and it's by far the easiest VTOL aircraft I've flown and the capabilities are impressive.
A hard currency not based on a commodity would probably not arise on the free market as gold did thousands of years ago. It could be imposed via a government or agreed upon in the free market (more likely in modern times) but we are still left with the problem of determining and protecting the quality of money, number of bills, preventing counterfeiting, etc. These are all things handled automatically with a commodity (at least the right one) as money.
We could just say there will be 1 trillion dollars, period. What who then is in charge of printing them, removing old ones, making new ones? How will they be trusted? The government is the first answer most people will post, but a study of monetary history shows this is not a very wise choice;-)
You've demonstrated some of what I don't like about "velocity" and gross products. By adding assets, liabilities, interest, etc. all in one lump value, you're saying they are all the same in some way. You implicitly begin to see this as a measure of wealth, yet we still have 1 vase and 10,000 dollars. Same amount of water can be carried. You then speak of "velocity" which is still defined in terms of gross product, a simple summation of all the transactions in the economy.
What is the independent definition of "velocity" and how is it measured?
As for the Mister Vase Proprietorship and its high bid for the vase, I think this is basically similar to fractional reserve banking, whereby the lender and the borrower both have use of the same money. This sort of transaction is inflationary in nature and also prone to failure as you have noted. Provided there isn't forced "insurance" via some sort of FDIC, this sort of transactions are limited by market forces and fear of failure, though I tend to see them as a little on the fraudulent side, too.
In the real world, when Mister Vase Proprietership runs into problems because the creek dries up for a few days or someone is late with payments, the whole shebang will quickly fall apart. At this point, however, our enterprising bunch will invent a central bank and printing presses and solve the situation nicely with a bunch of fresh paper money. Then inflation, velocity or not, will really begin!
Say you sat our fictional economy in a room and everyone had their 100 bucks. There's a vase in the middle of the room and this is the only good available. Bidding begins. The highest bid possible is a consortium of 100 people bidding 100 dollars or 10,000 bucks.
Now, increase the velocity of money by having everyone pass their money around in a circle as fast as possible. In the end, the highest possible bid is still 10,000 dollars by the same consortium. I don't care how you measure GDP of this group, the total number of dollars still determines the basic price level.
I guess where we diverge is viewing GDP and thus terms defined in terms of GDP as "real". Aggregate measures like this to me shouldn't be taken too seriously. Apples and oranges may be both measured in dollars but their relative value is determined by human preference, individual by individual. To lump all goods and services into a single cardinal number and have it represent wealth is to say that there is a definable exchange rate for every single good and service for all people in the entire economy. When it comes to human preference, assigning cardinal (dollar) values becomes often impossible. What is the exchange rate between vanilla and chocolate ice cream? I hate vanilla, so for me, there is no exchange rate.
I guess my point is, I don't think that GDP is a good way to represent the value of an economy. Maybe it represents population times income, but you can't say it accurately represents the level of wealth as a whole.
This is part of the fundemental difference between the Austrian approach and the Keynesian school of economics: emphasis on the individual vs. the collective. If you want a good and short into into this school of thought, check out the Economics for Real People book I mentioned in my first post at the Mises Institute.
http://www.mises.org
You might not agree, but you'll probably find it interesting. Plus it's a cheap book;-)
Okay, hold on. Borrowing money does not drive inflation. Some people have more money to potentially drive prices up, but that money came from other people restraining their consumption so that they have money to lend. There are still the same number of dollars, just in different hands. After the loan is spent, the borrower has to work off the loan which requires a decrease in consumption on their part, plus a little more to pay off the interest. While the borrower is paying off the loan, he certainly can't contribute to "price inflation" by trying to outbid the lender.
Borrowing can only drive general prices higher if both the borrower and the lender can use the same money, as can happen in a fractional reserve banking system, but that is a different issue.
This "velocity" concept has never made sense to me. First, what are the independent definitions of "velocity", volume of money, etc. in the equations? Far too often, I've only ever seen then defined in terms of each other.
But in your little example, 12x velocity can't equal a 12x rise in prices since exchanges are made at a particular instant in time and place. At a particular time, there is still only $10,000 in the economy and only that dollar "value" applies to the transaction at hand. Now expand our time window some nominal period of time to allow the transaction and other bidders. Even with the velocity concept, there is only a fraction more than $10,000 for our transaction. To fully realize the multiplicitive power of the "velocity" you'd have to have a 12 month auction for every good for everyone to have a chance to bid their full "$1200". But that isn't the way the real world works.
I think the "velocity" concept comes from the Keynesian focus on aggregate demand and production instead of focusing on the individual, the only real and fundemental unit of the market economy. In short, I don't think it really exists as a player in prices.
Transactions are discrete, not aggregate and there is no simple pat formula to describe them all.
No one ever said you had to be paid in physical gold. Paper money works just fine, as long as it's 100% backed by something physical, like gold.
Besides, gold coins, in useful denominations,would be exceedingly tiny. $1 is ~.1 grams or so.
Banks can settle accounts behind the scenes as we use "gold cards":-) The important thing is to prevent manipulation of the money supply by the government.
Japan's situation is a perfect example of the failure of Keynesian economics. They are printing the currency like mad in the hopes of forstalling deflation. They have a 0.15% interest rate and massive monetary growth and soon, direct purchase of stocks by the central bank in hopes of rising their prices. There is even talk of sending to each family the equivalent of 10,000 dollars in the hopes they'll spend it and generate inflation. Why isn't any of this working?
Japan is in the recessionary throes of a central bank created business cycle in a highly regulated economy. Many, many bad decisions were made with cheap money and a land bubble, but those businesses and banks aren't being allowed to fail so that the tied up capital is freed for more productive ends. There will be deflation in the Japanese economy or hyper-inflation followed by an even bigger bust.
This isn't the "good" deflation caused by a healthy market economy, but rather a let-down from a failed, overly regulated one. Similar to a bank bust when all the credit money dissappears and suddenly there's less money than there was before. Japan cannot escape one of several painful scenarios, but it is not the picture of a market economy.
If the U.S. follows the Japanese model, continues to keep printing dollars to keep credit cheap, bails out the airlines, the telecoms, the auto-industry and eventually the huge banks, we will take a similar road of economic stagnation. Let failed businesses fail so that the talent and wealth tied up can be freed.
This is the danger with political control of the economy. This corrective action is either muted or prevented by elected officials via taxation or inflation in the hopes of staying in office.
Japan is in trouble, but printing more money won't help them until they allow investments to finally fail instead of sucking up more wealth non-productively.
You are entirely correct. What is special about gold is that it was chosen on the free market (and then codified by governments later) as "money" out of all the available commodities. It is divisible, durable, reasonably scarce but widely distributed, and has a good "value per density". And in a way, it is related to the cost of "something". It is related in part to the cost of investing in mining equipment, labor, and refining. It can't be magically created, so it is related to other goods. But this is not the root of it's value. It was valued by the market as the most marketable commodity, thus it was money.
The California gold rush was inflationary so a hard money standard doesn't prevent inflation but it will restrain governments and hyper-inflation.
The choice of making coins or jewelry is the same as dollars or jewelry, no different. It is just a unit of exchange that is not subject to much government manipulation. Instead of prices being measured in dollars, measure them in grams.
A motor car in 1913 (Model T) took about 7 ounces of gold (at the official exchange rate, so take with grain of salt) and today a new Kia can be bought for about 25 ounces. Note, however, that the Kia is a supremely superior vechicle to the Model T. A Model T today (assuming it is legal to sell! and not as a collectible) would cost, what $1000? Less? Only 2 or 3 ounces, then.
Much different than the difference between $200 and $8000.
Actually, I believe I understand economics and human motivations pretty well. We just disagree on what drives investment and how an economy works.
I just deleted a huge passage of text that will take too much time to finish while I'm at work. Since you at least seem interested in economics, I suggest that you buy "Economics for Real People" available from the Mises Institute.
http://www.mises.org
This book clearly and quickly describes the Austrian school's view of economics as opposed to the Keynesian version most people are schooled in. Only the Austrian school has a model that incorporates the complicated, real world structure of capital goods and can describe why the business cycle occurs. It is also the only school the incorporates the real motivations of people instead of assuming people operate as equations. It is an entertaining read as these things go and is an inexpensive book.
To your point of deflation: Deflation is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, slow deflation is the normal mode of operation in a free market economy as technology and business innovation makes good cheaper with time. During the 1800s in the U.S., the general price level fell by 50% while wages rose slightly. This was a time of relatively limited monetary growth since hard money standards were in place for much of this time period. Considering the level of 19th technology compared to today's, I'd say that this price level decline would have actually accelerated. If this regime had extended into the 20th century we'd have far smaller incomes (in dollar terms) but a Ford would cost 100 bucks, too.
Deflation does discourage taking on huge debt obligations (a good thing considering the telecom malinvestment!) but neither inflation or deflation really affect good investments so long as the inflation isn't hyper-inflation. People always want to make their money worth more, so they'll invest whether we have rising prices or not. People don't need a coersive "push" from the government to want to invest money. They always want to become richer. What government driven inflation does is make bad investment decisions much more likely since the money is artificially cheap to begin with. Inflation driven investment decisions are at the root of the modern business cycle.
For reasons a little too complex to describe here (part of what I deleted), I don't believe that growth comes from increasing consumption, but rather from increasing savings that can be invested. This is different from the Keynesian view but crucial. If no one saved but rather spent every penny, the only source of investment dollars would be freshly printed money which will rapidly increase the price level. Only production backed by real savings can grow an economy sustainably.
You correctly see that hyper-inflation is bad but I don't agree that a little bit of a bad thing is a good thing. Inflation is unnecessary and distorts the wealth producing nature of the free market. The price of nearly all goods should be following the model of the computer industry (if not so dramatically in more mature industries). How many people (besides Michael Dell!) view falling computer prices as a bad thing? If inflation and rising prices in general is desirable, does this mean the government should step in a take control of the dangerously deflating computer industry?
>No one can dupe 1.5 million dollars out of thin air in the real world.
Actually, this is not quite true. Central banks have almost always done this. The Federal Reserve "creates" money out of thin air, buys government debt with it and thus tries to alter the various interest rates to what the Board of Governors desires. The central bank's control of the volume of dollars is nothing more than a monopoly on counterfeiting. This also shows that increasing the volume of money is the cause of inflation, both in the real world and the virtual.
The laws of economics apply to people no matter where they interact with each other and counterfeiting is still counterfeiting no matter who does it. It is a distortion of the economy and will eventually lead to its collapse. It's happened in the real world and evidently has happened online, too.
Inflation is evil, it is theft, it is a stealth "tax" (when used to buy government debt), and it is caused by government monopolies on the production of "money". Only a hard money system (much like an online system where people can't cheat) can save us from these problems.
Think about it, they don't call it "gold" in the games for no reason. It's been money for 6000 years all across the world until the beginning of the 1900s when governments banned its use and started cranking out pure fiat money. And look what has happened to its value. $1 today buys what 5 cents bought in about 1913, the year the Federal Reserve was created. Even at the "low" rate of about 3% inflation today (according to the Cleveland Fed) every dollar you earn today will only be worth 17 cents in 60 years. That's a tough hill to climb when planning for retirement.
Do you value her? [Yes.] Does she want a diamond? [Yes.] Will her having a diamond make your life better? [Yes, if she marries you.] Then get her a diamond. That's all that really matters. It's not a financial investment, it's an investment in happiness and worth far more than it's price in dollars.
Eye motion seems to last longer than other motor skills, so that in mind:
A pair of glasses with an IR LED that shines on the eye and a IR detector to pick up reflections. There should be a difference in IR reflectivity between eyelid closed and eyelid shut. A circut can count the number of times or look for a pattern to trigger the alarm.
Instead of telling what recording labels can and cannot do with their property (as long as the WAAAY too long copyright lasts) why not just repeal laws against bypassing the copy protection. That doesn't change the fact that spreading the music without permission and against the principles of "fair use" would still be illegal, but anyone would be free to build and sell a CD player or software that could rip the protected tracks. Support truth in labelling and let the market sort it out.
The government has no place in mandating, protecting, controlling, or subsidizing copy controls or their lack of use.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought about and planned on getting a Masters in some branch of mechanical engineering right after my BS degree, but during my last year, I realized I needed to just finish my BS and get a job. I had had enough. So I get my job at a medium sized aerospace company and several years pass. My supervisor recommends getting an MS (and not a PhD, unless I had a personal interest) in a technical field and lets me know that the lack of one will limit my career choices at the company. The company pays for tuition if I keep working fulltime. I take the deal. It takes me three years to get a Masters in Material Science (emphasizing meturllagy, fatigue, fracture mechanics, and composites) working full time. During that same time, I got married, bought a house, and had the first of my children.
It was difficult at times, but I'm glad I did it. Frankly, to do my job well takes more background knowledge than a BS will cover. We now recommend that all of our incoming structures analysts get a Masters if they don't hire in with one. It is a massive plus that my company will pay for school and be flexible with schedules, etc.
The path I took was get a basic degree in engineering, get a job at a firm with good benefits, find out what I like doing and am good at in the industry, and then use the company's resources to make myself more valuable to the company now that I have a clue. I will say, that academically, grad school wasn't difficult after working as an structures analyst in industry. I made much better grads in grad school than as an undergrad. The biggest problem was just fitting it all in. But working full time and getting a technical masters or an MBA is entirely possible, even with a family. Even if tuition hadn't been covered, it really wasn't all that expensive. I wouldn't have needed a loan, for instance, based on my pre-masters salary.
Basically, you just have to knuckle down and do it.
As a poster comments below, DU dust does burn. I don't know about tungsten. Tungsten is hard to work with, melts at a higher temperature and can't really be cast easily. Most tungsten products are sintered instead of cast and then forged, I think. The other issue is the government has tons of DU laying around with few other obvious uses.
If I had a nickel for everytime I heard someone suggest replacing a tungsten weight with uranium, I'd have a buck or so. Uranium (238 anyway) isn't denser than tungsten. Tungsten is the densist material for semi-practical applications. It's more available than iridium or osmium, and far less expensive than platinum, three more dense elements. For a few reasonably obvious reasons, neptunium and plutonium aren't really good alternatives to tungsten if you just want a dense lump of metal.
Actually, this particular chunck of foam IS relevant and an important event. Yes, lots of debris strikes the shuttles on lift-off, but most are quite small, much less than 1 lb or the "size of a suitcase" like the chunk that doomed Columbia. This piece they are concerned about was a similar size, but missed the orbiter. A strike from a similar sized piece of foam is a serious deal, unlike the 1" deep or less gouges to the tiles that are common. 1+ lb foam strikes will cause damage that is beyond the ability of NASA's still experimental repair methods.
So the big deal is not that some random foam bits came off, it's that a very large foam bit came off above the shuttle of comparable size to the one that popped a (non-repairable) hole in Columbia. This wasn't supposed to happen again.
A more sure-fire fix than better quality control would be to place a single layer of fiberglass/kevlar/(or maybe carbon) composite over the troublesome areas of the tank. Use a room-temp cure system and a layer a few thousandths thick. We use a woven "B" cloth at work that would do the trick. Yes, it'd add weight, but would solve the foam problem by adding some structure to work as a net to keep dislodged foam pieces with the tank and not flying towards the shuttle.
Then launch the few remaining shuttles to get thier work done and can the whole program.
Bryan Baskin
I agree that Hubble's cost/benefit ratio is high for a space program. I wonder if anyone at NASA has considered what to me is an obvious proposal... sell it. Perhaps some other country or company would like it. Maybe it is worth saving... just not to NASA?
I am sick and tired of people claiming the V-22 "doesn't work." That's a load of ignorant bull. Bell-Bell/Boeing has been developing and flying tiltrotors since 1953 and has sucessfully flown 6 different tiltrotors in the last half century. The V-22 is performing well in flight test and are rolling off the production assembly line. The causes of the crashes a few years ago are understood. One was a pilot error that took the aircraft a factor of three beyond the allowed descent rate. The other was a hydraulic/computer problem that has been fixed. The VRS state has been mapped and found to match predictions. Exiting the VRS state is easier in a tiltrotor than in a helicopter (just tilt the nacelles a few degrees).
In the end, I suspect the V-22 will be more like the C-130 than the Commanche. They'll be modded again and again and used all over the world for a wide variety of missions instead of cancelled with only a handful of flight vehicles. Besides, you want quiet rotorcraft... try and hear a V-22 in airplane mode 200 AGL. A single engine Cessna 172 at 500 feet AGL is much louder than until the V-22 is only a hundred feet away or so. Tiltrotors in airplane mode are very, very stealthy platforms vis a vis dudes with RPGs.
What the hell are you talking about? Tiltrotors have been flying for 50 years. Bell and/or Boeing has now designed and flown 6 tiltrotor aircraft, 4 of them fly-by-wire, ranging from the small Pointer and Eagle Eye UAVS, to the midsized XV-15 and BA609, and the larger V-22. The single piston engine XV-3 was the first in this line of aircraft, flown in the 1950s. The technical challenges of tiltrotors are well understood by Bell.
The modern twin engine tiltrotors have two engines and a drive shaft connecting the two so that either engine can power both rotors. The engines are widely (!) spaced which against some threats actually increases survivability. They are no more vulnerable to "dirt and one bullet" than any other aircraft, and more robust than most.
The point is simple: helicopters are good for hovering, bad for distance or speed. This is a solution that trancends the limitation of helicopters. Twice the speed at 2-3 times the range. Tiltrotors are more efficient for transport/business missions and will be very effective in search and rescue. They also make good UAVs for ship board use since they can have the long range of a fixed wing without having to land in a net.
Just because the cold war is over doesn't mean that troops don't need to get from point A to point B quickly, and doesn't mean that people don't need to get to far offshore wells, find people in danger in ocean, patrol our shores, fly from city center to city center or in general provide another option for the aviation industry
You are correct that VRS is common to all rotorcraft. In fact, when normalized to thrust, rotor geometry, etc. the VRS characteristic of tiltrotors are the same as conventional helos, proving that it is not a unique situation. However, it is not hard to escape from on a tiltrotor. All that is required is a few degrees of tilt on the nacelles and the VRS condition is eliminated. There is a zone of VRS instability that results in vibration and roll rate changes. The computers now detect this, warn the pilot, and the pilot can either slide to the side laterally, increase forward speed, or tilt the nacelles and exit the VRS state. As far as I know, the V-22 is the only rotor craft that warns the pilot of VRS and has so many ways of exiting the condition.
The crash that killed 19 Marines in Arizona was due to flying well outside the approved flight envelope at the time. 800 ft/s at any forward airspeed was approved and the ship was decending at 2100 ft/s at 40knts forward airspeed. This state was later flown and simulated and shown to be around the onset of dangerous VRS conditions. This portion of the flight envolope has been explored and expanded so that now the V-22 and other tiltrotors are capable of quick decent profiles.
The biggest problem here was a question of tactics. Army doctrine (now being adjusted) still called for coming to a hover before firing weapons. This obviously exposes the aircraft to high risk small arms fire. Marine doctrine on the other hand has helo pilots firing on the run, not slowing below 60 knots in combat. This difference accounts for much of the combat robustness of the Cobra over the Apache. In fact, before the war, I believe the Marines upped their minimum combat speed.
/. have seen/heard a V-22 approach an LZ at 100 feet AGL in airplane mode. It is nearly silent until a 100 or so yards away. Transition can be quick (15s) land, dump cargo, and transition to forward flight again. Because of this reduced exposure/announcement time, the V-22 is more survivable than an old CH-47 or CH-46.
That said, landing involves stopping, and is always risky. The V-22 has the ability to enter and egress an LZ faster and quiter than any other current rotary wing aircraft. I doubt many on
You of course realize that by going with smaller ducted fans you've dramatically decreased the lifting efficiency of the aircraft, increased the horsepower and thus engine weight required and turned a system with two crosslinked rotors (similar to CH-46, CH-47, and several other old and new helos) into a system with 6 crosslinked lift devices. Or were you going to just not link them together and hope that each fan carried enough excess power to compensate for differential thrust? You'll be hard pressed to convince anyone paying the fuel bill that this is a better way to go.
The Moller Skycar is fine and all, but it's small. It will have nearly 800 hp to lift something like 3000 lb or about 3.75lb/hp. The BA609 does about 6lb/hp. A decent rule of thumb for smallish helos is 10lb/hp.
The V-22 or any other Bell twin engined tiltrotor to date can fly on one engine. The two rotors are cross shafted together so that both rotors remain in synch and powered at all times. A quad tiltrotor has been considered and that aircraft (C-130 sized) would have all four engines and rotors cross-shafted so that several engines could be lost without losing the aircraft.
That said, the V-22 will not be a A-10 replacement. That simply makes no sense. A gunship version has been proposed but it's more along the lines of an AC-130 gunship. Orbit higher and a little futher away from the targets. More of an area weapon for softer targets not getting down and dirty with heavy armor. The 'Hog is tops for that.
Early test V-22s did have ejection seats. The rotors do not pass above the cockpit so there is a small path in VTOL mode and obviously a larger path in airplane mode for a safe ejection. Current production ships no longer carry this feature and like any other cargo ship, there were never plans to eject all the passengers.
The cause of the Arizona accident that killed 19 Marines was a form of vortex ring state that formed around one proprotor that caused an imbalance of lift from one side to the other. The ship rolled sharply and nosed in. All helos are susceptible to VRS and it forms when you are travelling down too fast in combination with low forward airspeed. At the time, the Osprey had a vertical descent rate limit of 800 ft/min at low forward airspeeds. The ship in question was descending at ~2100 ft/min, almost three times the recommended rate. Pilot error. The other crash later that year was due to a combination of hydraulic and software failures that reduced the redundancy of some control systems.
The VRS has now been shown to not be a symptom of tiltrotors only, its boundaries have been mapped out, warning sensors have been installed, and VRS exit strategies developed. In a helo, you just gain some forward speed or sideward speed. In a tiltrotor you have the additional option of tilting the nacelles a few degrees. In addition, plenty of improvements have been made to all sorts of subsystems and the computers have been through the cleaners to check for more bugs.
The commuter ship, the BA609, will also benefit from these studies. It's target certification date is late 2007. That date is so distance for a variety of reasons, most of them non-technical.
Tiltrotors are complicated, but I've flown the BA609 sim, and it's by far the easiest VTOL aircraft I've flown and the capabilities are impressive.
A hard currency not based on a commodity would probably not arise on the free market as gold did thousands of years ago. It could be imposed via a government or agreed upon in the free market (more likely in modern times) but we are still left with the problem of determining and protecting the quality of money, number of bills, preventing counterfeiting, etc. These are all things handled automatically with a commodity (at least the right one) as money.
;-)
We could just say there will be 1 trillion dollars, period. What who then is in charge of printing them, removing old ones, making new ones? How will they be trusted? The government is the first answer most people will post, but a study of monetary history shows this is not a very wise choice
Bryan Baskin
You've demonstrated some of what I don't like about "velocity" and gross products. By adding assets, liabilities, interest, etc. all in one lump value, you're saying they are all the same in some way. You implicitly begin to see this as a measure of wealth, yet we still have 1 vase and 10,000 dollars. Same amount of water can be carried. You then speak of "velocity" which is still defined in terms of gross product, a simple summation of all the transactions in the economy.
What is the independent definition of "velocity" and how is it measured?
As for the Mister Vase Proprietorship and its high bid for the vase, I think this is basically similar to fractional reserve banking, whereby the lender and the borrower both have use of the same money. This sort of transaction is inflationary in nature and also prone to failure as you have noted. Provided there isn't forced "insurance" via some sort of FDIC, this sort of transactions are limited by market forces and fear of failure, though I tend to see them as a little on the fraudulent side, too.
In the real world, when Mister Vase Proprietership runs into problems because the creek dries up for a few days or someone is late with payments, the whole shebang will quickly fall apart. At this point, however, our enterprising bunch will invent a central bank and printing presses and solve the situation nicely with a bunch of fresh paper money. Then inflation, velocity or not, will really begin!
Bryan Baskin
Say you sat our fictional economy in a room and everyone had their 100 bucks. There's a vase in the middle of the room and this is the only good available. Bidding begins. The highest bid possible is a consortium of 100 people bidding 100 dollars or 10,000 bucks.
;-)
Now, increase the velocity of money by having everyone pass their money around in a circle as fast as possible. In the end, the highest possible bid is still 10,000 dollars by the same consortium. I don't care how you measure GDP of this group, the total number of dollars still determines the basic price level.
I guess where we diverge is viewing GDP and thus terms defined in terms of GDP as "real". Aggregate measures like this to me shouldn't be taken too seriously. Apples and oranges may be both measured in dollars but their relative value is determined by human preference, individual by individual. To lump all goods and services into a single cardinal number and have it represent wealth is to say that there is a definable exchange rate for every single good and service for all people in the entire economy. When it comes to human preference, assigning cardinal (dollar) values becomes often impossible. What is the exchange rate between vanilla and chocolate ice cream? I hate vanilla, so for me, there is no exchange rate.
I guess my point is, I don't think that GDP is a good way to represent the value of an economy. Maybe it represents population times income, but you can't say it accurately represents the level of wealth as a whole.
This is part of the fundemental difference between the Austrian approach and the Keynesian school of economics: emphasis on the individual vs. the collective. If you want a good and short into into this school of thought, check out the Economics for Real People book I mentioned in my first post at the Mises Institute.
http://www.mises.org
You might not agree, but you'll probably find it interesting. Plus it's a cheap book
Okay, hold on. Borrowing money does not drive inflation. Some people have more money to potentially drive prices up, but that money came from other people restraining their consumption so that they have money to lend. There are still the same number of dollars, just in different hands. After the loan is spent, the borrower has to work off the loan which requires a decrease in consumption on their part, plus a little more to pay off the interest. While the borrower is paying off the loan, he certainly can't contribute to "price inflation" by trying to outbid the lender.
Borrowing can only drive general prices higher if both the borrower and the lender can use the same money, as can happen in a fractional reserve banking system, but that is a different issue.
This "velocity" concept has never made sense to me. First, what are the independent definitions of "velocity", volume of money, etc. in the equations? Far too often, I've only ever seen then defined in terms of each other.
But in your little example, 12x velocity can't equal a 12x rise in prices since exchanges are made at a particular instant in time and place. At a particular time, there is still only $10,000 in the economy and only that dollar "value" applies to the transaction at hand. Now expand our time window some nominal period of time to allow the transaction and other bidders. Even with the velocity concept, there is only a fraction more than $10,000 for our transaction. To fully realize the multiplicitive power of the "velocity" you'd have to have a 12 month auction for every good for everyone to have a chance to bid their full "$1200". But that isn't the way the real world works.
I think the "velocity" concept comes from the Keynesian focus on aggregate demand and production instead of focusing on the individual, the only real and fundemental unit of the market economy. In short, I don't think it really exists as a player in prices.
Transactions are discrete, not aggregate and there is no simple pat formula to describe them all.
No one ever said you had to be paid in physical gold. Paper money works just fine, as long as it's 100% backed by something physical, like gold.
:-) The important thing is to prevent manipulation of the money supply by the government.
Besides, gold coins, in useful denominations,would be exceedingly tiny. $1 is ~.1 grams or so.
Banks can settle accounts behind the scenes as we use "gold cards"
Bryan Baskin
I didn't adequately discuss Japan, sorry.
Japan's situation is a perfect example of the failure of Keynesian economics. They are printing the currency like mad in the hopes of forstalling deflation. They have a 0.15% interest rate and massive monetary growth and soon, direct purchase of stocks by the central bank in hopes of rising their prices. There is even talk of sending to each family the equivalent of 10,000 dollars in the hopes they'll spend it and generate inflation. Why isn't any of this working?
Japan is in the recessionary throes of a central bank created business cycle in a highly regulated economy. Many, many bad decisions were made with cheap money and a land bubble, but those businesses and banks aren't being allowed to fail so that the tied up capital is freed for more productive ends. There will be deflation in the Japanese economy or hyper-inflation followed by an even bigger bust.
This isn't the "good" deflation caused by a healthy market economy, but rather a let-down from a failed, overly regulated one. Similar to a bank bust when all the credit money dissappears and suddenly there's less money than there was before. Japan cannot escape one of several painful scenarios, but it is not the picture of a market economy.
If the U.S. follows the Japanese model, continues to keep printing dollars to keep credit cheap, bails out the airlines, the telecoms, the auto-industry and eventually the huge banks, we will take a similar road of economic stagnation. Let failed businesses fail so that the talent and wealth tied up can be freed.
This is the danger with political control of the economy. This corrective action is either muted or prevented by elected officials via taxation or inflation in the hopes of staying in office.
Japan is in trouble, but printing more money won't help them until they allow investments to finally fail instead of sucking up more wealth non-productively.
You are entirely correct. What is special about gold is that it was chosen on the free market (and then codified by governments later) as "money" out of all the available commodities. It is divisible, durable, reasonably scarce but widely distributed, and has a good "value per density". And in a way, it is related to the cost of "something". It is related in part to the cost of investing in mining equipment, labor, and refining. It can't be magically created, so it is related to other goods. But this is not the root of it's value. It was valued by the market as the most marketable commodity, thus it was money.
The California gold rush was inflationary so a hard money standard doesn't prevent inflation but it will restrain governments and hyper-inflation.
The choice of making coins or jewelry is the same as dollars or jewelry, no different. It is just a unit of exchange that is not subject to much government manipulation. Instead of prices being measured in dollars, measure them in grams.
A motor car in 1913 (Model T) took about 7 ounces of gold (at the official exchange rate, so take with grain of salt) and today a new Kia can be bought for about 25 ounces. Note, however, that the Kia is a supremely superior vechicle to the Model T. A Model T today (assuming it is legal to sell! and not as a collectible) would cost, what $1000? Less? Only 2 or 3 ounces, then.
Much different than the difference between $200 and $8000.
Actually, I believe I understand economics and human motivations pretty well. We just disagree on what drives investment and how an economy works.
I just deleted a huge passage of text that will take too much time to finish while I'm at work. Since you at least seem interested in economics, I suggest that you buy "Economics for Real People" available from the Mises Institute.
http://www.mises.org
This book clearly and quickly describes the Austrian school's view of economics as opposed to the Keynesian version most people are schooled in. Only the Austrian school has a model that incorporates the complicated, real world structure of capital goods and can describe why the business cycle occurs. It is also the only school the incorporates the real motivations of people instead of assuming people operate as equations. It is an entertaining read as these things go and is an inexpensive book.
To your point of deflation: Deflation is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, slow deflation is the normal mode of operation in a free market economy as technology and business innovation makes good cheaper with time. During the 1800s in the U.S., the general price level fell by 50% while wages rose slightly. This was a time of relatively limited monetary growth since hard money standards were in place for much of this time period. Considering the level of 19th technology compared to today's, I'd say that this price level decline would have actually accelerated. If this regime had extended into the 20th century we'd have far smaller incomes (in dollar terms) but a Ford would cost 100 bucks, too.
Deflation does discourage taking on huge debt obligations (a good thing considering the telecom malinvestment!) but neither inflation or deflation really affect good investments so long as the inflation isn't hyper-inflation. People always want to make their money worth more, so they'll invest whether we have rising prices or not. People don't need a coersive "push" from the government to want to invest money. They always want to become richer. What government driven inflation does is make bad investment decisions much more likely since the money is artificially cheap to begin with. Inflation driven investment decisions are at the root of the modern business cycle.
For reasons a little too complex to describe here (part of what I deleted), I don't believe that growth comes from increasing consumption, but rather from increasing savings that can be invested. This is different from the Keynesian view but crucial. If no one saved but rather spent every penny, the only source of investment dollars would be freshly printed money which will rapidly increase the price level. Only production backed by real savings can grow an economy sustainably.
You correctly see that hyper-inflation is bad but I don't agree that a little bit of a bad thing is a good thing. Inflation is unnecessary and distorts the wealth producing nature of the free market. The price of nearly all goods should be following the model of the computer industry (if not so dramatically in more mature industries). How many people (besides Michael Dell!) view falling computer prices as a bad thing? If inflation and rising prices in general is desirable, does this mean the government should step in a take control of the dangerously deflating computer industry?
Bryan Baskin
>No one can dupe 1.5 million dollars out of thin air in the real world.
Actually, this is not quite true. Central banks have almost always done this. The Federal Reserve "creates" money out of thin air, buys government debt with it and thus tries to alter the various interest rates to what the Board of Governors desires. The central bank's control of the volume of dollars is nothing more than a monopoly on counterfeiting. This also shows that increasing the volume of money is the cause of inflation, both in the real world and the virtual.
The laws of economics apply to people no matter where they interact with each other and counterfeiting is still counterfeiting no matter who does it. It is a distortion of the economy and will eventually lead to its collapse. It's happened in the real world and evidently has happened online, too.
Inflation is evil, it is theft, it is a stealth "tax" (when used to buy government debt), and it is caused by government monopolies on the production of "money". Only a hard money system (much like an online system where people can't cheat) can save us from these problems.
Think about it, they don't call it "gold" in the games for no reason. It's been money for 6000 years all across the world until the beginning of the 1900s when governments banned its use and started cranking out pure fiat money. And look what has happened to its value. $1 today buys what 5 cents bought in about 1913, the year the Federal Reserve was created. Even at the "low" rate of about 3% inflation today (according to the Cleveland Fed) every dollar you earn today will only be worth 17 cents in 60 years. That's a tough hill to climb when planning for retirement.
Inflation is theft.
Bryan Baskin
Do you value her? [Yes.] Does she want a diamond? [Yes.] Will her having a diamond make your life better? [Yes, if she marries you.] Then get her a diamond. That's all that really matters. It's not a financial investment, it's an investment in happiness and worth far more than it's price in dollars.
Bryan Baskin
Eye motion seems to last longer than other motor skills, so that in mind:
A pair of glasses with an IR LED that shines on the eye and a IR detector to pick up reflections. There should be a difference in IR reflectivity between eyelid closed and eyelid shut. A circut can count the number of times or look for a pattern to trigger the alarm.
Bryan Baskin
Instead of telling what recording labels can and cannot do with their property (as long as the WAAAY too long copyright lasts) why not just repeal laws against bypassing the copy protection. That doesn't change the fact that spreading the music without permission and against the principles of "fair use" would still be illegal, but anyone would be free to build and sell a CD player or software that could rip the protected tracks. Support truth in labelling and let the market sort it out.
The government has no place in mandating, protecting, controlling, or subsidizing copy controls or their lack of use.
Bryan Baskin