Ummm... time is in metric, the second, its just not base 10. Most metric units are base 10, not all, many of the derived scientific units, like atomic quantity, are based on natural considerations. Your argument is specious.
So we have length, mass, energy, and force, along with the hundreds of associated units, all in base 10. We have a single measure, time, which is _typically_ not base 10 (it is in science). How is that "half", troll?
"Another strategy is buy-to-build. The first three trains were imported as a whole; the second three were assembled with imported parts; subsequent trains contain more and more Chinese made parts."
Uhhh, that's how *all* heavy industrial projects work. Most contracts specifies local-build parts because otherwise your trade balance goes whacky and currencies get mashed. Remove all references of "China" and you have the story of practically any train built in the last 50 years.
The Toronto streetcar fleet is a Swiss design, by SIG. We bought three and then made the rest in Thunder Bay. The ICTS was originally a German maglev, but they pulled out and we got the design work for free. The Amtrak Turboliners are the same, as are most civilian aircraft.
After the opening scene in the Discovery, Frank can be seen eating while Dave enters from the inner core and walks over to get his own dinner. 15 seconds max.
Not a long shot? Watch it carefully.
Remember that the Discovery interior is a large cylinder that rotates to allow the walker to remain at the bottom of the ring. That means that while Dave is walking over to Frank, Frank is hanging from the ceiling.
There's a bit of a fake because they switch shots when Dave passes under the center. After that you can see that he has to stand on an angle when he goes to the food machine.
> No ground-based telescope is going to be able to observe at the infrared wavelengths that are needed to observe the ancient universe
So then we spend $6.5 billion (for now) to do that, or we could build far more practical designs that will return orders of magnitude more science for 1/5th the cost.
EVERY decision has to be studied in terms of price/performance. Space based telescopes can be extremely effective (the HALO series for instance) but in overall terms Hubble is not that great, and it's pretty clear that Webb won't be either. It's a 1980s solution being applied in the 21st century.
Not really, but that's besides the point. For much less that $6.5 billion we could build a much larger telescope here, say 1/5th that. For that 1.2 billion you'd get more science, like from the European Extremely Large Telescope.
People love to point to Hubble pictures and say how great they are and how you couldn't get that on Earth. Hogwash. Hubble just gets all the publicity. NASA's good at that, and having IMAX films about it doesn't hurt. TMT has ten times the resolution and an even wider bandwidth than Hubble, but where's the IMAX film about it?
One handed? Try this, hold your phone with one hand, and try to make circular motions on the front surface using your thumb. I don't know about you, but pulling over toward my palm and then moving down (the noon-to-four motion) is pretty hard to do.
But that's ok, all I need is some exercise: Push! Harder! Go faster Max! Reach over the top. Master your ass!
AM I being a naive old man watching people complain about companies who save millions of people's lives and improves the lives of millions of others evert day, and all they take in return is paper with patterns painted on it.
Seriously, I spend more on coffee than Singulair, but the later is by any definition, a miracle drug.
Grow up. If you don't like them making all that money off the hard working backs of all those poor people you pretend to know, BUY SHARES.
No one is moving. Everything is sitting relatively still. The space between them, and everything else, is expanding. That expansion is uniform and fast.
> How different would America be now if we all drove turbine-powered cars
LOL. A turbine uses between 60 and 70% of it's full-throttle fuel use while standing still. The compressor soaks up a lot of power. They're fine for systems that operate at high power levels all the time, or where power-to-weight is the only major consideration, but for auto use they're useless. Hybrids fix this, but they didn't have LiIon batteries in the 50/60's.
> single spindle turbine, with a generator on the same shaft as the turbine
Use a Wankel. All the same advantages. They're even replacing turbines for APUs.
With that said, where America is lacking is that we are not looking at Cargo and doing it across all of North America. Basically, we should be putting a high speed rail on the common cargo routes, rather than common human routes.
Can't do it, signalling and track loads on cargo lines are not useful for high-speed trains. To get anything near "high speed" you need separate lins.
Cargo in general is dying in the US. Since delivery over the last mile generally requires a semi-trailer to haul the container, it's typically cheaper in the long run to build a new container port than it is to trans-ship through trains. Then you ship the containers to the port and truck them the last 400 km or so. This doesn't work for mid-west areas, but the amount of cargo flowing there is limited to the point that it's not a serious consideration.
The same is not true in Canada where the coastal loading areas are seriously limited, basically to Halifax, Vancouver and a few ports on the St. Lawrence while the main industrial areas are all inland 1000's of km away. As a result the railways up here are making money hand over fist, and they're slowly but surely buying up the US companies. Soo Line cars are very common in Oshawa.
Yeah, china has a long history of stealing things and then taking credit for it. For example, they claim that they have the fastest maglev. In reality, it is Germany that does. The problem is that China has come up with a new one. What does it look like? JUST LIKE GERMANY's.
Really? No one's going to call him in this astonishingly racist post?
Back here on planet Earth, one could easily find that both designs are produced under license, from Transurban and Siemens. No "stealing" involved.
> but single-crystal silicon solar cells (the highest manufacturable efficiency) are well past 20% right now
Commercial cells available in quantity are lower, about 15 to 17%.
That's only the cell itself. If you consider the losses due to resistance on the front surface, reflection off the wiring on the front face, wiring losses, and the area of the panel that is not covered by cells (look at an image of any mono-Si panel) you'll get PANEL efficiency around 14% for just about every panel in the world.
> The same setup up north would be multiples of that size
We use 1150 kWh per kWp in Toronto. The Bay Area gets about 25% more. So "multiples" in that case is a little less than "2".
Here's some numbers to consider. The local power company pays 80 cents per kWh for rooftop solar (yes, you read that right). At that price, a system normally pays off in 10 years or less. That means if all you want to do is break even, it would be at about 40 cents a kWh.
Now that's a lot more than you pay now (in most places). But that's _retail_cost_. The cost of installation is perhaps half that if you consider very large installations, 10 MWp and up. So in those cases, the breakeven price is likely closer to 25 cents.
That's in Toronto. In Mohave and the Great Sandy Desert, it's better by about 50 to 100%. So we're looking at maybe 12.5 to 20 cents a kWh. Which is quite reasonable, and on the same order as wind power.
Now that is a lot more expensive than coal, which is somewhere around 4 to 6 cents per kWh. However, it's unlimited and clean. How much is that worth?
Slashdot Mirror
> It's not called a couple half-liters now is it?
No, it's 568 ml.
> half-conversion to metric
Ummm... time is in metric, the second, its just not base 10. Most metric units are base 10, not all, many of the derived scientific units, like atomic quantity, are based on natural considerations. Your argument is specious.
So we have length, mass, energy, and force, along with the hundreds of associated units, all in base 10. We have a single measure, time, which is _typically_ not base 10 (it is in science). How is that "half", troll?
No no no, the absolutely best metric conversion story is the Gimli Glider.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
"Another strategy is buy-to-build. The first three trains were imported as a whole; the second three were assembled with imported parts; subsequent trains contain more and more Chinese made parts."
Uhhh, that's how *all* heavy industrial projects work. Most contracts specifies local-build parts because otherwise your trade balance goes whacky and currencies get mashed. Remove all references of "China" and you have the story of practically any train built in the last 50 years.
The Toronto streetcar fleet is a Swiss design, by SIG. We bought three and then made the rest in Thunder Bay. The ICTS was originally a German maglev, but they pulled out and we got the design work for free. The Amtrak Turboliners are the same, as are most civilian aircraft.
Another "yellow scare" story.
Maury
> and few have a motivating factor to create independent
> pages or sites on the topics anymore
That doesn't seem to have stopped anyone. Far from it, now there's pages who's entire existence is debunking the "mainstream view" on the wiki.
Another example of a game that is not zero-summed.
These days...it is getting hard to TELL which one is the bum, and which one is the president.
Not at all. One of them no longer smokes.
Or perhaps more accurately, not updating it.
It still has some things I like, but there's many more things I like in other places now. Boxing for one...
After the opening scene in the Discovery, Frank can be seen eating while Dave enters from the inner core and walks over to get his own dinner. 15 seconds max.
Not a long shot? Watch it carefully.
Remember that the Discovery interior is a large cylinder that rotates to allow the walker to remain at the bottom of the ring. That means that while Dave is walking over to Frank, Frank is hanging from the ceiling.
There's a bit of a fake because they switch shots when Dave passes under the center. After that you can see that he has to stand on an angle when he goes to the food machine.
No reason to do this shot that way, but he did.
> It could easily be a meteor crater or a sinkhole, or even an old quarry
Given that the posted feature has a second landform that appears largely identical just to the upper left, I'm going with quarry.
> They are composed of a metal that reacts strongly to acids.
>The largest piece so far reacted with tap water and
> dish-washing detergent
Dish washing detergent is basic, not acidic.
http://ca.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090106114510AAlzSKE
It is highly unlikely you have a single material that reacts _chemically_ the same way to both.
> No ground-based telescope is going to be able to observe at the infrared wavelengths that are needed to observe the ancient universe
So then we spend $6.5 billion (for now) to do that, or we could build far more practical designs that will return orders of magnitude more science for 1/5th the cost.
EVERY decision has to be studied in terms of price/performance. Space based telescopes can be extremely effective (the HALO series for instance) but in overall terms Hubble is not that great, and it's pretty clear that Webb won't be either. It's a 1980s solution being applied in the 21st century.
> Smaller satellites implies smaller mirrors
Not really, but that's besides the point. For much less that $6.5 billion we could build a much larger telescope here, say 1/5th that. For that 1.2 billion you'd get more science, like from the European Extremely Large Telescope.
People love to point to Hubble pictures and say how great they are and how you couldn't get that on Earth. Hogwash. Hubble just gets all the publicity. NASA's good at that, and having IMAX films about it doesn't hurt. TMT has ten times the resolution and an even wider bandwidth than Hubble, but where's the IMAX film about it?
> It turned out that they moved rapidly enough that they could be used to solve a serious problem of the day: longitude determination
Wrong. The system never worked well enough to be useful in spite of a century of effort. John Harrison's clocks solved that problem.
The French used it on land, but that's about it.
One handed? Try this, hold your phone with one hand, and try to make circular motions on the front surface using your thumb. I don't know about you, but pulling over toward my palm and then moving down (the noon-to-four motion) is pretty hard to do.
But that's ok, all I need is some exercise: Push! Harder! Go faster Max! Reach over the top. Master your ass!
Sulfoxides plus the brine to make them into a nice vapour.
Attacks are the normal "I'm being poisoned" reflex. Sulfoxides are close enough.
AM I being a naive old man watching people complain about companies who save millions of people's lives and improves the lives of millions of others evert day, and all they take in return is paper with patterns painted on it.
Seriously, I spend more on coffee than Singulair, but the later is by any definition, a miracle drug.
Grow up. If you don't like them making all that money off the hard working backs of all those poor people you pretend to know, BUY SHARES.
No one is moving. Everything is sitting relatively still. The space between them, and everything else, is expanding. That expansion is uniform and fast.
> How different would America be now if we all drove turbine-powered cars
LOL. A turbine uses between 60 and 70% of it's full-throttle fuel use while standing still. The compressor soaks up a lot of power. They're fine for systems that operate at high power levels all the time, or where power-to-weight is the only major consideration, but for auto use they're useless. Hybrids fix this, but they didn't have LiIon batteries in the 50/60's.
> single spindle turbine, with a generator on the same shaft as the turbine
Use a Wankel. All the same advantages. They're even replacing turbines for APUs.
Maury
> two-part version of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit
Huh? He fit the Ring books into a film each, yet the Hobbit, smaller than any of them, needs two parts? Uggg.
With that said, where America is lacking is that we are not looking at Cargo and doing it across all of North America. Basically, we should be putting a high speed rail on the common cargo routes, rather than common human routes.
Can't do it, signalling and track loads on cargo lines are not useful for high-speed trains. To get anything near "high speed" you need separate lins.
Cargo in general is dying in the US. Since delivery over the last mile generally requires a semi-trailer to haul the container, it's typically cheaper in the long run to build a new container port than it is to trans-ship through trains. Then you ship the containers to the port and truck them the last 400 km or so. This doesn't work for mid-west areas, but the amount of cargo flowing there is limited to the point that it's not a serious consideration.
The same is not true in Canada where the coastal loading areas are seriously limited, basically to Halifax, Vancouver and a few ports on the St. Lawrence while the main industrial areas are all inland 1000's of km away. As a result the railways up here are making money hand over fist, and they're slowly but surely buying up the US companies. Soo Line cars are very common in Oshawa.
Yeah, china has a long history of stealing things and then taking credit for it. For example, they claim that they have the fastest maglev. In reality, it is Germany that does. The problem is that China has come up with a new one. What does it look like? JUST LIKE GERMANY's.
Really? No one's going to call him in this astonishingly racist post?
Back here on planet Earth, one could easily find that both designs are produced under license, from Transurban and Siemens. No "stealing" involved.
In the UK the track goes around a lot of corners and is far from straight
That's oversold; tilting trains can deal with this, as Bombardier has demonstrated.
The Chinese CHR3 _is_ the Velaro E.
> but single-crystal silicon solar cells (the highest manufacturable efficiency) are well past 20% right now
Commercial cells available in quantity are lower, about 15 to 17%.
That's only the cell itself. If you consider the losses due to resistance on the front surface, reflection off the wiring on the front face, wiring losses, and the area of the panel that is not covered by cells (look at an image of any mono-Si panel) you'll get PANEL efficiency around 14% for just about every panel in the world.
Maury
> The same setup up north would be multiples of that size
We use 1150 kWh per kWp in Toronto. The Bay Area gets about 25% more. So "multiples" in that case is a little less than "2".
Here's some numbers to consider. The local power company pays 80 cents per kWh for rooftop solar (yes, you read that right). At that price, a system normally pays off in 10 years or less. That means if all you want to do is break even, it would be at about 40 cents a kWh.
Now that's a lot more than you pay now (in most places). But that's _retail_cost_. The cost of installation is perhaps half that if you consider very large installations, 10 MWp and up. So in those cases, the breakeven price is likely closer to 25 cents.
That's in Toronto. In Mohave and the Great Sandy Desert, it's better by about 50 to 100%. So we're looking at maybe 12.5 to 20 cents a kWh. Which is quite reasonable, and on the same order as wind power.
Now that is a lot more expensive than coal, which is somewhere around 4 to 6 cents per kWh. However, it's unlimited and clean. How much is that worth?
Maury