A couple of months later, I had a nearly identical zip-lock bag in my carry-on (sans the camera battery, which I have not yet replaced). I was pulled aside for "extra scrutiny" specifically because of this bag.
I typically travel with more cables, chargers, and batteries than you can shake a stick at (Two cameras, an iPhone, a laptop, a hiking GPS and an Nuvi.) I've never been pulled for extra scrutiny - except the one time I was headed home for a funeral and had only my cell phone and laptop. I.E. don't try drawing a curve through a single data point.
I can only deduce that the TSA "stole" my batteries and cables on the earlier journey
Never mind you have absolutely zero evidence that is true.
Actually, I have always thought that the Soviets getting a satellite into space first was a good thing, as an American of 45 years. It put the fear of ungod into the American military complex to get into space
Well, the problem with 'your thought' is that is has nothing to with 'the facts' - because in reality, America was already trying to get into space.
It also created a huge demand for science, and boosted the desire of teenagers to enter the science field. Nothing like fear to motivate a country into investing into science.
I have never seen any statistics that indicate any noticeable increase in people entering the sciences post Sputnik.
Actually, I do live in a mountainous area. In fact, I live in one of the few areas in the country where I have two different ranges within less than two hours drive.
The fact that many rails roads there don't have roads and they use aerostats for limited logging is irrelevant - because to build a high speed monorail you're going to need roads for construction access. Once you've built those roads you need anyhow.... Aerostats no longer make sense.
Actually, I can think of many places that can use this. For starters, here in the west, we have large amounts of areas in the mountains that are expensive to build at. OTH, if a structure can be taken up there, that changes economics.
By the time you've built the road to get the heavy machinery up to clear the area and build the foundation - bringing up the components and labor to build the structure itself is fairly trivial. Actually, once you've cleared a road so people can access the completed structure, you're ready to bring up whatever machinery and supplies you need without an aerostat.
In addition, imagine building a monorail/maglev. Putting in elevated track is expensive unless you have a lots of nice easy access. This makes it easy to build out a fast track.
Since you need a road for construction access, even with an aerostat 'crane'... you don't need an aerostat anymore. As you can simply use the road you need to build anyhow.
I.E. you don't really understand what makes these kinds of construction expensive.
There is a market, just not necessarily in the skyscraper size class yet. Build them smaller, but big enough to move a house.
But we already have [relatively] cheap truck that are all but immune to weather to fill that niche - [very] expensive airships (which require considerable extra lifting infrastructure to transfer to loads from the bottom of the structure to the lifting point on top) which require fairly calm weather conditions are a poor replacement indeed.
Fit one out with crane equipment like that found at a major port. Now if a freighter has a problem in the open ocean, you can fly one of these to it and offload the cargo to another ship (or ships, more likely).
Why? We already have oceangoing tugboats more than capable of towing the ships to port in anything short of hurricane conditions. By the time an areostat has moved the cargo to another ship (assuming reasonable weather), the tug has already towed it to port much more cheaply.
You could also haul out a complete replacement power train, and if new ships were designed with this in mind you would eventually be able to drop-in major components in most ships afloat.
Not only do we have tugs as pointed out above, replacing drive components at sea as your propose is roughly akin to conducting an appendectomy via the patients ear canal - with a spoon. It just doesn't make any sense.
Same gear could be deployed to a train derailment, or to replace a malfunctioning locomotive on the track in the middle of nowhere.
In the case of a train derailment we already have cranes that work in virtually all weathers. (In exactly the manner that areostats do not.) If a locomotive dies, you just hook another locomotive in front and tow it as is already common practice. If it won't roll, well then you use the cranes mentioned above and jacks to remove and replace the damaged drive truck.
The way that scale affects LTA craft is very different from how it affects HTA craft like helicopters. If you can build one big enough and fast enough, you could anchor to a sinking ship and keep it afloat, or simply pick it up and haul it to a dry dock. This could be useful for deep-sea salvage, though the existing barge-style ships are quite effective already.
Pick up an entire ship using an LTA craft? You're talking something the size of a small country - and hideously vulnerable to weather.
In short, there may not be much of a market right now for moving large buildings, but there are plenty of other markets that such a device could tap.
In short, there are no such markets - in each of the examples you provide above, the areostat is vastly inferior to existing solutions.
Buildings (and pretty much everything else on Earth) are mostly designed to resist compressive loads I.E. the force of gravity. Thus, if you want to move a structure using this method your pretty much have two major options: First, to move an existing structure you can build a heavy cage around it so you can lift it from the top. Second, to move a new structure you can design in massive reinforcements so you can lift it from the top.
Or you can do what they currently do now which is shove a series of I-beams under it to take the weight from the foundation. Once all the weight is on the I-beams, there is no difference to the building if the I-beams are being lifted by a series of jacks to get it on a truck, a crane to lift it onto another foundation, or a dirigible to carry it cross country.
Sometimes it helps to stop and think before typing, you might try it sometime. When you do, in this case, the intelligent person would ask himself - how do you connect the beams on the bottom to the lifting point on the top. Then the intelligent person will re-read my message and note that I'd already mentioned that.
The idiot and his boon companion Captain Obvious instead will just repeat what the individual I was replying to and I already said.
Both you and the OP are correct in different ways - and aptly illustrate why this is such a bad idea.
Buildings (and pretty much everything else on Earth) are mostly designed to resist compressive loads I.E. the force of gravity. Thus, if you want to move a structure using this method your pretty much have two major options: First, to move an existing structure you can build a heavy cage around it so you can lift it from the top. Second, to move a new structure you can design in massive reinforcements so you can lift it from the top. Both are expensive and add considerable parasitic loads to the structure and the lift.
Not to mention, this idea has been floated a dozen times or more in the last fifty odd years, and always with the same result - a bankrupt company and penniless investors. While they've got some cool hacks in this scheme, they don't seem to have overcome the basic solution-in-search-of-problem problem. I.E. there doesn't actually seem to be a market.
Probably on the off-chance that it discovers something while in a graveyard orbit. You never know what sort of crazy stuff happens when you just leave a camera running. Sure, the odds are pretty low, but the satellite's already in space, so why not?
Because it costs money and consumes personnel, communications, etc., resources.
Ask the steel industry how that worked out. Or the auto industry. Or any of the half dozen other industries chased offshore because (in part) of unions that insisted on never ending pay and benefits increases - regardless of how the company and/or the economy was faring.
Don't get me wrong, unions have accomplished a lot of good, but they've also done a lot of damage.
I thought it would fit with the American culture to be proud of modern technology and to be independent. So I can't understand why Americans seem to not like solar power very much?
Because another element of American culture is not pay twice as much for something that's available elsewhere at a considerably lower price - and that's the situation with solar power. Lacking massive subsidies, it's simply not anywhere near competitive.
Environmentalists want the FULL COSTS of fossil fuel use to be included when comparing the prices. What is the cost of releasing all the CO2 into the air?
And when they don't have the "FULL COSTS", they'll selectively make up costs in order to make the math come out the way they want.
You tax the polluting stuff versus rebating the non-polluting stuff to encourage adoption until the actual costs of the pollution can be incorporated.
Precisely my point - taxation doesn't actually equate to paying for the costs of pollution, but it *does* artificially inflate the costs of the 'polluting stuff'. (Never mind that renewable sources pollute too, but that pollution is out of sight, out of mind, and doesn't matter - because the goal isn't to reduce pollution, it's to force a predetermined outcome into being.)
The shocking thing about this whole story is that in retrospect, his idea seems obvious and is scientifically sound, but was ignored.
Well, no, not really. He was funded until the people funding him realized he wasn't actually producing anything but vaporware - then he was ignored. His reputation has been enhanced posthumously because we eventually did build computers (making his seem 'obvious and scientifically sound' by comparison) even though he never actually built anything.
The real point I'm trying to make is how much CAD software and man hours will it take to simulate this - but he did it all without even a pocket calculator.
Except he didn't actually do anything except produce reams and reams of sketches that might someday be worked into a usable design along with a handful of random prototypes of parts that might someday be incorporated into a finished machine.
TFA considerably overstates the situation. There isn't an Analytical Engine to be built - because there is no complete design for any single major component of the machine. If you think of the Engine as the Duke Nukem Forever of mechanical computing, you won't be far off the mark.
It still might help. It should give us a better communication infrastructure and cause the big hardware vendors to locate more distribution centers and technicians in the area.
If you don't have good communications infrastructure, they aren't putting the data center there in the first place. If the data center needs parts, that's what UPS/FedEx are for - it would take a huge data center (something like an order of magnitude or two larger than anything ever built) to make it worth time for a major hardware vendor to even consider a part time tech, let alone a distribution center.
Will Polaris still be the North Star, or will it be replaced?
Polaris will no longer be the North Star, but that will be more because of the precession of Earth's rotation axis than because of any movements on Polaris' part.
No, you're wrong - because you completely misunderstood what he said. He did not say (as you imply) that social media was not useful as a tool for organizing. He said that absent a strong organizing body and people willing to actually leave their keyboard - social media was not useful for promoting change.
Wasn't there an unofficial replacement being designed (and maybe developed) by ex-NASA guys? That was cheaper, on-schedule and likely to actually work?
Paper spacecraft are *always* cheaper, on-schedule, and likely to actually work. It's when you start bending metal and have to start keeping those promises that start to go downhill.
Whether they can be replaced or not is irrelevant.
It's very relevant, and neither twisting what I said in a vain attempt to 'prove' otherwise nor vainly straining to avoid actually address what I did say changes that.
At micro-torr pressures, torques from circularly polarized light cause the levitated particles to rotate at frequencies >1MHz, which can be inferred from modulation of light scattering off the rotating flake when an electric field resonant with the rotation rate is applied.
It's exceedingly rare these days for someone to move from the proverbial factory floor to anything higher on the totem pole than the equivalent of senior foreman.
Don't kid yourself, it was rare 'back then' too. There is no 'lost golden age'.
n geek-land, those translate to techies' career path frequently blocked by de facto policy from getting past something like Senior Software Architect in a lot of corporations.
Makes sense to me, as geek skills are of little use above that level.
This reminds me of a movie we watched a couple of days ago...a biopic on Coco Chanel. In the film, there's this scene where there are dozens of women sitting there sewing purses, dresses, etc...and the woman playing Chanel says "This company is successful because of me! It's called C-H-A-N-E-L for a reason!".
Claiming responsibility for the company's success while saying nothing of the throngs of people actually putting together her products was simultaneously amusing and disheartening.
When the truth is disheartening - then the problem is with you, not the truth. Because she's absolutely right - the people putting the products together could vanish overnight, be replaced by new people, and the company would continue without a bobble. But take away the designer, the name, the key person - and it all grinds to a halt.
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I typically travel with more cables, chargers, and batteries than you can shake a stick at (Two cameras, an iPhone, a laptop, a hiking GPS and an Nuvi.) I've never been pulled for extra scrutiny - except the one time I was headed home for a funeral and had only my cell phone and laptop. I.E. don't try drawing a curve through a single data point.
Never mind you have absolutely zero evidence that is true.
Well, the problem with 'your thought' is that is has nothing to with 'the facts' - because in reality, America was already trying to get into space.
I have never seen any statistics that indicate any noticeable increase in people entering the sciences post Sputnik.
Actually, I do live in a mountainous area. In fact, I live in one of the few areas in the country where I have two different ranges within less than two hours drive.
The fact that many rails roads there don't have roads and they use aerostats for limited logging is irrelevant - because to build a high speed monorail you're going to need roads for construction access. Once you've built those roads you need anyhow.... Aerostats no longer make sense.
By the time you've built the road to get the heavy machinery up to clear the area and build the foundation - bringing up the components and labor to build the structure itself is fairly trivial. Actually, once you've cleared a road so people can access the completed structure, you're ready to bring up whatever machinery and supplies you need without an aerostat.
Since you need a road for construction access, even with an aerostat 'crane'... you don't need an aerostat anymore. As you can simply use the road you need to build anyhow.
I.E. you don't really understand what makes these kinds of construction expensive.
But we already have [relatively] cheap truck that are all but immune to weather to fill that niche - [very] expensive airships (which require considerable extra lifting infrastructure to transfer to loads from the bottom of the structure to the lifting point on top) which require fairly calm weather conditions are a poor replacement indeed.
Why? We already have oceangoing tugboats more than capable of towing the ships to port in anything short of hurricane conditions. By the time an areostat has moved the cargo to another ship (assuming reasonable weather), the tug has already towed it to port much more cheaply.
Not only do we have tugs as pointed out above, replacing drive components at sea as your propose is roughly akin to conducting an appendectomy via the patients ear canal - with a spoon. It just doesn't make any sense.
In the case of a train derailment we already have cranes that work in virtually all weathers. (In exactly the manner that areostats do not.) If a locomotive dies, you just hook another locomotive in front and tow it as is already common practice. If it won't roll, well then you use the cranes mentioned above and jacks to remove and replace the damaged drive truck.
Pick up an entire ship using an LTA craft? You're talking something the size of a small country - and hideously vulnerable to weather.
In short, there are no such markets - in each of the examples you provide above, the areostat is vastly inferior to existing solutions.
Sometimes it helps to stop and think before typing, you might try it sometime. When you do, in this case, the intelligent person would ask himself - how do you connect the beams on the bottom to the lifting point on the top. Then the intelligent person will re-read my message and note that I'd already mentioned that.
The idiot and his boon companion Captain Obvious instead will just repeat what the individual I was replying to and I already said.
Both you and the OP are correct in different ways - and aptly illustrate why this is such a bad idea.
Buildings (and pretty much everything else on Earth) are mostly designed to resist compressive loads I.E. the force of gravity. Thus, if you want to move a structure using this method your pretty much have two major options: First, to move an existing structure you can build a heavy cage around it so you can lift it from the top. Second, to move a new structure you can design in massive reinforcements so you can lift it from the top. Both are expensive and add considerable parasitic loads to the structure and the lift.
Not to mention, this idea has been floated a dozen times or more in the last fifty odd years, and always with the same result - a bankrupt company and penniless investors. While they've got some cool hacks in this scheme, they don't seem to have overcome the basic solution-in-search-of-problem problem. I.E. there doesn't actually seem to be a market.
Because it costs money and consumes personnel, communications, etc., resources.
Ask the steel industry how that worked out. Or the auto industry. Or any of the half dozen other industries chased offshore because (in part) of unions that insisted on never ending pay and benefits increases - regardless of how the company and/or the economy was faring.
Don't get me wrong, unions have accomplished a lot of good, but they've also done a lot of damage.
Because another element of American culture is not pay twice as much for something that's available elsewhere at a considerably lower price - and that's the situation with solar power. Lacking massive subsidies, it's simply not anywhere near competitive.
And when they don't have the "FULL COSTS", they'll selectively make up costs in order to make the math come out the way they want.
Precisely my point - taxation doesn't actually equate to paying for the costs of pollution, but it *does* artificially inflate the costs of the 'polluting stuff'. (Never mind that renewable sources pollute too, but that pollution is out of sight, out of mind, and doesn't matter - because the goal isn't to reduce pollution, it's to force a predetermined outcome into being.)
The energy saved by the installation will be more than made up for by the amount of energy expended in proclaiming how green the White House is.
Well, no, not really. He was funded until the people funding him realized he wasn't actually producing anything but vaporware - then he was ignored. His reputation has been enhanced posthumously because we eventually did build computers (making his seem 'obvious and scientifically sound' by comparison) even though he never actually built anything.
Except he didn't actually do anything except produce reams and reams of sketches that might someday be worked into a usable design along with a handful of random prototypes of parts that might someday be incorporated into a finished machine.
TFA considerably overstates the situation. There isn't an Analytical Engine to be built - because there is no complete design for any single major component of the machine. If you think of the Engine as the Duke Nukem Forever of mechanical computing, you won't be far off the mark.
So? That means it's improbable, not impossible.
If you don't have good communications infrastructure, they aren't putting the data center there in the first place. If the data center needs parts, that's what UPS/FedEx are for - it would take a huge data center (something like an order of magnitude or two larger than anything ever built) to make it worth time for a major hardware vendor to even consider a part time tech, let alone a distribution center.
Polaris will no longer be the North Star, but that will be more because of the precession of Earth's rotation axis than because of any movements on Polaris' part.
Nah, he's no higher than around maybe 10th or 1,000th. I remember seeing diagrams of how the constellations would be changed as early as the mid 70's.
No, you're wrong - because you completely misunderstood what he said. He did not say (as you imply) that social media was not useful as a tool for organizing. He said that absent a strong organizing body and people willing to actually leave their keyboard - social media was not useful for promoting change.
Paper spacecraft are *always* cheaper, on-schedule, and likely to actually work. It's when you start bending metal and have to start keeping those promises that start to go downhill.
Another set of 'firm plans' [without visible funding and with yet another maybe this year, maybe that year schedule]?
If the Russians ever figure out how to monetize the endless stream of plans they produce, they'll be buying China in a year or two.
It's very relevant, and neither twisting what I said in a vain attempt to 'prove' otherwise nor vainly straining to avoid actually address what I did say changes that.
From the abstract linked above:
Don't kid yourself, it was rare 'back then' too. There is no 'lost golden age'.
Makes sense to me, as geek skills are of little use above that level.
When the truth is disheartening - then the problem is with you, not the truth. Because she's absolutely right - the people putting the products together could vanish overnight, be replaced by new people, and the company would continue without a bobble. But take away the designer, the name, the key person - and it all grinds to a halt.
Is that a rhetorical question or are you new to Slashdot?