My favorite one is at the town bank in Oberwesel, Germany. If you want to use it after hours, you stick your card through a slot in a medieval stone wall and a great iron gate slides open with a gentle hum.
There was another one, almost forgotten now. I'm not sure which mission it occurred on...
In those days, translunar trajectories were customarily computed by the "sphere of influence" method, which meant that you ignored Moon gravity out to the point where Earth and Moon gravity were equal, then ignored Earth gravity for the rest of the way. It introduced some error, but saved a lot of primitive computer time, and it would put you close enough to make a final course correction when you were almost there.
So here was one of the Apollo missions on the way home, and Houston commented "You crossed into Earth gravity at such-and-such time." The flight commander, in a jaunty mood, said "Yeah, we felt a little jerk just now."
And Walter Cronkite bought it.
Within a few hours there were headlines saying APOLLO SURGES AHEAD INTO HOME PLANET'S GRAVITY. Of course Cronkite was one of NASA's biggest supporters, and they weren't about to make him look silly, so they just shut up about it. I have never seen it mentioned since.
Frederick Forsyth wrote an interesting novel called The Fist of God that began with the Bull bushwhack, and went on with a rather cogent-sounding argument for it being someone other than the Mossad. Good read.
As a software person, this chap's well ahead of one of the quiz show superstars of the Fifties...I think I know his name, but won't mention it because I may have two of them mixed up. Anyway, he knew every
useless fact you could imagine, but was totally incapable of forming an insight. Even as a media figure he could never hold a real job, and the show winnings were essentially his lifetime income.
That may just be why Wal-Mart is walking all over Sears. You can run a retail business with the cheapest labor capable of exhaling warm air if you have the management processes to make it work...they both have the former, but only Wal-Mart has the latter.
I don't know if they still do it, but Sears used to have catalog sales departments in the retail stores. You could pick stuff from the catalog, prepay for it, and pick it up in a box a week later. But you paid for what you ordered, not for what you got, and the two could be very different...especially with tools. You might order a compression tester and get a compressor. And if it worked out the other way round, you could always take it back.
My wife was conned into a third-party warranty on a computer she bought for our nephew, via the altruistic motive of not wanting to make me drive across town to fix the kid's machine. When his floppy drive quit working, she found that they would not do anything until she had run the "recovery CD," which would format the disk and reinstall Windows. "This will make your computer as good as new, ma'am, and it's in your contract..."
So of course I had to drive over anyway and fish the balled-up disk label out of the floppy drive.
Likewise CompUSA. It wasn't very long ago that they serviced manufacturers' warranties on the spot, with your choice of replacement or store credit...now it's two weeks and you're on your own, if you didn't let them rip you off for the extension.
My most recent dose of this was a wireless keyboard/mouse combo from a company that rhymes with Ashcroft...and the mfr was just as cool as can be.
"It's only three months old, but the dealer won't service your warranty."
"Where'd you buy it?"
"CompUSA. Can I get an RMA?"
"Oh, I see. No, forget the RMA...just copy your receipt and the label under the mouse and fax that to us."
New unit in a week. Kinda removes the last motive for buying non-emergency stuff locally, don't it?
I thought NASA called them extra vehicular activities or EVAs
It does, but if you weren't listening to a live NASA feed, you probably heard it from a media droid...and they've been calling them spacewalks ever since the very first one, when a TV network ran a news special titled "The Man Who Walked in Space."
r "Metaphors R Us" j
Re:I know it's not tin foil, but....
on
RF-Blocking Wallpaper
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· Score: 4, Informative
match the pattern of most other elements (helium, sodium, etc.)
The pattern of most other metals, not most other elements. Every element ending in -ium is a metal except helium. The latter was first observed on the sun, via spectrometry, and was believed to be a metal, so it was named "sun metal" in Latin. By the time it was found on earth, it was too late to change the name.
Actually, though I haven't checked this specifically, I'd call it a good bet that the orbit of Pluto was the last one the probe crossed. Pluto's orbit passes inside Neptune's rather briefly, and most of it lies well outside.
Of course, "briefly" is a bit relative: Pluto has traveled only a bit over a quarter of the way round its orbit since we first saw it.
Strangely enough, the motivation for developing these engines was largely noise. There's an older class of jet models that use ducted fans, with a one-cylinder glowplug engine of around 0.7 to 1 cubic inch running a fan of 6 or 7 inches. In order to get reasonable thrust, these things have to run tuned pipes and wind up to absurd speeds. At the same time, urban sprawl has put pressure on flying sites to reduce noise; the prop-driven models are running very effective mufflers now, but the ducted fans can't be muffled and their noise is so offensive that they've been banned from a lot of sites.
The result was a new generation of genuine turbojets, using turbines adapted from automotive turbochargers. They sell for about $3000 a pop, and these guys are using EIGHT of them...the turbojets are remarkably quiet, because most of their noise is well above hearing range.
No, no, no. The buoyancy is proportional to the difference between the density of the lifting gas and that of the ambient gas. The sea-level densities, in kilograms per cubic meter, are:
Air 1.29
Helium 0.164
Hydrogen 0.083
So one cubic meter of helium will lift 1.29-0.164=1.126 kilograms of load, and one cubic meter of hydrogen will lift 1.29-0.083=1.207 kilograms, or about 7% more than helium.
Exercise: To explain why the density of hydrogen is 1/2 and not 1/4 that of helium, google on monatomic and diatomic.
Ummm...how many times have you asked your congresscritter to join in writing the check? If the answer is zero, NASA is doing more to make it happen than you are.
When I was a kid in the 1940s our neighborhood druggist, Mr. Murphy, was still keeping heroin under the counter for his elderly customers...I'm fairly sure I was given some once or twice circa 1947. Grandma's "medical book" spoke quite highly of it.
You have to be careful with Bryson...he has a lot of good insights, but sometimes he misses the boat in a big way. My favorite (quoted from memory, not verbatim): "Hydrogen and oxygen are two of the most combustion-friendly elements. But when you combine them, you get only noncombustible water."
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My favorite one is at the town bank in Oberwesel, Germany. If you want to use it after hours, you stick your card through a slot in a medieval stone wall and a great iron gate slides open with a gentle hum.
rj
It's been in use for at least fifty years at US military bases, in reference to the bus on which one rides back to base late on Saturday night.
rj
Produce a counterexample.
Prove his solution isn't unique.
rj
rj
There was another one, almost forgotten now. I'm not sure which mission it occurred on...
In those days, translunar trajectories were customarily computed by the "sphere of influence" method, which meant that you ignored Moon gravity out to the point where Earth and Moon gravity were equal, then ignored Earth gravity for the rest of the way. It introduced some error, but saved a lot of primitive computer time, and it would put you close enough to make a final course correction when you were almost there.
So here was one of the Apollo missions on the way home, and Houston commented "You crossed into Earth gravity at such-and-such time." The flight commander, in a jaunty mood, said "Yeah, we felt a little jerk just now."
And Walter Cronkite bought it.
Within a few hours there were headlines saying APOLLO SURGES AHEAD INTO HOME PLANET'S GRAVITY. Of course Cronkite was one of NASA's biggest supporters, and they weren't about to make him look silly, so they just shut up about it. I have never seen it mentioned since.
rj
rj
rj
I don't know if they still do it, but Sears used to have catalog sales departments in the retail stores. You could pick stuff from the catalog, prepay for it, and pick it up in a box a week later. But you paid for what you ordered, not for what you got, and the two could be very different...especially with tools. You might order a compression tester and get a compressor. And if it worked out the other way round, you could always take it back.
rj
So of course I had to drive over anyway and fish the balled-up disk label out of the floppy drive.
rj
Likewise CompUSA. It wasn't very long ago that they serviced manufacturers' warranties on the spot, with your choice of replacement or store credit...now it's two weeks and you're on your own, if you didn't let them rip you off for the extension.
My most recent dose of this was a wireless keyboard/mouse combo from a company that rhymes with Ashcroft...and the mfr was just as cool as can be.
"It's only three months old, but the dealer won't service your warranty."
"Where'd you buy it?"
"CompUSA. Can I get an RMA?"
"Oh, I see. No, forget the RMA...just copy your receipt and the label under the mouse and fax that to us."
New unit in a week. Kinda removes the last motive for buying non-emergency stuff locally, don't it?
rj
Caddyshack->Caddyshack II
Moon Over Parador->Dave
The Road Warrior->Waterworld.
rj
Well, "blowing up" can be a synonym for inflation...so I guess it's still blowing shit up.
rj
Hey, there's big money in anisette.
rj
rj
It does, but if you weren't listening to a live NASA feed, you probably heard it from a media droid...and they've been calling them spacewalks ever since the very first one, when a TV network ran a news special titled "The Man Who Walked in Space."
r "Metaphors R Us" j
The pattern of most other metals, not most other elements. Every element ending in -ium is a metal except helium. The latter was first observed on the sun, via spectrometry, and was believed to be a metal, so it was named "sun metal" in Latin. By the time it was found on earth, it was too late to change the name.
rj
Actually, though I haven't checked this specifically, I'd call it a good bet that the orbit of Pluto was the last one the probe crossed. Pluto's orbit passes inside Neptune's rather briefly, and most of it lies well outside.
Of course, "briefly" is a bit relative: Pluto has traveled only a bit over a quarter of the way round its orbit since we first saw it.
rj
I would guess you've never had a fellow juror look you in the face and say "It wasn't her fault; she just wasn't looking where she was going."
rj
Strangely enough, the motivation for developing these engines was largely noise. There's an older class of jet models that use ducted fans, with a one-cylinder glowplug engine of around 0.7 to 1 cubic inch running a fan of 6 or 7 inches. In order to get reasonable thrust, these things have to run tuned pipes and wind up to absurd speeds. At the same time, urban sprawl has put pressure on flying sites to reduce noise; the prop-driven models are running very effective mufflers now, but the ducted fans can't be muffled and their noise is so offensive that they've been banned from a lot of sites.
The result was a new generation of genuine turbojets, using turbines adapted from automotive turbochargers. They sell for about $3000 a pop, and these guys are using EIGHT of them...the turbojets are remarkably quiet, because most of their noise is well above hearing range.
rj
Air 1.29
Helium 0.164
Hydrogen 0.083
So one cubic meter of helium will lift 1.29-0.164=1.126 kilograms of load, and one cubic meter of hydrogen will lift 1.29-0.083=1.207 kilograms, or about 7% more than helium.
Exercise: To explain why the density of hydrogen is 1/2 and not 1/4 that of helium, google on monatomic and diatomic.
rj
The fact that insignia is commonly accepted as a singular today makes that glaringly obvious.
rj
Ummm...how many times have you asked your congresscritter to join in writing the check? If the answer is zero, NASA is doing more to make it happen than you are.
rj
When I was a kid in the 1940s our neighborhood druggist, Mr. Murphy, was still keeping heroin under the counter for his elderly customers...I'm fairly sure I was given some once or twice circa 1947. Grandma's "medical book" spoke quite highly of it.
r "Dang, that feels better" j
You have to be careful with Bryson...he has a lot of good insights, but sometimes he misses the boat in a big way. My favorite (quoted from memory, not verbatim): "Hydrogen and oxygen are two of the most combustion-friendly elements. But when you combine them, you get only noncombustible water."
rj
Of course not. (16/9)! does not exist. (16!)/(9!) does, though.
rj