Yes, dammit, cellphones will work from an airplane. That is not the problem.
When your phone connects to a terminal, both the phone and the terminal measure the strength of each other's signal and they adjust their transmitting power to give a usable signal. That's why your battery charge doesn't last as long out in the country: your phone is transmitting at full power.
When you're at high altitude in an airplane, your phone will connect to a terminal that might be fifty or a hundred miles away, it will use full power to do that, and it will hit every other cell tower within that range. That loads the system down.
The system described in TFA puts a terminal right in the airplane, where your phone can communicate with it at minimum power. Then the signal goes over a reserved channel from the airplane to a dedicated ground terminal and into the main cell system, without fscking up everybody else on the same channel as your phone.
Umm, no, a nose cone is not a fuse in any sense of the word. It's the conical housing -- IOW, the pointy thing on the front of a missile -- which contains the warhead and protects it from the heat of reentry. TFA describes the misrouted objects as being cone-shaped, and someone along the line conflated "cone" with "nose cone", which is a totally different kind of cone.
"Fuse" can mean the kind of fuse you have under your dashboard, or a detonating device that amounts to a fancy blasting cap. In the latter context, it's often but not always spelled "fuze". TFA is completely vague as to which meaning is correct.
Yes, isomeme updated me on that. That condition means that Mercury is still dissipating spin energy, so I suppose it should eventually achieve 1:1 lock, even with the orbit eccentricity trying to keep it stable.
This is the same process that keeps one side of the Moon facing the Earth, and one side of Mercury facing the Sun. Both of them had some amount of spin long ago, but the squishing removes energy, and the only place that energy can come from is the rotational energy of the spin.
The strength of the effect depends on the relative sizes of the two bodies, and the radius of the orbit, which is why most of the bodies in the solar system aren't tide-locked.
Much like Fantastic Voyage. The film producers hired Isaac Asimov to do a novelization from the screenplay, and not knowing the first thing about Asimov, told him he'd better hurry up on it because the film release was only six months away.
Asimov dropped off the manuscript the following week, and it was promptly serialized in a magazine, leading many people to believe the film was made from an Asimov novel. Harry Kleiner, who wrote the original screenplay, was not amused...
If you're a skier, you know that when people take up the cry of "Ski! Ski!" there is a loose ski rocketing down the slope and you'd better not be in the way. Well, in Dobbin's day, "Runaway! Runaway!" had precisely the same function. Every able-bodied male in the horse's path of advance was duty-bound to do something to stop the critter. If you were among the testosterone-poisoned, you could commandeer another horse and give chase; if not, you could discharge your duty by stepping in front of the horse, yelling "Whoa!" and diving for cover.
Of course, you would very likely land in a pile of shit.
That's only true of a handful of the lines, on the very steepest hills. San Francisco strung cables citywide in the 1870s and '80s; the system was wrecked in the earthquake of 1906; and most of the cable cars were replaced by the much cheaper electric cars when the system was rebuilt.
Well, behind more than on...lot of wagons in use there and in the west, too. The near-total mechanization of the US Army was largely driven by the relative economics of shipping horses and trucks overseas.
Plus which, the saddle horse is by far the most dangerous vehicle ever used in commerce, with something like three serious injuries or deaths per thousand seat miles.
How does walking ankle-deep in liquefied horseshit grab you? That's a pretty good description of life in a major city at the turn of the twentieth century.
San Francisco installed cable cars in the 1870s, when they knew that electric trolleys were only a decade away -- because they simply couldn't wait. Their streets were getting hit with some 55,000 gallons of horse whiz, and the concomitant number of road apples, per day. Foot, wheel and hoof traffic stirred it up into a goo so slippery that the horses couldn't make it up the hills; they kept slipping on the cobblestones and breaking legs. At one point the city was shooting an average of one horse per day.
Then automobiles came along and the cities got all polluted.
The zero-G environment is only one thing you have to consider before you stick things in a spacecraft. You're not just putting those objects where they'll float around; you're also putting them into a closed environment that is going to stay that way for weeks, and is absolutely intolerant of fires, toxic gas production, and quite a few other things. Events that are just a pain in the ass down here will kill you in space.
rj
Re:I went to school with nerds.
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Yes, dammit, cellphones will work from an airplane. That is not the problem.
When your phone connects to a terminal, both the phone and the terminal measure the strength of each other's signal and they adjust their transmitting power to give a usable signal. That's why your battery charge doesn't last as long out in the country: your phone is transmitting at full power.
When you're at high altitude in an airplane, your phone will connect to a terminal that might be fifty or a hundred miles away, it will use full power to do that, and it will hit every other cell tower within that range. That loads the system down.
The system described in TFA puts a terminal right in the airplane, where your phone can communicate with it at minimum power. Then the signal goes over a reserved channel from the airplane to a dedicated ground terminal and into the main cell system, without fscking up everybody else on the same channel as your phone.
rj
"Fuse" can mean the kind of fuse you have under your dashboard, or a detonating device that amounts to a fancy blasting cap. In the latter context, it's often but not always spelled "fuze". TFA is completely vague as to which meaning is correct.
rj
...a Washington Monument ploy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_ploy
rj
How sad. When I had profs whose first language was not English, we both learned a little something over and above what was on the final.
rj
Ummm, how many years would that be?
rj
Except when your favorite program is on. Then you give it a picture of the crowd at the Super Bowl.
rj
Yes, isomeme updated me on that. That condition means that Mercury is still dissipating spin energy, so I suppose it should eventually achieve 1:1 lock, even with the orbit eccentricity trying to keep it stable.
rj
Aha, looks as if I'm 43 years out of date on Mercury...apparently that was determined in 1965. Thanks for the correction.
rj
This is the same process that keeps one side of the Moon facing the Earth, and one side of Mercury facing the Sun. Both of them had some amount of spin long ago, but the squishing removes energy, and the only place that energy can come from is the rotational energy of the spin.
The strength of the effect depends on the relative sizes of the two bodies, and the radius of the orbit, which is why most of the bodies in the solar system aren't tide-locked.
rj
Dang, where are mod points when you need them?
rj
Especially if it prevents the occupants of an apartment house chipping in on one broadband connection...
rj
Ridiculous? Wow. It must be something in the city water.
rj
rj
Whooossshhhh...
rj
No, and he wasn't a pederast either.
rj
Asimov dropped off the manuscript the following week, and it was promptly serialized in a magazine, leading many people to believe the film was made from an Asimov novel. Harry Kleiner, who wrote the original screenplay, was not amused...
rj
If you're a skier, you know that when people take up the cry of "Ski! Ski!" there is a loose ski rocketing down the slope and you'd better not be in the way. Well, in Dobbin's day, "Runaway! Runaway!" had precisely the same function. Every able-bodied male in the horse's path of advance was duty-bound to do something to stop the critter. If you were among the testosterone-poisoned, you could commandeer another horse and give chase; if not, you could discharge your duty by stepping in front of the horse, yelling "Whoa!" and diving for cover.
Of course, you would very likely land in a pile of shit.
rj
That's only true of a handful of the lines, on the very steepest hills. San Francisco strung cables citywide in the 1870s and '80s; the system was wrecked in the earthquake of 1906; and most of the cable cars were replaced by the much cheaper electric cars when the system was rebuilt.
rj
rj
Plus which, the saddle horse is by far the most dangerous vehicle ever used in commerce, with something like three serious injuries or deaths per thousand seat miles.
rj
How does walking ankle-deep in liquefied horseshit grab you? That's a pretty good description of life in a major city at the turn of the twentieth century.
San Francisco installed cable cars in the 1870s, when they knew that electric trolleys were only a decade away -- because they simply couldn't wait. Their streets were getting hit with some 55,000 gallons of horse whiz, and the concomitant number of road apples, per day. Foot, wheel and hoof traffic stirred it up into a goo so slippery that the horses couldn't make it up the hills; they kept slipping on the cobblestones and breaking legs. At one point the city was shooting an average of one horse per day.
Then automobiles came along and the cities got all polluted.
rj
In the anti-static negative cleaning brush in your photo darkroom.
rj
The zero-G environment is only one thing you have to consider before you stick things in a spacecraft. You're not just putting those objects where they'll float around; you're also putting them into a closed environment that is going to stay that way for weeks, and is absolutely intolerant of fires, toxic gas production, and quite a few other things. Events that are just a pain in the ass down here will kill you in space.
rj
Differential...Y!
A square! B square!
Integral of pi!
--Georgia Tech version
rj
Well, e^(i * pi) = -1 comes a little closer to the magical, once you get past the grammar school definition...
rj