"And last I checked with my redneck cousins, one doesn't need a vast quantity of gasoline to make moonshine."
You should have questioned your cousins in more detail. If they are typical rednecks, they are probably using a wood-fired boiler for distillation. But it absolutely does take quite a bit of energy to produce moonshine. On a humerous side note, an actual cousin of mine once built a small solar powered distillery, which I guess makes him a greenish-red neck. But I doubt that contratption would scale very well.
Absolutely the sun produces all sorts of energy. I'm just skeptical whether growing corn, fermenting it, distilling it, extracting hydrogen and using the hydrogen in a fuel cell is the most efficient way to use that energy. It seems unlikely, because there are a lot of steps. Each step is going to lose some of the energy you started with, and some steps will use some fixed amount whether you have that much left or not.
Hydrogen to be used in fuel cells is a great energy storage medium, and quite possibly the way of the future. The question is how efficiently we can use solar (or nuclear) power power to produce hydrogen. When someone answers this question by saying, "first, grow a lot of corn...", history suggests they might be working for the corn industry.
Luck is certainly more likely to determine the survival of a particular individual than slight differences in fitness. But the survival of the species will be dominated by fitness. Let's say we have a mutation that makes those individuals who have it one one hundredth of a percent more likely to survive. It makes almost no difference to the individual, but after a few hundred generations, those with it will completely dominate. Your examples only demonstrate you don't coprehend the "scale of evolution". Take for example a million larger lions, and a million smaller lions that work together in pairs, and assume these populations are in competition for scarce resources. Will one population be gone in a few hundred thousand years? Probably. Do I know which one? Nope. Will it be luck? Nope.
But anyway, why am I bothering to try and explain evolution? You won't get it if I spend my whole life doing so, for your misunderstanding is willful. Instead, here's a basic primer on the scientific method:
1) Come up with a theory that seems to explain something about the world. 2) Think of some peice of evidence you could gather that will work out one way if your theory is correct, and another way if your theory is incorrect. 3) Go gather that evidence. 4) Did it support your theory? 5) If No, come up with a new theory. 6) If yes, keep in mind that that doesn't prove anything, and go back to step 2, repeating forever. Each time through this loop, you may become slightly more convinced your theory is probably correct, but if you're cautious, you'll never be really sure.
Note also that this is actual, messy, real-world stuff, so the best answer you are likely to get to step 4 is likely to be "almost entirely Yes, but a few of the details over here are kind of weird". Actual scientists will respond by saying "Weird details, cool! Let's look at them closely and see if we can figure it out." Crackpots will say "Aha! The whole theory is thus obviously false, which means my theory must be true."
You see, I know what your "theory" is, and it isn't a theory, because you can't do step 2.
It's ignored because it's idiotic nonsense. Unfavorable mutations don't put any "drag" on evolution. They just die.
In any case, nobody who knows what they are talking about will claim to know how long it should take for organisms of a given complexity to arise via evolution. The number of unknowns in any such calculation is such it's just a wild ass guess. Heck, just quantifying "complexity"...
So some guy named Haldane wanted to debunk evolutuion and made a wild assed guess that said evolution must be wrong? I hope you'll forgive the scientific communtity for finding this niether shocking nor troubling.
I've heard it ascribed to Bugs Bunny using it to describe Elmer Fudd. In case that reference doesn't cross the pond, Bugs Bunny's nemesis Elmer Fudd is a bumbling, foolish hunter. So when bugs called him a "Nimrod", most Americans had no idea the word meant "hunter", an so connected the word with his other attributes.
Let me state that comment you keep seeing a little differently:
It takes more energy to produce ethanol than that ethanol contains. It doesn't matter what the original source of energy used by the tractors/trucks/heaters is, you're better off just using that than ethanol.
As for "Hydrogen Power", their is no such thing. The hydrogen tech everyone is talking about is an energy storage mechanism, not a generation mechanism. You need to generate the power somewhere, and if you then send that power through the grow-corn-make-ethanol loop, you've lost more than 20% of your power before you even think about how to use the ethanol.
We'll never get to the point of transitioning to alternative energy sources if people who claim to be supporting alternative energy are really supporting technology that just throws energy away. (but provides an excuse give tax dollars to ADM, who then make big campaign contributions)
"a fuel source that only takes bacteria, the sun, and a few weeks to create"
Why do people keep spouting this? Ethanol takes more energy to create than it contains, not even counting the solar energy used in growing the corn. The farm equipment to grow the corn, the transportation to the ethanol plant, and the ethanol plant itself use more energy than the ethanol coming out of the plant contains. Ethanol is not a power source. Ethanol is a way to throw away a bunch of energy in exchange for two things: 1) a slight reduction in carbon monoxide production if you mix it into your cars gas. 2) an excuse to give away heaps of tax dollars in farm subsidies.
It doesn't matter if you switch the farm, transport, and plant away from fossil fuels. Ethanol production is energy negative regardless of the original energy source.
I don't think there is anything magical about an experiment. What you want is a some peice of evidence that your theory predicts will turn out differently than some alternative theory. Then you go get that evidence and see. A controlled (and hence repeatable) experiment is one way of producing such evidence, but there is nothing wrong with going out in the world and finding it (though it may be harder). The key is that anyone who wants to can go find the same evidence (or run the same experiment) and get the same result.
So the theory of evolution (along with a collection of sub theories) might make the prediction "While water breathers have cartiligenous(sp?) skeletons, air breathing marine animals will have bony skeletons." Anyone who wants to can go cut up a bunch of fish and whales and see that these seemingly unrelated traits match up consistently. This lends support to the theory that the traits are related because they both correspond to animals whose ancestors lived on land.
The results of repeatable experiments are just one type of independantly observable evidence. Regardless of it's source, no evidence proves a theory. Rather, it supports a theory by turning out the way that theory predicts. Experimental evidence is not any more significant than observed evidence, it's just more dramatic. This is because scientists in fields that lend themselves to experimentation can identify a peice of evidence that would distinguish their theory from the prevailing ones, and then force that evidence into existence.
Anyway, evidence, experimentally derived or not, is useful only for distinguishing between competing theories. I can't tell you what evidence to check, or what experiment to do to confirm evolution unless you tell me what your alternative theory is. In fact, I don't know of any alternative theories to evolution whatsoever. The supposed alternatives I have heard advanced are all non-falsifiable.
Well, "It's falsifiable, and seems probable" is the best I ask of any scientific theory, and evolution is falsifiable and seems (to me) incredibly probable.
By "clasic experiment" I assume you mean something like the ones that come generally in Physics (e.g. Michelson-Morley, or the two-slit experiment) But these don't really demonstrate their theories. Rather, they support their theories while dramatically disproving the prevailing alternative theory. It's hard to see how evolution would ever achieve this sort of drama, partly because there isn't a different, prevailing scientific theory for it to supplant.
Anyway, if someone has a falsifiable alternative to evolution, I'd be interested. But everyone I've heard criticising evolution was advancing a non-falsifiable alternative, so I'm not interested. But then they want to be taken seriously in some way (e.g. changing education policy) that forces me to be interested, so they piss me off.
"Anti-religionists seem to think everything, including anything within religion, should be 'provable', no matter what"
Well, you'd probably call me "Anti-religionists", (though I wouldn't), and I don't ask that anything be provable. I do ask that something be at least theoretically disprovable if you want to call it science, and if you want it to be accorded the respect due to science.
This is the hallmark of "religious" beliefs: No matter what evidence turns up, they cannot be disproven. I try not to believe such things (except on Tuesdays). I have no problem if you wish too, so long as you don't try to base public policy on them or teach them to my children.
Oh, wait, you're advancing Pascals wager. In my experience, everyone familiar with Pascals wager learned of it in Philosophy 101, where it is invariably accompanied by 16 demonstrations of how stupid it is. Assuming this is where you heard of it, I'm sure you'll understand when I say that Occams Razor suggests you're a troll.
"On the speculative question of whether intelligent aliens have souls, all Christian authors I have read agree that they do."
Really? What about unintelligent aliens? How dumb do they have to be before they don't have souls? Forget the aliens. Do cows have souls? Is it still OK to eat them? Depending on your answers to those two, Is canabalism a sin, or was there some magic point in the course of evolution when humans aquired souls?
OK, I'm being a bit silly here. I have some respect for the attempts of Catholocism and other fairly mainstream sects to avoid taking a stand on scientific issues, it's the fundamentalists who say science is wrong (without understanding it) that piss me off. But smart religions stay away from science only because they've been burned before. Even when they've tried to aggree with science, that science has later proved to be not quite right (which is no problem for science, but a big problem if you're asspiring to infallibility).
Well, I agree that whatever effects an adminstration has on the economy won't be felt immediately. But a lot of people essentially claim the effects of the guy they like better will be felt whenever the next boom is. Which is nonsense. More likely, the effects of what a president can do will be felt over the very long term, extending over many boom/bust cycles.
I think Bush's policies (cut taxes, particularly on the wealthy; radically increase spending; remove restrictions on corporations enriching themselves at the expense of the commons) might probably help the economy recover in the short term, at the expense of completely trashing it over the long term. But by that time there will have been a few democtatic administrations to blame it on.
"you're in denial, and you keep repeating things not based on fact (which is a trait of many liberals)."
As do you. It's a trait that's pretty much universal of anyone discussing politics, because there are precious few facts to go around.
Example: You say economic changes tend to lag behind administrations. Most of the time when people say this it is spin; They like the administrations that in recent history have coincided with not so good economic times. So it's not unreasonable for someone to assume it is spin when you say it.
But you say it's not spin. Well either way, I say it's hogwash. Presidents have at best a small ability to impact the economy at all. Regardless of what they do, it's going to go well some times, and get fubarred other times. Maybe a President, with the cooperation of Congress and a bunch of state governments could gaurauntee a fubar if they worked at it. But obviously they're not going to. Nobody has the magic formula for making everything run smoothly forever. The economy is a stupendously complex system, with a few billion participants (worldwide) trying to push it in their own favor. To suggest it's behavior is attributable to the actions of a single person (even a president) is inane.
That's easily avoided. Before you close the debugger, go to the Debug menu and select "Detach All".
Detaching the debugger from a process leaves the process running. Stopping the debugger generally stops the process it's attached to. That's why when you close the debugger window, it asks if you want to stop debugging. Why it doesn't give you the option right there to detach all and then close is a mystery to me, since that's almost always what I want.
What does it have to do with money? Well, it costs a hell of a lot of it, that's what it has to do with money. You are welcome to be naturally curious with your own money. If you want to use someone elses money (e.g. mine), you should expect them to ask what they are getting out of it. Historicaly, explorers who were funded by others got that funding only because they had an answer to that question.
Yeah, a man might have done more than the current robot has. But getting him there would have cost many times as much. Could we learn more from having one guy in a suit on Mars than one robot? Probably. But we can learn even more from having a dozen robots at a dozen different landing points with a dozen different instrument packages.
"Easy, launch the factory to geosyncronous orbit, and build from there down"
Doesn't help. You still need to get the raw materials up to the factory. A cable 6 earth-radii in length is going to have an incredible total mass. One way or another, you have to get the center of gravity of that mass up to geosyncronous orbit.
I don't dispute that a space elevator may someday be doable, though I think that day is a very long way off. I just think that a launch mechanism that brings the cost of building the elevator down enough to make it wothwhile will itself be a competitor that makes building the elevator not worthwhile.
That's a fantastically fast rotation, but OK. Still, the system doesn't buy you anything. For every load you move from high in the atmosphere to such-and-such an orbit, you sap the rotational energy of your lifter, and must add more energy to bring yourself up to speed. In the best possible case, the amount of energy you need to get your lifter back up to rotational speed is the amount of energy it would have taken you to move the load up to it's orbit without the lifter.
Again, the advantage of a space elevator is getting energy up to your craft without lifting fuel.
When can we develop a production method that makes it economically feasible to create a cable out of this (not yet developed) composite which is long enough to circle the earth?
When can we develop a launch mechanism that makes it economically feasible to get that (fricking enornous) cable up to geosynconous orbit?
If we have the launch mechanism specified above, will it make any sense to build a space elevator?
Space elevators, bah humbug! They're a really neat idea, but I think they'll always be sci-fi. You need a cable whose length is about 6 times the radius of the earth, but which can support itself hung on end. So show me a material with that kind of strength to weight ratio. Then I'll ask you to show me how you can produce such a huge amount of it cheaply enough. Finnally, I'll ask you to show me a launch mechanism that can get your incredibly massive cable up to geosyncronous orbit cheaply enough. If you can show me that last one, I'll ask why we need a space elevator...
I don't see how your system gets you anything. The advantage of a space elevator is you can generate power on earth and transmit it up the cable.
Other problem:
If it's in low orbit, it's not going to be matching local wind speed. wind will be trivial compared to the massive speed of the orbiter relative to the earth.
"Exceedingly long" is a bit of an understatement. The length you're talking about (with just more elevator for a counterweight) is roughly 12 times the earths radius. Even with a counterweight system, the distance to geosyncronous is almost 6 earth radii. So, aproximately, you need a cable that completely encircles the earth when laid flat, and is strong enough to support its own weight when hung on end. I don't see that kind of strength-to-weight ratio being produced any time in the near future. And even if you produce the material, you've got to produce it in stupefying quantity, and get it all up to geosyncronous by some other means.
So I don't see a space elevator being economically feasible for a very, very long time, and certainly not before other launch means become so cheap as to eclipse it anyway.
Well, yes, you can get there considerably faster taking the logarithmic route. So if you can figure out how to have your craft accelerate constantly the whole way, a lot of stuff is not really that far away. Of course, if you're going a really long way, you'll get to going really fast, and constant acceleration will take more and more thrust. (Damn you, Relativity.)
Actually, the main point of the lego mindstorms was to change the way kids learned... to make learning and playing the same.
Kids have always learned by playing, this is not a change. I'll certainly give mindstorms credit for recognizing that this is how kids learn.
If you want some children to learn about basic math and spatial relationships, it's hard to do much worse than a textbook, and hard to do any better than opening a couple big tubs full of basic legos and leaving the room.
Slashdot Mirror
"And last I checked with my redneck cousins, one doesn't need a vast quantity of gasoline to make moonshine."
You should have questioned your cousins in more detail. If they are typical rednecks, they are probably using a wood-fired boiler for distillation. But it absolutely does take quite a bit of energy to produce moonshine. On a humerous side note, an actual cousin of mine once built a small solar powered distillery, which I guess makes him a greenish-red neck. But I doubt that contratption would scale very well.
Absolutely the sun produces all sorts of energy. I'm just skeptical whether growing corn, fermenting it, distilling it, extracting hydrogen and using the hydrogen in a fuel cell is the most efficient way to use that energy. It seems unlikely, because there are a lot of steps. Each step is going to lose some of the energy you started with, and some steps will use some fixed amount whether you have that much left or not.
Hydrogen to be used in fuel cells is a great energy storage medium, and quite possibly the way of the future. The question is how efficiently we can use solar (or nuclear) power power to produce hydrogen. When someone answers this question by saying, "first, grow a lot of corn...", history suggests they might be working for the corn industry.
Luck is certainly more likely to determine the survival of a particular individual than slight differences in fitness. But the survival of the species will be dominated by fitness. Let's say we have a mutation that makes those individuals who have it one one hundredth of a percent more likely to survive. It makes almost no difference to the individual, but after a few hundred generations, those with it will completely dominate. Your examples only demonstrate you don't coprehend the "scale of evolution". Take for example a million larger lions, and a million smaller lions that work together in pairs, and assume these populations are in competition for scarce resources. Will one population be gone in a few hundred thousand years? Probably. Do I know which one? Nope. Will it be luck? Nope.
But anyway, why am I bothering to try and explain evolution? You won't get it if I spend my whole life doing so, for your misunderstanding is willful. Instead, here's a basic primer on the scientific method:
1) Come up with a theory that seems to explain something about the world.
2) Think of some peice of evidence you could gather that will work out one way if your theory is correct, and another way if your theory is incorrect.
3) Go gather that evidence.
4) Did it support your theory?
5) If No, come up with a new theory.
6) If yes, keep in mind that that doesn't prove anything, and go back to step 2, repeating forever. Each time through this loop, you may become slightly more convinced your theory is probably correct, but if you're cautious, you'll never be really sure.
Note also that this is actual, messy, real-world stuff, so the best answer you are likely to get to step 4 is likely to be "almost entirely Yes, but a few of the details over here are kind of weird". Actual scientists will respond by saying "Weird details, cool! Let's look at them closely and see if we can figure it out." Crackpots will say "Aha! The whole theory is thus obviously false, which means my theory must be true."
You see, I know what your "theory" is, and it isn't a theory, because you can't do step 2.
It's ignored because it's idiotic nonsense. Unfavorable mutations don't put any "drag" on evolution. They just die.
In any case, nobody who knows what they are talking about will claim to know how long it should take for organisms of a given complexity to arise via evolution. The number of unknowns in any such calculation is such it's just a wild ass guess. Heck, just quantifying "complexity"...
So some guy named Haldane wanted to debunk evolutuion and made a wild assed guess that said evolution must be wrong? I hope you'll forgive the scientific communtity for finding this niether shocking nor troubling.
It means "fool" or "idiot".
I've heard it ascribed to Bugs Bunny using it to describe Elmer Fudd. In case that reference doesn't cross the pond, Bugs Bunny's nemesis Elmer Fudd is a bumbling, foolish hunter. So when bugs called him a "Nimrod", most Americans had no idea the word meant "hunter", an so connected the word with his other attributes.
Let me state that comment you keep seeing a little differently:
It takes more energy to produce ethanol than that ethanol contains. It doesn't matter what the original source of energy used by the tractors/trucks/heaters is, you're better off just using that than ethanol.
As for "Hydrogen Power", their is no such thing. The hydrogen tech everyone is talking about is an energy storage mechanism, not a generation mechanism. You need to generate the power somewhere, and if you then send that power through the grow-corn-make-ethanol loop, you've lost more than 20% of your power before you even think about how to use the ethanol.
We'll never get to the point of transitioning to alternative energy sources if people who claim to be supporting alternative energy are really supporting technology that just throws energy away. (but provides an excuse give tax dollars to ADM, who then make big campaign contributions)
"a fuel source that only takes bacteria, the sun, and a few weeks to create"
Why do people keep spouting this? Ethanol takes more energy to create than it contains, not even counting the solar energy used in growing the corn. The farm equipment to grow the corn, the transportation to the ethanol plant, and the ethanol plant itself use more energy than the ethanol coming out of the plant contains.
Ethanol is not a power source.
Ethanol is a way to throw away a bunch of energy in exchange for two things:
1) a slight reduction in carbon monoxide production if you mix it into your cars gas.
2) an excuse to give away heaps of tax dollars in farm subsidies.
It doesn't matter if you switch the farm, transport, and plant away from fossil fuels. Ethanol production is energy negative regardless of the original energy source.
I don't think there is anything magical about an experiment. What you want is a some peice of evidence that your theory predicts will turn out differently than some alternative theory. Then you go get that evidence and see. A controlled (and hence repeatable) experiment is one way of producing such evidence, but there is nothing wrong with going out in the world and finding it (though it may be harder). The key is that anyone who wants to can go find the same evidence (or run the same experiment) and get the same result.
So the theory of evolution (along with a collection of sub theories) might make the prediction "While water breathers have cartiligenous(sp?) skeletons, air breathing marine animals will have bony skeletons." Anyone who wants to can go cut up a bunch of fish and whales and see that these seemingly unrelated traits match up consistently. This lends support to the theory that the traits are related because they both correspond to animals whose ancestors lived on land.
The results of repeatable experiments are just one type of independantly observable evidence. Regardless of it's source, no evidence proves a theory. Rather, it supports a theory by turning out the way that theory predicts. Experimental evidence is not any more significant than observed evidence, it's just more dramatic. This is because scientists in fields that lend themselves to experimentation can identify a peice of evidence that would distinguish their theory from the prevailing ones, and then force that evidence into existence.
Anyway, evidence, experimentally derived or not, is useful only for distinguishing between competing theories. I can't tell you what evidence to check, or what experiment to do to confirm evolution unless you tell me what your alternative theory is. In fact, I don't know of any alternative theories to evolution whatsoever. The supposed alternatives I have heard advanced are all non-falsifiable.
Well, "It's falsifiable, and seems probable" is the best I ask of any scientific theory, and evolution is falsifiable and seems (to me) incredibly probable.
By "clasic experiment" I assume you mean something like the ones that come generally in Physics (e.g. Michelson-Morley, or the two-slit experiment) But these don't really demonstrate their theories. Rather, they support their theories while dramatically disproving the prevailing alternative theory. It's hard to see how evolution would ever achieve this sort of drama, partly because there isn't a different, prevailing scientific theory for it to supplant.
Anyway, if someone has a falsifiable alternative to evolution, I'd be interested. But everyone I've heard criticising evolution was advancing a non-falsifiable alternative, so I'm not interested. But then they want to be taken seriously in some way (e.g. changing education policy) that forces me to be interested, so they piss me off.
"Anti-religionists seem to think everything, including anything within religion, should be 'provable', no matter what"
Well, you'd probably call me "Anti-religionists", (though I wouldn't), and I don't ask that anything be provable. I do ask that something be at least theoretically disprovable if you want to call it science, and if you want it to be accorded the respect due to science.
This is the hallmark of "religious" beliefs: No matter what evidence turns up, they cannot be disproven. I try not to believe such things (except on Tuesdays). I have no problem if you wish too, so long as you don't try to base public policy on them or teach them to my children.
Oh, wait, you're advancing Pascals wager. In my experience, everyone familiar with Pascals wager learned of it in Philosophy 101, where it is invariably accompanied by 16 demonstrations of how stupid it is. Assuming this is where you heard of it, I'm sure you'll understand when I say that Occams Razor suggests you're a troll.
Assuming we're talking about a project of any significant size:
"If you hand craft in assembler, you then will get well architectured code."
From what I've seen, buggy, impossible to decipher spaghetti is more common.
"Even though it may take 10 times as long to write"
Try 10,000.
"It will be 100 time more efficient"
Maybe 10%, if you're good.
Now for a few lines of inline assembler, if say a 50% speed improvement is a big deal, definitely spend the 10 - 100 times as long to write it.
"I'd rather have a programmer working for me..."
If you're doing significant projects on x86 in assembler, you don't have any programmers working for you, or won't for long. Maintainability matters.
"On the speculative question of whether intelligent aliens have souls, all Christian authors I have read agree that they do."
Really? What about unintelligent aliens? How dumb do they have to be before they don't have souls? Forget the aliens. Do cows have souls? Is it still OK to eat them? Depending on your answers to those two, Is canabalism a sin, or was there some magic point in the course of evolution when humans aquired souls?
OK, I'm being a bit silly here. I have some respect for the attempts of Catholocism and other fairly mainstream sects to avoid taking a stand on scientific issues, it's the fundamentalists who say science is wrong (without understanding it) that piss me off. But smart religions stay away from science only because they've been burned before. Even when they've tried to aggree with science, that science has later proved to be not quite right (which is no problem for science, but a big problem if you're asspiring to infallibility).
Well, I agree that whatever effects an adminstration has on the economy won't be felt immediately. But a lot of people essentially claim the effects of the guy they like better will be felt whenever the next boom is. Which is nonsense. More likely, the effects of what a president can do will be felt over the very long term, extending over many boom/bust cycles.
I think Bush's policies (cut taxes, particularly on the wealthy; radically increase spending; remove restrictions on corporations enriching themselves at the expense of the commons) might probably help the economy recover in the short term, at the expense of completely trashing it over the long term. But by that time there will have been a few democtatic administrations to blame it on.
"you're in denial, and you keep repeating things not based on fact (which is a trait of many liberals)."
As do you. It's a trait that's pretty much universal of anyone discussing politics, because there are precious few facts to go around.
Example: You say economic changes tend to lag behind administrations. Most of the time when people say this it is spin; They like the administrations that in recent history have coincided with not so good economic times. So it's not unreasonable for someone to assume it is spin when you say it.
But you say it's not spin. Well either way, I say it's hogwash. Presidents have at best a small ability to impact the economy at all. Regardless of what they do, it's going to go well some times, and get fubarred other times. Maybe a President, with the cooperation of Congress and a bunch of state governments could gaurauntee a fubar if they worked at it. But obviously they're not going to. Nobody has the magic formula for making everything run smoothly forever. The economy is a stupendously complex system, with a few billion participants (worldwide) trying to push it in their own favor. To suggest it's behavior is attributable to the actions of a single person (even a president) is inane.
Funny, I've been doing it since NT4.
I must be magic.
That's easily avoided. Before you close the debugger, go to the Debug menu and select "Detach All".
Detaching the debugger from a process leaves the process running. Stopping the debugger generally stops the process it's attached to. That's why when you close the debugger window, it asks if you want to stop debugging. Why it doesn't give you the option right there to detach all and then close is a mystery to me, since that's almost always what I want.
What does it have to do with money? Well, it costs a hell of a lot of it, that's what it has to do with money. You are welcome to be naturally curious with your own money. If you want to use someone elses money (e.g. mine), you should expect them to ask what they are getting out of it. Historicaly, explorers who were funded by others got that funding only because they had an answer to that question.
Yeah, a man might have done more than the current robot has. But getting him there would have cost many times as much. Could we learn more from having one guy in a suit on Mars than one robot? Probably. But we can learn even more from having a dozen robots at a dozen different landing points with a dozen different instrument packages.
"Easy, launch the factory to geosyncronous orbit, and build from there down"
Doesn't help. You still need to get the raw materials up to the factory. A cable 6 earth-radii in length is going to have an incredible total mass. One way or another, you have to get the center of gravity of that mass up to geosyncronous orbit.
I don't dispute that a space elevator may someday be doable, though I think that day is a very long way off. I just think that a launch mechanism that brings the cost of building the elevator down enough to make it wothwhile will itself be a competitor that makes building the elevator not worthwhile.
That's a fantastically fast rotation, but OK.
Still, the system doesn't buy you anything. For every load you move from high in the atmosphere to such-and-such an orbit, you sap the rotational energy of your lifter, and must add more energy to bring yourself up to speed. In the best possible case, the amount of energy you need to get your lifter back up to rotational speed is the amount of energy it would have taken you to move the load up to it's orbit without the lifter.
Again, the advantage of a space elevator is getting energy up to your craft without lifting fuel.
But, as I said, the real questions are:
When can we develop a production method that makes it economically feasible to create a cable out of this (not yet developed) composite which is long enough to circle the earth?
When can we develop a launch mechanism that makes it economically feasible to get that (fricking enornous) cable up to geosynconous orbit?
If we have the launch mechanism specified above, will it make any sense to build a space elevator?
Space elevators, bah humbug!
They're a really neat idea, but I think they'll always be sci-fi. You need a cable whose length is about 6 times the radius of the earth, but which can support itself hung on end. So show me a material with that kind of strength to weight ratio. Then I'll ask you to show me how you can produce such a huge amount of it cheaply enough.
Finnally, I'll ask you to show me a launch mechanism that can get your incredibly massive cable up to geosyncronous orbit cheaply enough.
If you can show me that last one, I'll ask why we need a space elevator...
I don't see how your system gets you anything. The advantage of a space elevator is you can generate power on earth and transmit it up the cable.
Other problem:
If it's in low orbit, it's not going to be matching local wind speed. wind will be trivial compared to the massive speed of the orbiter relative to the earth.
"Exceedingly long" is a bit of an understatement. The length you're talking about (with just more elevator for a counterweight) is roughly 12 times the earths radius. Even with a counterweight system, the distance to geosyncronous is almost 6 earth radii. So, aproximately, you need a cable that completely encircles the earth when laid flat, and is strong enough to support its own weight when hung on end. I don't see that kind of strength-to-weight ratio being produced any time in the near future. And even if you produce the material, you've got to produce it in stupefying quantity, and get it all up to geosyncronous by some other means.
So I don't see a space elevator being economically feasible for a very, very long time, and certainly not before other launch means become so cheap as to eclipse it anyway.
3.57412789 x 10^22 furlongs
1.29409676 x 10^21 leagues
3.88229027 x 10^21 nautical miles
Happy to help.
Well, yes, you can get there considerably faster taking the logarithmic route. So if you can figure out how to have your craft accelerate constantly the whole way, a lot of stuff is not really that far away. Of course, if you're going a really long way, you'll get to going really fast, and constant acceleration will take more and more thrust. (Damn you, Relativity.)
Actually, the main point of the lego mindstorms was to change the way kids learned... to make learning and playing the same.
Kids have always learned by playing, this is not a change. I'll certainly give mindstorms credit for recognizing that this is how kids learn.
If you want some children to learn about basic math and spatial relationships, it's hard to do much worse than a textbook, and hard to do any better than opening a couple big tubs full of basic legos and leaving the room.