If today, while watching CNN, I saw breaking news, and it was a press conference where NASA or SETI or some other organization announced definitive proof of Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, how would it change life here on earth?
Well, first thing, NASA would get a bloody great appropriation to go out there and straighten them out about Jesus.
We have so many ex-WW2 airfields because we built them to train the air forces that we sent to operate from the ones in your country, and in four or five hundred other places.
Carriers do indeed head upwind for flight ops, and it does reduce the relative speeds...not enough for a zero-speed touchdown, but it makes landings a bit easier.
There is, however, a downside: the resulting turbulence can be wicked. From WW2 into the Fifties, carriers generally steamed flat-out into the wind, because they needed 30-odd knots of wind over the deck to get an airplane down on their short decks. The canted flight deck and improvements in high-lift devices converged to ease that requirement, and today's carriers can recover airplanes while loafing along barely fast enough to steer, and the pilots get to land in smooth air.
Incidentally, there WAS a carrier that matched speed with the airplanes: it was USS Akron, a 785-foot dirigible that launched and recovered scout airplanes via a crane that reached out through a belly hatch. Getting an airplane onto the hook was said to be a perfect bitch.
I'm pretty impressed by the system they have on the passenger boats on the Rhine. They have no screws, as such. There's a single vertical drive shaft that sticks down through the hull amidships, and rotates a horizontal wheel. Blades much like those on an aircraft propeller extend vertically down from three points on the wheel, so they rotate somewhat like an eggbeater. A system of levers and bellcranks varies the pitch on the blades as they go around, and by setting the levers you can apply a torque in either direction and/or a translational force in any direction, independently. You can run forward like an ordinary boat, spin in one place, or move sideways into a dock at will.
Those boats make passenger stops every two or three miles, and it doesn't take up much more time than a bus stop.
rj
Re:Playing Games you don't understand.
on
Spammers Busted
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· Score: 1
It's "You can't HUSTLE an honest man." You can cheat anybody. Hustling is making the other guy think HE'S the one who's cheating.
Short-weighting somebody on a sack of beans is cheating. Selling him speakers that he thinks are stolen is hustling.
rj
Re:Clarification on International Drivers License.
on
Spammers Busted
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· Score: 1
As nearly as I can tell, the only function of the International Driver's License is to translate the information on a person's home license into one of several languages that are recognized by driving authorities everywhere. As you say, one has to have a valid home license to get an IDL, and the IDL states that it is valid only when accompanied by that home license.
When I've rented cars in Germany and France, the agencies there wanted only to see my US license, and hadn't the slightest interest in my IDL.
OK, those aren't skirted, but they're still operating at sub-wingspan heights. The Russian "Ekranoplan" did indeed get as high as 20 meters, but it had a wingspan of 10 times that.
The Spruce Goose, for that matter, never climbed out of ground effect!
What it means is that ground effect is governed by a parameter equal to the ratio of height to wingspan. It starts to get measurable when this gets less than 1, and is substantial at 0.5.
It also depends on aspect ratio: long skinny wings show much more ground effect than short stubby ones.
For the ground-effect boats, the "wingspan" is a figure on the order of the length of the boat, and the altitude is the separation between the flexible skirt and the surface -- only a few inches. The ground effect parameter is somewhere down around 0.001-0.01.
Ask anybody who was at Georgia Tech circa 1960 about the Batman...I thought the foil thing was unique to him for many years.
Seems bats emit a brain-rotting radiation, and he wore a derby lined with lead foil (no cheap aluminum for him; he was an engineer). This had a tendency to build up lethal static charges, so he had all his clothes equipped with sewn-in wires and alligator clips that would ground the hat to a nail in his shoe.
You can guess how respectful and understanding we were.
I remember learning that I could get all kinds of attention by pulling the adhesive tape off my navel. My mom told me somewhere along the way that I had done that repeatedly, so I can't say with certainty that it isn't an implanted memory...but it still seems quite clear.
The IAU does assign descriptive names in addition to the serial designators, and discoverers are given some degree of preference in suggesting names. There's a substantial list of themes and rules, such as "no political figures from the 19th century or later".
Ummm, no, they merely dig out sources and offer cites. They'll be glad to take your contrary cites under consideration too, if you can cite something better than a friend of a friend.
Pretty much everybody in this thread has these definitions screwed up.
Aircraft are divided into airplanes, rotorcraft, gliders, airships and balloons.
An airship is sustained by a lighter-than-air gas and has mechanical propulsion; a balloon is sustained by a lighter-than-air gas and has no propulsion of its own.
Airships are divided into dirigibles (synonymous with zeppelins) and blimps. Dirigibles have internal frames for rigidity; blimps have only the internal gas pressure for rigidity.
There has never been a spherical airship before, and I'm somewhat at a loss as to why anyone would build such a thing; controlling it would be a bitch. So if these things do come to pass, they will be sui generis.
The word "dirigible" causes some confusion, because it does indeed mean steerable in Latin, and blimps are certainly steerable; however, the aviation community decided to use "dirigible" as a synonym for "zeppelin" back when World War I had made German names unpopular. The Hindenburg was a dirigible/zeppelin; Goodyear has blimps.
What you refer to is the result of the Smithsonian's long-running collusion with Glenn Curtiss et al to rip off the Wrights' patents. They exhibited Samuel P. Langley's failed machine for many years as "the first airplane capable of flight", and sponsored a test of a phony "replica" in the post-WW1 years as proof that it really could fly. The Wrights sent their airplane to the Imperial War Museum in London in retaliation, and it didn't come back until popular pressure forced the Smithsonian to agree to give up the charade.
Au contraire, mon frere. We're doing a splendid job with flapping-wing aircraft, and we outperform nature by a considerable margin.
Birds flap with a reciprocating motion, which is enormously inefficient in a muscle-powered system; the act of stopping an upstroke and starting a downstroke is massively irreversible in the thermodynamic sense, and throws away tons of energy.
But we know how to do one thing that nature doesn't: we can make a rotating joint. That means we can flap wings with a nice, efficient rotary motion. The helicopter does everything a bird does, and does it better (well, okay, except shit on your clothes). Ornithopters, like steam locomotives and wet-plate cameras, make splendid toys.
There are four of those east of Denver that lie in land that was leased from ranchers when they were dug, and reverted to the ranchers when the Air Force shut them down. They're a continual problem for the county sheriff, because teenagers break into them and hold clandestine parties with predictable results. The ranchers have gone to a lot of trouble to seal them up, but the kids have been remarkably resourceful in defeating them. Cutting torches and hydraulic jacks have been employed at times.
There was a promoter who claimed to be working up a plan to turn the silos into upscale underground homes for people with off-center tastes in housing, but that never got anywhere. I haven't heard about them in four or five years now, so maybe they've just been filled in.
It would have been the best sf film ever done, period.
rj
Re:Lacks any ability to glide
on
Fanwing Planes?
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· Score: 1
Ummm, who told you that? The Osprey has the same autorotation capability as a helicopter, and it can fly in full tiltrotor mode with one engine out because the engines are cross-shafted.
It does indeed have some serious problems, but they don't include any basic inability to tolerate engine failure.
rj
Re:Creepy...
on
Book on NR-1
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· Score: 2, Informative
If you want to see cramped, have a look at U-1 (launched 1906) in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. It's a full-fledged diesel-electric boat, but it looks like something about halfway between a WW2 U-Boat and the Hunley.
Slashdot Mirror
...is to build a house of such esthetic value and livability that your heirs will consider it worth taking care of. And if you don't, who cares?
rj
If today, while watching CNN, I saw breaking news, and it was a press conference where NASA or SETI or some other organization announced definitive proof of Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, how would it change life here on earth?
Well, first thing, NASA would get a bloody great appropriation to go out there and straighten them out about Jesus.
rj
We have so many ex-WW2 airfields because we built them to train the air forces that we sent to operate from the ones in your country, and in four or five hundred other places.
rj
Carriers do indeed head upwind for flight ops, and it does reduce the relative speeds...not enough for a zero-speed touchdown, but it makes landings a bit easier.
There is, however, a downside: the resulting turbulence can be wicked. From WW2 into the Fifties, carriers generally steamed flat-out into the wind, because they needed 30-odd knots of wind over the deck to get an airplane down on their short decks. The canted flight deck and improvements in high-lift devices converged to ease that requirement, and today's carriers can recover airplanes while loafing along barely fast enough to steer, and the pilots get to land in smooth air.
Incidentally, there WAS a carrier that matched speed with the airplanes: it was USS Akron, a 785-foot dirigible that launched and recovered scout airplanes via a crane that reached out through a belly hatch. Getting an airplane onto the hook was said to be a perfect bitch.
rj
I'm pretty impressed by the system they have on the passenger boats on the Rhine. They have no screws, as such. There's a single vertical drive shaft that sticks down through the hull amidships, and rotates a horizontal wheel. Blades much like those on an aircraft propeller extend vertically down from three points on the wheel, so they rotate somewhat like an eggbeater. A system of levers and bellcranks varies the pitch on the blades as they go around, and by setting the levers you can apply a torque in either direction and/or a translational force in any direction, independently. You can run forward like an ordinary boat, spin in one place, or move sideways into a dock at will.
Those boats make passenger stops every two or three miles, and it doesn't take up much more time than a bus stop.
rj
It's "You can't HUSTLE an honest man." You can cheat anybody. Hustling is making the other guy think HE'S the one who's cheating.
Short-weighting somebody on a sack of beans is cheating. Selling him speakers that he thinks are stolen is hustling.
rj
As nearly as I can tell, the only function of the International Driver's License is to translate the information on a person's home license into one of several languages that are recognized by driving authorities everywhere. As you say, one has to have a valid home license to get an IDL, and the IDL states that it is valid only when accompanied by that home license.
When I've rented cars in Germany and France, the agencies there wanted only to see my US license, and hadn't the slightest interest in my IDL.
rj
OK, those aren't skirted, but they're still operating at sub-wingspan heights. The Russian "Ekranoplan" did indeed get as high as 20 meters, but it had a wingspan of 10 times that.
The Spruce Goose, for that matter, never climbed out of ground effect!
rj
What it means is that ground effect is governed by a parameter equal to the ratio of height to wingspan. It starts to get measurable when this gets less than 1, and is substantial at 0.5.
It also depends on aspect ratio: long skinny wings show much more ground effect than short stubby ones.
For the ground-effect boats, the "wingspan" is a figure on the order of the length of the boat, and the altitude is the separation between the flexible skirt and the surface -- only a few inches. The ground effect parameter is somewhere down around 0.001-0.01.
rj
Ask anybody who was at Georgia Tech circa 1960 about the Batman...I thought the foil thing was unique to him for many years.
Seems bats emit a brain-rotting radiation, and he wore a derby lined with lead foil (no cheap aluminum for him; he was an engineer). This had a tendency to build up lethal static charges, so he had all his clothes equipped with sewn-in wires and alligator clips that would ground the hat to a nail in his shoe.
You can guess how respectful and understanding we were.
rj
I remember learning that I could get all kinds of attention by pulling the adhesive tape off my navel. My mom told me somewhere along the way that I had done that repeatedly, so I can't say with certainty that it isn't an implanted memory...but it still seems quite clear.
r "innie" j
The IAU does assign descriptive names in addition to the serial designators, and discoverers are given some degree of preference in suggesting names. There's a substantial list of themes and rules, such as "no political figures from the 19th century or later".
rj
Nope...a moon that size would barely make a sunspot. rj
Ummm, no, they merely dig out sources and offer cites. They'll be glad to take your contrary cites under consideration too, if you can cite something better than a friend of a friend.
rj
Right, what KDE needs is a Blue Screen of Death. Or maybe teal.
rj
Pretty much everybody in this thread has these definitions screwed up.
Aircraft are divided into airplanes, rotorcraft, gliders, airships and balloons.
An airship is sustained by a lighter-than-air gas and has mechanical propulsion; a balloon is sustained by a lighter-than-air gas and has no propulsion of its own.
Airships are divided into dirigibles (synonymous with zeppelins) and blimps. Dirigibles have internal frames for rigidity; blimps have only the internal gas pressure for rigidity.
There has never been a spherical airship before, and I'm somewhat at a loss as to why anyone would build such a thing; controlling it would be a bitch. So if these things do come to pass, they will be sui generis.
The word "dirigible" causes some confusion, because it does indeed mean steerable in Latin, and blimps are certainly steerable; however, the aviation community decided to use "dirigible" as a synonym for "zeppelin" back when World War I had made German names unpopular. The Hindenburg was a dirigible/zeppelin; Goodyear has blimps.
rj
What you refer to is the result of the Smithsonian's long-running collusion with Glenn Curtiss et al to rip off the Wrights' patents. They exhibited Samuel P. Langley's failed machine for many years as "the first airplane capable of flight", and sponsored a test of a phony "replica" in the post-WW1 years as proof that it really could fly. The Wrights sent their airplane to the Imperial War Museum in London in retaliation, and it didn't come back until popular pressure forced the Smithsonian to agree to give up the charade.
rj
Au contraire, mon frere. We're doing a splendid job with flapping-wing aircraft, and we outperform nature by a considerable margin.
Birds flap with a reciprocating motion, which is enormously inefficient in a muscle-powered system; the act of stopping an upstroke and starting a downstroke is massively irreversible in the thermodynamic sense, and throws away tons of energy.
But we know how to do one thing that nature doesn't: we can make a rotating joint. That means we can flap wings with a nice, efficient rotary motion. The helicopter does everything a bird does, and does it better (well, okay, except shit on your clothes). Ornithopters, like steam locomotives and wet-plate cameras, make splendid toys.
rj
Didn't Dr. Quatermass have an exciting dig in one of those places in "Five Million Years to Earth"?
rj
There are four of those east of Denver that lie in land that was leased from ranchers when they were dug, and reverted to the ranchers when the Air Force shut them down. They're a continual problem for the county sheriff, because teenagers break into them and hold clandestine parties with predictable results. The ranchers have gone to a lot of trouble to seal them up, but the kids have been remarkably resourceful in defeating them. Cutting torches and hydraulic jacks have been employed at times.
There was a promoter who claimed to be working up a plan to turn the silos into upscale underground homes for people with off-center tastes in housing, but that never got anywhere. I haven't heard about them in four or five years now, so maybe they've just been filled in.
rj
Well, um, yes...so what does that have to do with pi? Pi is not defined in terms of any physical measurement, except maybe in shop class.
rj
Zero percent, to be precise. And thus it will stay.
rj
It would have been the best sf film ever done, period.
rj
Ummm, who told you that? The Osprey has the same autorotation capability as a helicopter, and it can fly in full tiltrotor mode with one engine out because the engines are cross-shafted.
It does indeed have some serious problems, but they don't include any basic inability to tolerate engine failure.
rj
If you want to see cramped, have a look at U-1 (launched 1906) in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. It's a full-fledged diesel-electric boat, but it looks like something about halfway between a WW2 U-Boat and the Hunley.
rj