I blew twenty-four mod points, came home from work, crashed my car, paid a thousand dollars, screamed at some people on the street, and made my girlfriend break up with me in order to fix that missing article.
First part of your comment was good, even funny. Your tagline, "I've taught at both union and non-union schools. Unions are better for students and teachers." not so much. All 'public (dis)service' unions, and that includes the teachers' unions -- which are the proximate cause of the demonstrable stupidity of the last two generations -- are simply extortionate groups preying on the public purse.
I was only 17 when I enlisted, so I didn't pull any real gaffes like that with officers, or civilian muckety-mucks. After I had gotten a reputation, though, there were often an unusual number of 'scrambled eggs' types around. One enduring misunderstanding by them was that because I was 'bright', I'd of course want to be an officer. I was perfectly happy being a sergeant (then only a spec-4).
I was also young and dumb enough in 1961, that I wanted to get in one of the MAAG units going to Southeast Asia. My Colonel kept denying my 10-24 (?) personnel action request, (don't recall the form number anymore) because he said he wasn't going to send the first 'intuitive' FDC computer he'd ever met off to slog around in a rice paddy.
In the early sixties, we had nukes, carried them on TM-6 up to the Czech border (Meiningen Gap) and did battery and battalion tests in Grafenwoehr several times a year.
I'd only been there about 2 months when a sister 8" outfit from V Corps landed a round in the tent city, just west of main post at Graf, and we were the next major unit rotating there for our tests. Sobering
Once we started shooting, it became obvious how it happened. One of the fire points up on the northwest corner of Graf was a straight line through the bunker at NV-04/09er (the standard registrationpoint) to the tent city. (FP 141b, as I recall) And contrary to what news reports of the time said, it was *not* charge 7 as opposed to charge 5, it was 6 rather than 5. Had the powder man not been holding *something* (the #7 bag is pretty big) the safety officer would have seen that something was amiss.
I contributed my own little piece of confusion when I whanged one off the NV-04/09er bunker roof on a precision registration. (FO to FDC: "one-seven, this is three-zero. Target hit, dud" 30 seconds or so later, "cease fire, cease fire, cease fire all units. Maintain the data on your guns until you are checked and cleared."
It was me. That sucker had flown 7500 M, hit sideways on a sloping piece of the broken roof, changed azimuth, ricocheting another 5700 M, whistling merrily all the way, and landed about 1 klick out from the firing line at the tank range west of the main post and tent city.
Crater analysis (8" leaves a big crater) found the little slip of paper from under the fuse, and a largish fragment with a lot number.
Of course, he had committed no error or negligence, but the result was the EOD and demo guys went out into the impact area and *leveled* all those old WWII bunkers.
People who think the services don't pay attention to safety (at least as much as is possible) are from my experience, just plain nuts.
The finale was, that after two years, (it took them nearly a year to set it up) I got emergency orders and a letter appointing me to the West Point Hell Week class of September '83, with a year in Belvoir to spruce me up and get me ready -- even then, geeks were not overly style conscious, although I did make Col.'s orderly once, with some diligent effort.
I could *NOT* convince them that I didn't want to be an officer. I did not want to go to West Point. I wanted to shoot my cannons. For a twenty year old kid, assigned to battalion headquarters FDC, with 12 8" howitzers to command it is a REAL power trip. It was also something that I didn't want to give up nearly a year early to get shanghaied into a fancy OCS program (as I viewed it at the time)
When I got to Belvoir, I told them that I was not going to cooperate, and that for the umpteenth time, "*I DID NOT TO BE AN OFFICER!"
Their 'punishment' or revenge, was to send me to a STRAC outfit in FT Benning, GA. Oh please don't throw me in the briar patch! I won't be able to wear my parka, or my mickey mouse boots anymore! I'll only have one pair of gloves, and no mittens. No wool trousers and shirts. OH, please no!
The rest of my punishment was getting assigned to a
Somebody go hunt up Syvia Sydney (Grandma Norris) and see if she still has her old record of Jeannette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy singing "Indian Love Call"
I got two rewards out of it (other than karma points). A cheesy little brass and walnut plaque, and more importantly, I didn't have to pay for any of my beer at the NCO club the next evening.
In 1984, I fired a pattern of illumination shells to form a letter "A" (my battery) after winning the battery tests. (Also a neat way to burn up the extra ammo, so as not to have to turn it back in -- a *major* p.i.t.a.)
As section chief of the FDC, I relied on paper chart and paper calulations, although we had specially modified HP's to do the same thing. (A whole 'nother story, but we didn't use the Army's method of data entry either. I taught my people about 'peeks and pokes', and cut down our data entry time by about 75%)
What freaked out our observer from the 505thArty/101airborne, though, was computing a second mission in my head.
The colonel called, ("27 this is 6. That letter "A" is way too small to see well.") Since it was already pretty durn big, I assumed that he wanted the "A" twice as big, so I closed my eyes, computed 5 (one gun could maintain its firing data) sets of deltas for the other guns.
The observer said later (to my Captain and the Colonel) that never in his life had he seen anyone do 3-d trig in their head. It was checked on paper, and my data was 0/0 correct ("Check, 0!)" on all 15 data points (deflection, elevation and tof
I buy my beer ready made. However, I make my own kimchee. Uses up a lot of room in the refrigerator.
It also needs to be lagered. In order to produce kimchee instead of stinky, rotten cabbage, it needs to ferment at or less than 40 degrees -- refrigerator temperatures.
That's why the Koreans call it "winter kimchee"
When I worked at a restaurant, and had permission to use the extra space in the walk-in, I could make it by the 5 and 10 gallon lots.
Most of the comments in this post miss the main technical point. It is the silica nano particles that do the trick. The liquid suspension medium is probably just a compromise between competing characteristics of similar liquids. I expained all this in an earlier post.
in 1967 and 1968 at Ohio State University, I researched and used this property of thixotropes as both an acoustic coupler and as a high-pass filter. My department (Welding Engineering) was doing research on non-destructive testing of concrete highways -- contractors got paid for the average depth of the concrete emplaced, (nominally nine inches) and that had always been tested and documented with core samples.
We attempted to do it with a sonar method. Basiclly, we whacked the concrete with a half microsecond, 2Mhz pulse from barium ferrite crystals mounted rigidly in a big aluminum ring, and measured the time in and out.
Problems were the aggregate nature of concrete, impedance of the interface, and both physical and acoustic coupling in and out.
I discovered that a tube of a hair grooming product called "Groom and Clean" rang when tapped. Curious as to why, and having all these neat acoustic toys to play with in our lab, I discovered several things.
First, what thixotropes are, (Groom and Clean was primarily methyl cellulose suspended in water) second, what other similar materials existed, third, what cheaper materials were available (bentonite) and what the stuff was good for.
All thixotropes have the property of flowing like liquids when moved gently., and acting like glass when shocked. IOW, you can stir it, but if you fire a projectile at it, or simply whack it with a hammer, it will shatter like flint or a big chunk of glass in a characteristic 'conchoidal' fracture. the key feature is though, that it *immediately* slumps into a liquid again!
OK, why is this? The composite material is small flakes of a wettable, but insoluble crystalline material. In bentonite it's plain old ordinary kaolin type clay, with a particular sheetlike structure. When this is wetted, and suspended in water, (I found early on, that plain old antifreese worked better, but I had trouble enough squeezing any cash out of the administrator, without having to beg for a 55 gal drum of propylene glycol), the result is just a big tub of gray glop (bear in mind these are all scientific terms of art.)
A projectile, or more to the point, in my research, any fast-onset shock, turned the plates up on edge, more quickly than they could flow out of the way of each other. The flakes, in touching each other, produced a temporary rigid matrix that acted like glass, or flint (both super-viscous liquids)
In retrospect, the intuitive leap required to soak a fabric in this stuff, and use it as armor should have been obvious, but it was not the focus of my interest, or needs. Oh well, the University would have had patent anyway, since I was just a lowly bench researcher
At any rate, the end result was that I could use it as a pysical acoustic coupler (the gooey characteristic) under my big aluminum ring, and and the glop also acted as an impedance transformer for the 2Mhz 'bong' from the piezo-electric crystals, because very high frequency pulses would pass through, selectively, more easily than the low frequency rumbles and internal reflections from inside the aluminum block. (a Fourier analysis for a single.5 microsecond pulse gives a long train of harmonics athat were not only not useful to my purpose, but were, in fact a distraction.) It also filtered out the low frequency multi-path reflections within the concrete.
The receiver, in a close fitting hole in the ring, got slathered on the sides and end with the bentonite as well. Before the drillers mud improvements, our oscilloscope had a lot of 'grass' that made spotting the echo difficult, and often times impossible. Knowing the mean trasnmission times thruogh various types of concrete was helpful, but not definitive. Our new ability to clean up both the input signal (the bong!) and the received echo made the return signal much more obvious in the now much reduced 'grass' on the oscilloscope.
I had previously worked with concrete (as the scion of a big readi-mix c
I used as parameters the weapon that Earth used on the Kzin in one of the Man-Kzin War stories. 10 meter iron ball, boosted to half light speed using a long slingshot orbital run over the ecliptic, and got a little bitty ol' crater 35 klicks across, and yielding only 4.71 x 10 to the 22 Joules, or 1.13x10 to the 7th megatons of energy.
The fireball, from 100 klicks away is a measly 44 km wide, and only lasts for a minute and a half.
On the other hand the air blast seems fairly satisfying, -- 92 db at 100 km. A reasonably nice 'bang"!, all in all.
Ejecta spatter at 100 km seems a trifle excessive, at 3 meters deep and a mean chunk size of about 25 cm.
My observation is that if it were realitively (no punning here) easy to boost an iron ingot up to half the speed of light, it would make a pretty fair weapon, but not, as someone else noted, a planet buster.
In the strory I had in mind, it kind of ruined the Kzinti's day. (well the hapless humans there, as well, but to make omelets...)
I caught that, too (throat-singing), and thought "...someone at/. has either read Feynman's biography, or watched it on Public TV. But no, Tuvalu != Tanu Tuva, (or the former Tuvan ASR), and as Feynman correctly pointed out, it is no longer purple.
~ Denise ~
Lo, these many years agone, Analog Science Fiction Magazine ran a series of science fact articles on the kinetic and thermal effects of large bolide impacts.
At this remove in time, I don't remember authors,or dates, but it had to be in the 70's, and I think Stan Schmidt had become the editor by then (a University Physics Professor) and the quality of the fact articles went up by an order of magnitude.
The point that you made, that it requires a hard dense outer shell is *not* necessary. things happen so quickly at 40 klicks per second that none of the material has much of a chance to move, expand, or do anything, other than heat up quickly, turn to plasma, and start producing x-rays.
Obviously, when the energy stored in the column of compressed air, rammed in front of the incoming bolide matches the kinetic energy stored in the bolide, forward motion stops, at which instant, you get a pretty spectacular release of all the energy stored in the system. (it goes "BANG", and pretty loudly.)
Your explanation is certainly one scenario, but in actual fact, it seems to be that most meteors are either stony or metallic, (mostly stony), but most cometesimals are, as you suggest, water, methane, ammonia and so forth, and if they had stony or metallic admixtures, they would likely not be in the form of a shell, but in the form of a dirty snowball
Slashdot Mirror
That's "a spelling error".
I blew twenty-four mod points, came home from work, crashed my car, paid a thousand dollars, screamed at some people on the street, and made my girlfriend break up with me in order to fix that missing article.
First part of your comment was good, even funny. Your tagline, "I've taught at both union and non-union schools. Unions are better for students and teachers." not so much. All 'public (dis)service' unions, and that includes the teachers' unions -- which are the proximate cause of the demonstrable stupidity of the last two generations -- are simply extortionate groups preying on the public purse.
Roger Zelazny's _Dalhgren_
I was only 17 when I enlisted, so I didn't pull any real gaffes like that with officers, or civilian muckety-mucks. After I had gotten a reputation, though, there were often an unusual number of 'scrambled eggs' types around. One enduring misunderstanding by them was that because I was 'bright', I'd of course want to be an officer. I was perfectly happy being a sergeant (then only a spec-4).
I was also young and dumb enough in 1961, that I wanted to get in one of the MAAG units going to Southeast Asia. My Colonel kept denying my 10-24 (?) personnel action request, (don't recall the form number anymore) because he said he wasn't going to send the first 'intuitive' FDC computer he'd ever met off to slog around in a rice paddy.
In the early sixties, we had nukes, carried them on TM-6 up to the Czech border (Meiningen Gap) and did battery and battalion tests in Grafenwoehr several times a year.
I'd only been there about 2 months when a sister 8" outfit from V Corps landed a round in the tent city, just west of main post at Graf, and we were the next major unit rotating there for our tests. Sobering
Once we started shooting, it became obvious how it happened. One of the fire points up on the northwest corner of Graf was a straight line through the bunker at NV-04/09er (the standard registrationpoint) to the tent city. (FP 141b, as I recall) And contrary to what news reports of the time said, it was *not* charge 7 as opposed to charge 5, it was 6 rather than 5. Had the powder man not been holding *something* (the #7 bag is pretty big) the safety officer would have seen that something was amiss.
I contributed my own little piece of confusion when I whanged one off the NV-04/09er bunker roof on a precision registration. (FO to FDC: "one-seven, this is three-zero. Target hit, dud" 30 seconds or so later, "cease fire, cease fire, cease fire all units. Maintain the data on your guns until you are checked and cleared."
It was me. That sucker had flown 7500 M, hit sideways on a sloping piece of the broken roof, changed azimuth, ricocheting another 5700 M, whistling merrily all the way, and landed about 1 klick out from the firing line at the tank range west of the main post and tent city.
Crater analysis (8" leaves a big crater) found the little slip of paper from under the fuse, and a largish fragment with a lot number.
Of course, he had committed no error or negligence, but the result was the EOD and demo guys went out into the impact area and *leveled* all those old WWII bunkers.
People who think the services don't pay attention to safety (at least as much as is possible) are from my experience, just plain nuts.
The finale was, that after two years, (it took them nearly a year to set it up) I got emergency orders and a letter appointing me to the West Point Hell Week class of September '83, with a year in Belvoir to spruce me up and get me ready -- even then, geeks were not overly style conscious, although I did make Col.'s orderly once, with some diligent effort.
I could *NOT* convince them that I didn't want to be an officer. I did not want to go to West Point. I wanted to shoot my cannons. For a twenty year old kid, assigned to battalion headquarters FDC, with 12 8" howitzers to command it is a REAL power trip. It was also something that I didn't want to give up nearly a year early to get shanghaied into a fancy OCS program (as I viewed it at the time)
When I got to Belvoir, I told them that I was not going to cooperate, and that for the umpteenth time, "*I DID NOT TO BE AN OFFICER!"
Their 'punishment' or revenge, was to send me to a STRAC outfit in FT Benning, GA. Oh please don't throw me in the briar patch! I won't be able to wear my parka, or my mickey mouse boots anymore! I'll only have one pair of gloves, and no mittens. No wool trousers and shirts. OH, please no!
The rest of my punishment was getting assigned to a
Somebody go hunt up Syvia Sydney (Grandma Norris) and see if she still has her old record of Jeannette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy singing "Indian Love Call"
If that doesn't work we can get another copy at:
Indian Love Call
Erehwon
Erehwon
Thanks! It is to blush!
As section chief of the FDC, I relied on paper chart and paper calulations, although we had specially modified HP's to do the same thing. (A whole 'nother story, but we didn't use the Army's method of data entry either. I taught my people about 'peeks and pokes', and cut down our data entry time by about 75%)
What freaked out our observer from the 505thArty/101airborne, though, was computing a second mission in my head.
The colonel called, ("27 this is 6. That letter "A" is way too small to see well.") Since it was already pretty durn big, I assumed that he wanted the "A" twice as big, so I closed my eyes, computed 5 (one gun could maintain its firing data) sets of deltas for the other guns.
The observer said later (to my Captain and the Colonel) that never in his life had he seen anyone do 3-d trig in their head. It was checked on paper, and my data was 0/0 correct ("Check, 0!)" on all 15 data points (deflection, elevation and tof
Yes I can also do long division in my head!
[B^)
It also needs to be lagered. In order to produce kimchee instead of stinky, rotten cabbage, it needs to ferment at or less than 40 degrees -- refrigerator temperatures.
That's why the Koreans call it "winter kimchee"
When I worked at a restaurant, and had permission to use the extra space in the walk-in, I could make it by the 5 and 10 gallon lots.
Regards, all...
That's spelled "lysdexis"
Or she wanted to leave no tern unstoned...
(Brrrrrrmp!) rimshot
Most of the comments in this post miss the main technical point. It is the silica nano particles that do the trick. The liquid suspension medium is probably just a compromise between competing characteristics of similar liquids. I expained all this in an earlier post.
in 1967 and 1968 at Ohio State University, I researched and used this property of thixotropes as both an acoustic coupler and as a high-pass filter. My department (Welding Engineering) was doing research on non-destructive testing of concrete highways -- contractors got paid for the average depth of the concrete emplaced, (nominally nine inches) and that had always been tested and documented with core samples.
.5 microsecond pulse gives a long train of harmonics athat were not only not useful to my purpose, but were, in fact a distraction.) It also filtered out the low frequency multi-path reflections within the concrete.
We attempted to do it with a sonar method. Basiclly, we whacked the concrete with a half microsecond, 2Mhz pulse from barium ferrite crystals mounted rigidly in a big aluminum ring, and measured the time in and out.
Problems were the aggregate nature of concrete, impedance of the interface, and both physical and acoustic coupling in and out.
I discovered that a tube of a hair grooming product called "Groom and Clean" rang when tapped. Curious as to why, and having all these neat acoustic toys to play with in our lab, I discovered several things.
First, what thixotropes are, (Groom and Clean was primarily methyl cellulose suspended in water) second, what other similar materials existed, third, what cheaper materials were available (bentonite) and what the stuff was good for.
All thixotropes have the property of flowing like liquids when moved gently., and acting like glass when shocked. IOW, you can stir it, but if you fire a projectile at it, or simply whack it with a hammer, it will shatter like flint or a big chunk of glass in a characteristic 'conchoidal' fracture. the key feature is though, that it *immediately* slumps into a liquid again!
OK, why is this? The composite material is small flakes of a wettable, but insoluble crystalline material. In bentonite it's plain old ordinary kaolin type clay, with a particular sheetlike structure. When this is wetted, and suspended in water, (I found early on, that plain old antifreese worked better, but I had trouble enough squeezing any cash out of the administrator, without having to beg for a 55 gal drum of propylene glycol), the result is just a big tub of gray glop (bear in mind these are all scientific terms of art.)
A projectile, or more to the point, in my research, any fast-onset shock, turned the plates up on edge, more quickly than they could flow out of the way of each other. The flakes, in touching each other, produced a temporary rigid matrix that acted like glass, or flint (both super-viscous liquids)
In retrospect, the intuitive leap required to soak a fabric in this stuff, and use it as armor should have been obvious, but it was not the focus of my interest, or needs. Oh well, the University would have had patent anyway, since I was just a lowly bench researcher
At any rate, the end result was that I could use it as a pysical acoustic coupler (the gooey characteristic) under my big aluminum ring, and and the glop also acted as an impedance transformer for the 2Mhz 'bong' from the piezo-electric crystals, because very high frequency pulses would pass through, selectively, more easily than the low frequency rumbles and internal reflections from inside the aluminum block. (a Fourier analysis for a single
The receiver, in a close fitting hole in the ring, got slathered on the sides and end with the bentonite as well. Before the drillers mud improvements, our oscilloscope had a lot of 'grass' that made spotting the echo difficult, and often times impossible. Knowing the mean trasnmission times thruogh various types of concrete was helpful, but not definitive. Our new ability to clean up both the input signal (the bong!) and the received echo made the return signal much more obvious in the now much reduced 'grass' on the oscilloscope.
I had previously worked with concrete (as the scion of a big readi-mix c
I used as parameters the weapon that Earth used on the Kzin in one of the Man-Kzin War stories. 10 meter iron ball, boosted to half light speed using a long slingshot orbital run over the ecliptic, and got a little bitty ol' crater 35 klicks across, and yielding only 4.71 x 10 to the 22 Joules, or 1.13x10 to the 7th megatons of energy. The fireball, from 100 klicks away is a measly 44 km wide, and only lasts for a minute and a half. On the other hand the air blast seems fairly satisfying, -- 92 db at 100 km. A reasonably nice 'bang"!, all in all. Ejecta spatter at 100 km seems a trifle excessive, at 3 meters deep and a mean chunk size of about 25 cm. My observation is that if it were realitively (no punning here) easy to boost an iron ingot up to half the speed of light, it would make a pretty fair weapon, but not, as someone else noted, a planet buster. In the strory I had in mind, it kind of ruined the Kzinti's day. (well the hapless humans there, as well, but to make omelets...)
I caught that, too (throat-singing), and thought "...someone at /. has either read Feynman's biography, or watched it on Public TV. But no, Tuvalu != Tanu Tuva, (or the former Tuvan ASR), and as Feynman correctly pointed out, it is no longer purple.
~ Denise ~
Lo, these many years agone, Analog Science Fiction Magazine ran a series of science fact articles on the kinetic and thermal effects of large bolide impacts.
At this remove in time, I don't remember authors,or dates, but it had to be in the 70's, and I think Stan Schmidt had become the editor by then (a University Physics Professor) and the quality of the fact articles went up by an order of magnitude.
The point that you made, that it requires a hard dense outer shell is *not* necessary. things happen so quickly at 40 klicks per second that none of the material has much of a chance to move, expand, or do anything, other than heat up quickly, turn to plasma, and start producing x-rays.
Obviously, when the energy stored in the column of compressed air, rammed in front of the incoming bolide matches the kinetic energy stored in the bolide, forward motion stops, at which instant, you get a pretty spectacular release of all the energy stored in the system. (it goes "BANG", and pretty loudly.)
Your explanation is certainly one scenario, but in actual fact, it seems to be that most meteors are either stony or metallic, (mostly stony), but most cometesimals are, as you suggest, water, methane, ammonia and so forth, and if they had stony or metallic admixtures, they would likely not be in the form of a shell, but in the form of a dirty snowball
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