"...Also, most binary systems have very tight orbits between the companion stars--a binary system with 1/2 a lightyear distance might be even more unusual than a unary star system..."
I just ran this through a three-body analysis program, and it shows a common valid solution path for this type of orbital system. I am going to publish my results of the resultant curve and call it the "Unary Track Inflection".
LED lamps are used all the time in aviation, where they are certified for high humidity, immersion, salt spray, and temperature extremes. It is commonplace to seal them and use conductive heat sinks to dissipate the internal heat. Thermal failure problems are well understood and well mitigated.
CFL fixtures can also be easily protected. It is all about using the right lamp type for the right job, no one is claiming that a CFL is the best for commercial street lighting, for example, where sodium lamps offer superior benefits, and especially not in an oven!
With regards to color vs energy, CFLs and white LEDs use a phoshpor to reradiate a broader color spectrum. The efficacy losses due to light outside of your visual spectrum are a very small fraction of the total output. While your comments with regard to color quality vs aesthetics are important, you assumptions about color vs efficacy are more or less false.
And one more aside, I'm even using standard spiral CFLs in my outdoor porch and carport now exposed to rain and weather, with no problems. They've lasted over 2 years now.
"but how long before a scared poorly trained sailor has emptied that clip? whereas a watercannon and LRAD wont run out of ammunition, and are probably a bit easier to aim"
Ridiculous. Are you seriously claiming that bullets are more difficult to store and supply than hundreds, even thousands, of gallons of water? Why, all that water ammunition would have to be accounted for in the ship's hold for instant readiness, reducing stability, reducing cargo, truly ridiculous. Why, one could think up even crazier schemes such as actively sucking these thousands of gallons from some "convenient" mass of water nearby, I suppose you'd just throw our a hose and...oh...wait...never mind.
Yep, this is exactly what's done. I'm a lighting engineer, and you simply tailor an array of Red/Green/Blue/Yellow/White LEDs with a controller to get whatever light mix you want. Individual portions of the array can be PWM controlled separately, letting you essentially design to almost any spectral output you desire (money permitting, of course.) Typical for a "comfortable warm incandescent feel" is White with Yellow.
Yes, agreed. I'm a lighting engineer, and do a lot of LED dimming and color-transition-effect arrays of LEDs. In the case of arrays, some LEDs may be driven full bright and the output color may still appear to at full bright, but you can still get flicker when one of the RGBW LEDs in the array is being driven at a low frequency to achieve a particular output color for the array.
I'm very sensitive to flicker, and can definitely notice many of the dim states at low frequencies.
For reference, an 85 Hz CRT was barely tolerable for me, and I needed 100 Hz or greater to avoid piercing headaches at the end of the day.
Related to this...my wife packs all of her digital MRI records around on DVDs, it's very cool and fun to browse at home also.
Her scanning lab place, for some reason, does not archive the digital data for more than a year and imposes the archiving burden on the physician/hospital that they transmit to. A physical DVD is mailed and then physically filed at the hospital, with all of the pitfalls and human errors inherent in filing of paper records. Guess what happens if the hospital staff is flaky and doesn't file it correctly? Poof, gone. It's happened to us on a couple of occasions. DVDs binder-clipped to my wife's paper records and scratched all to hell? Seen it.
We discovered incidentally that while the firm labels the disk case with the record info, patient name, etc, the DVD itself is unlabeled. A doctor left our MRI DVD in the disk tray of one of the exam room PCs once, but didn't remember which one. We had to drive back to the hospital and go from room to room all over the floor checking DVD drives for the misplaced disk, or my wife would have "lost" her MRI records.
Digital is not the panacea one thinks, humans and bureuacratic offices are ingenious at screwing things up.
I'm a lighting engineer that helps design LED systems...
Those failures are likely not the LEDs, but are the fault of the controller components. Like any electronic, cheap components become the weak link in the chain, and skimping money on the controller results in shoddy quality in the unit as a *whole*, even if the LEDs are perfectly fine (and I would bet that the LEDs are still perfectly fine.)
My E61 is slightly over 1/2" at its thickest (top) narrowing to under 1/2" at the bottom. I love the form factor.
My only complaints with the device, which I otherwise love more than any phone I've used, are:
--It has a smooth featureless metal housing with no "grippy" ridges, and has a tendency to slip out of my hand or loose pockets if I'm not careful.
--The UI is very slow, it takes a zen patience to navigate the menus, and actively punishes rapid selecting with random results (you can't reliably cue up input from reflex and wait for the UI to catch up).
I am a design engineer actually (electrical & systems). I completely disagree with you if you are implying that problem-solving intuition and logical development are absent from the discrete math and analytical/statistical math fields. If anything, I think they are far more valuable for those concepts than traditional "cookbook" mathematics such as most calculus & differential equations courses I've been through (B.S. in Physics, working on my M.S. in E.E.).
If I am at all a victim, it is at the expense of spending far too much of my educational time learning the aforementioned "cookbook" tricks (integration by parts, partial differential equations) that are pure "follow the recipe" mathematics instead of conceptual or theoretical.
I really recommend you take some deeper discrete or statistical analysis classes (300-400 level), set theory, game theory, and you will find a world of rich, intuitive, logical, thinking-math, that is being denied its due. I truly think that retooling primary education to support those fields as an end result, instead of high-end calculus-path courses that are just diff-eq and algebra-tricks in a new wrapping paper, is the way to build the intuitive, thinking, problem-solving students you desire.
"...The only real question is - Are engineers and scientists finding their maths education weak?..."
Absolutely. An engineer in the 40s/50s would need to have in-depth critical skills of geometrical proofs and relationships, nasty algebraic manipulations, and "bag of tricks" mathematics like series approximations, dummy variable substitutions, etc, because computing resources were rare and resource intensive. If you look at the older tests linked in the OP, you can really see a reflection of that need.
As an engineer today however, I have zero need for knowing trig simplification identities, calculus proofs, and the like beyond a high conceptual level, but I have far more need and usage of logical and discrete math fields, programming concepts, vector operations, statistical methods, and other "math" topics that are still completely absent from any high-school math curricula that I've seen.
My wife (a math degree and former teacher) suggested throwing out the "calculus path" of mathematics entirely and retool math education to a "discrete math path". It sounded heretical to me initially, but I've come to believe that she's correct.
As a physics (BS) and EE (MS) major I agree completely. There has been nothing in either major university degree program that Matlab wasn't able to do just fine. Unless you are doing hardcore lab data-crunching for your grad thesis work, I can't imagine that one would ever need anything more.
I have on occasion used Mathmatica, Maple, and Mathcad as alternatives, but only because they were a little easier for the task at hand, but Matlab still would have sufficed.
The Physics degree is a theoretical and conceptual curriculum, very heavy in math and logic, but it is not a CS degree.
I just installed 8.04 over the weekend on my laptop, and am a complete Linux/Unix noob. My results (Dell Vostro 1500 laptop):
From the iso disc, it installed flawlessly and I arrived at a desktop screen. After some fiddling:
Wireless card: Not detected/configured Sound card: Not detected/configured Video card: Not detected/configured Touchpad: Twitchy and jumpy
I sighed in frustration at the hours ahead...
First I needed an internet connection. I made a wireless profile, and after much frustrated fiddling it Firefox refused to connect even after I had configured and detected my router. So I used the oldest Windows trick in the book...reboot. Internet worked just fine after that, go figure, I had always heard the "geeks" say that Linux had solved the "reboot to install" problem.
Next I tried to install Flash. Yikes! My experience mimicked the article...what in the hell do I do with tar.gz or.rpm? Why doesn't double clicking on them do anything? Why isn't there any sort of "how to" prompt in Ubuntu, you would think that Linux would recognize its own files and know how to install them? Finally, I found a site that had a walkthrough tutorial of the package manager and I (very unintuitively) followed the recipe in ignorance and Flash worked.
Video card: Same story as Flash, nVidia's site gave me a link to a file, but why wouldn't it install? I tried a half-dozen different walkthroughs on various forums, with console commands of "sudo" this and "apt-get" that and finally installed something called "Envy". Finally, Ubuntu accepted the new drivers. Yay, video card works (2 hours later!)
Neat side effect...with the new video drivers, my touchpad is no longer twitchy. That's nice.
After my first weekend, I feel pretty good, but then I am used to suffering through Windows OS installs and upgrades, and compared to past Windows installs this was only equally painful, but not an improvement in any way.
Sound still does not work, I'm going to go forum-hunting again.
Bottom line, if the machine didn't come completely pre-installed and pre-configured with Ubuntu, I would never recommend the experience to another noob, especially not one who wasn't determined and fearless about troubleshooting.
My Wii, DS, and Xbox all have quirky issues with my own secured wireless router (which only works with Windows and Linux after many late nights of driver tweaking). They only work if I leave mine unsecured, which I won't do (since I also "share" my music across my house computers as a "virtual jukebox")
They all connect automatically to my neighbor's (don't know which one) unsecured signal however, so I admit that I leech on them for Mario Kart and CoD4 sessions.
You misspelled compliment, your lack of attention does not befit an engineer--urge to bomb rising......unless you were making clever wordplay with the set theory definition or other of the many mathematical meanings of the word, in which case well-punned, sir!
5. Awful textbooks Some are good in the popular subjects, many are terrible in the niche subjects. Engineering is a lower-population specialty, with less competition and incentive for quality textbooks to rise to prominence. Some fields have only a handful (2 or 3) authoritative texts *at all* anywhere. This syndrome is just as noticeable in obscure niche Liberal Arts fields as well, you just aren't a LA major and so you don't notice it.
4. Professors are rarely encouraging Having been in plenty of classes in both Liberal Arts, Engineering, and Science, sucky professor exist *everywhere*. If you don't like your professor, register for a different class section. Good ones not available at your school? Well, you didn't research your program/school very well, did you...
3. Dearth of quality counseling Same as above point...
2. Inflated grades This only matters for 2 scenarios......LA student trying to get into Engineering grad program, in which case their grades won't mean a thing since they don't have the prequisite classes anyway....Eng student trying to get into a LA grad program, in which case your cover letter and other experience/recommendations are going to carry more weight than you engineering grades (the LA program won't care about how you scored in Fourier Analysis)
1. Boring Assignments...see points 3 & 4 above. Again, it sounds like either a crappy school, or a student who shouldn't be an engineer and should look for other degree programs.
No, his definition was trying to verbalize F=ma, and he is quite correct. The key is his "relative to another mass". For example, your weight standing on the moon is less, due to the smaller mass of the moon.
Weight is a measure of force. On the IIS you have a cancelation of forces: the centripetal acceleration of the orbit exactly cancels the acceleration of gravity, leaving you with a delta of zero--a stable orbit, weightlessness. You are conflating 'weight' and 'mass'.
In your elevator freefall example, it isn't an illusion of weightlessness, it *is* weightlessness. Your mass however does not change.
Private pilot here. I was taking off in a Cessna 150 behind a 777 out of Paine Field in Everett. I waited the standard delay, plus an extra minute offered by the tower, before taxiing out for take off. Wakes last a long time, and taking off about 100' above the runway I hit the remaining wake. It flipped me past wings vertical one direction, then immediately flipped me over 180 degrees the other direction, then yanked me back to level. I had the controls to the opposite stops fighting the rolls and it didn't make the slightest difference.
The rating on the Cessna at that speed wouldn't break the wings, they would only stall out, but it's still just as bad when on climb out with no recovery room.
I kept on after that in normal climb out, scared but otherwise ok.
I submit the theory that you are simultaneously inside and outside of the pub, until you read my post. You will then collapse into a definite inside/outside pub state.
Because this state collapse must be physically and mentally very disorienting for you, you would definitely need a beer after such an experience. You would therefore head quickly to the nearest pub.
This suggests that you actually exist perpetually in an "inside pub" state, just at varying degrees of intoxication based on how often you click refresh.
Absolutely the same here...I'm an engineer/drafter that spends 40+ hrs a week at the keyboard, plus loves computer gaming at home. Around 10 years ago, I started getting rather serious RSI symptoms. Pain-spikes, numbness, tingling, it was progressing fast.
Shortly after that same time I started a martial arts class for fun. We routinely did a lot of different hand form exercises (fists, grips, tiger claws, etc) that would turn my wrists and forearms to jelly during classes.
Shortly thereafter (over about 3-6 months), my RSI symptoms lessened and gradually dissappeared. I'm now 10 years older, still do my kung-fu drills part time, and can spend entire days on a keyboard without the slightest pain or twinge and come home and play games until dawn.
Rock-climbing is likely very similar in the strength and flexibility of movement of the fingers and wrists. I fully credit kung fu for "curing" my RSI. I'm just glad that I coincidentally discovered it when I did.
"...I know people who work for aerospace who ( and this may not be normal ) get paid overtime..."
I am an engineer in aerospace. I'm classified salaried OT exempt, but still get paid overtime because of union contract agreements. It isn't 1.5 time, OT is billed as straight hourly plus an additional pittance, but at least it is extra pay. When on call, I get to bill any received phone calls as logged OT. Pretty good huh?
Down sides you say? Of course there are. As part of a negotiated union contract, I have zero merit based pay raises or bonuses and no control over my future salary. I am locked into a formulaic pay raise schedule and even if my boss wanted to pay me more for doing a kick-ass job (or pay the lazy desk-nappers less), the union contract wouldn't allow it.
Of course I could always flip to independent contractor, but then I have to manage all of my health benefits, insurance, etc which may or may not end up equitable in the long run.
*shrug* I get to work on cool stuff though, and get paid average-to-decent, so all things considered I can't really complain.
"...However, their are SOME "Republicans" who tend to think..."
When "some" becomes "most", perhaps you need to either redefine what Republican means, our create a new label that accurately describes your beliefs and platform. As it is, Republican has lost its useful context and meaning in language if it also requires a qualifier to clarify that you're not one of "those" Republicans.
I touch type, and am very used to my own particular keyboard. The moment I sit down at a different keyboard (my wife's laptop, a public station, a horrendous split-ergonomic keyboard), then I revert to hunt-and-peck mode. I'll also type differntly if I don't have my ergonomic puffy wrist pad for my hands.
Slashdot Mirror
"...Also, most binary systems have very tight orbits between the companion stars--a binary system with 1/2 a lightyear distance might be even more unusual than a unary star system..."
I just ran this through a three-body analysis program, and it shows a common valid solution path for this type of orbital system. I am going to publish my results of the resultant curve and call it the "Unary Track Inflection".
I am a lighting engineer...
LED lamps are used all the time in aviation, where they are certified for high humidity, immersion, salt spray, and temperature extremes. It is commonplace to seal them and use conductive heat sinks to dissipate the internal heat. Thermal failure problems are well understood and well mitigated.
CFL fixtures can also be easily protected. It is all about using the right lamp type for the right job, no one is claiming that a CFL is the best for commercial street lighting, for example, where sodium lamps offer superior benefits, and especially not in an oven!
With regards to color vs energy, CFLs and white LEDs use a phoshpor to reradiate a broader color spectrum. The efficacy losses due to light outside of your visual spectrum are a very small fraction of the total output. While your comments with regard to color quality vs aesthetics are important, you assumptions about color vs efficacy are more or less false.
And one more aside, I'm even using standard spiral CFLs in my outdoor porch and carport now exposed to rain and weather, with no problems. They've lasted over 2 years now.
Quick, Robin! To the conception capsule!
*na na na na na, na na na na ....*
"but how long before a scared poorly trained sailor has emptied that clip? whereas a watercannon and LRAD wont run out of ammunition, and are probably a bit easier to aim"
Ridiculous. Are you seriously claiming that bullets are more difficult to store and supply than hundreds, even thousands, of gallons of water? Why, all that water ammunition would have to be accounted for in the ship's hold for instant readiness, reducing stability, reducing cargo, truly ridiculous. Why, one could think up even crazier schemes such as actively sucking these thousands of gallons from some "convenient" mass of water nearby, I suppose you'd just throw our a hose and...oh...wait...never mind.
Yep, this is exactly what's done. I'm a lighting engineer, and you simply tailor an array of Red/Green/Blue/Yellow/White LEDs with a controller to get whatever light mix you want. Individual portions of the array can be PWM controlled separately, letting you essentially design to almost any spectral output you desire (money permitting, of course.) Typical for a "comfortable warm incandescent feel" is White with Yellow.
Yes, agreed. I'm a lighting engineer, and do a lot of LED dimming and color-transition-effect arrays of LEDs. In the case of arrays, some LEDs may be driven full bright and the output color may still appear to at full bright, but you can still get flicker when one of the RGBW LEDs in the array is being driven at a low frequency to achieve a particular output color for the array.
I'm very sensitive to flicker, and can definitely notice many of the dim states at low frequencies.
For reference, an 85 Hz CRT was barely tolerable for me, and I needed 100 Hz or greater to avoid piercing headaches at the end of the day.
Related to this...my wife packs all of her digital MRI records around on DVDs, it's very cool and fun to browse at home also.
Her scanning lab place, for some reason, does not archive the digital data for more than a year and imposes the archiving burden on the physician/hospital that they transmit to. A physical DVD is mailed and then physically filed at the hospital, with all of the pitfalls and human errors inherent in filing of paper records. Guess what happens if the hospital staff is flaky and doesn't file it correctly? Poof, gone. It's happened to us on a couple of occasions. DVDs binder-clipped to my wife's paper records and scratched all to hell? Seen it.
We discovered incidentally that while the firm labels the disk case with the record info, patient name, etc, the DVD itself is unlabeled. A doctor left our MRI DVD in the disk tray of one of the exam room PCs once, but didn't remember which one. We had to drive back to the hospital and go from room to room all over the floor checking DVD drives for the misplaced disk, or my wife would have "lost" her MRI records.
Digital is not the panacea one thinks, humans and bureuacratic offices are ingenious at screwing things up.
I'm a lighting engineer that helps design LED systems...
Those failures are likely not the LEDs, but are the fault of the controller components. Like any electronic, cheap components become the weak link in the chain, and skimping money on the controller results in shoddy quality in the unit as a *whole*, even if the LEDs are perfectly fine (and I would bet that the LEDs are still perfectly fine.)
Yes, and it is even more concerning because the eye's blink reflex will not occur, increasing the damage. Infrared laser == nasty.
Freeman, you're late! Get back to the resonance chamber!
My E61 is slightly over 1/2" at its thickest (top) narrowing to under 1/2" at the bottom. I love the form factor.
My only complaints with the device, which I otherwise love more than any phone I've used, are:
--It has a smooth featureless metal housing with no "grippy" ridges, and has a tendency to slip out of my hand or loose pockets if I'm not careful.
--The UI is very slow, it takes a zen patience to navigate the menus, and actively punishes rapid selecting with random results (you can't reliably cue up input from reflex and wait for the UI to catch up).
I am a design engineer actually (electrical & systems). I completely disagree with you if you are implying that problem-solving intuition and logical development are absent from the discrete math and analytical/statistical math fields. If anything, I think they are far more valuable for those concepts than traditional "cookbook" mathematics such as most calculus & differential equations courses I've been through (B.S. in Physics, working on my M.S. in E.E.).
If I am at all a victim, it is at the expense of spending far too much of my educational time learning the aforementioned "cookbook" tricks (integration by parts, partial differential equations) that are pure "follow the recipe" mathematics instead of conceptual or theoretical.
I really recommend you take some deeper discrete or statistical analysis classes (300-400 level), set theory, game theory, and you will find a world of rich, intuitive, logical, thinking-math, that is being denied its due. I truly think that retooling primary education to support those fields as an end result, instead of high-end calculus-path courses that are just diff-eq and algebra-tricks in a new wrapping paper, is the way to build the intuitive, thinking, problem-solving students you desire.
"...The only real question is - Are engineers and scientists finding their maths education weak?..."
Absolutely. An engineer in the 40s/50s would need to have in-depth critical skills of geometrical proofs and relationships, nasty algebraic manipulations, and "bag of tricks" mathematics like series approximations, dummy variable substitutions, etc, because computing resources were rare and resource intensive. If you look at the older tests linked in the OP, you can really see a reflection of that need.
As an engineer today however, I have zero need for knowing trig simplification identities, calculus proofs, and the like beyond a high conceptual level, but I have far more need and usage of logical and discrete math fields, programming concepts, vector operations, statistical methods, and other "math" topics that are still completely absent from any high-school math curricula that I've seen.
My wife (a math degree and former teacher) suggested throwing out the "calculus path" of mathematics entirely and retool math education to a "discrete math path". It sounded heretical to me initially, but I've come to believe that she's correct.
As a physics (BS) and EE (MS) major I agree completely. There has been nothing in either major university degree program that Matlab wasn't able to do just fine. Unless you are doing hardcore lab data-crunching for your grad thesis work, I can't imagine that one would ever need anything more.
I have on occasion used Mathmatica, Maple, and Mathcad as alternatives, but only because they were a little easier for the task at hand, but Matlab still would have sufficed.
The Physics degree is a theoretical and conceptual curriculum, very heavy in math and logic, but it is not a CS degree.
I just installed 8.04 over the weekend on my laptop, and am a complete Linux/Unix noob. My results (Dell Vostro 1500 laptop):
.rpm? Why doesn't double clicking on them do anything? Why isn't there any sort of "how to" prompt in Ubuntu, you would think that Linux would recognize its own files and know how to install them? Finally, I found a site that had a walkthrough tutorial of the package manager and I (very unintuitively) followed the recipe in ignorance and Flash worked.
From the iso disc, it installed flawlessly and I arrived at a desktop screen. After some fiddling:
Wireless card: Not detected/configured
Sound card: Not detected/configured
Video card: Not detected/configured
Touchpad: Twitchy and jumpy
I sighed in frustration at the hours ahead...
First I needed an internet connection. I made a wireless profile, and after much frustrated fiddling it Firefox refused to connect even after I had configured and detected my router. So I used the oldest Windows trick in the book...reboot. Internet worked just fine after that, go figure, I had always heard the "geeks" say that Linux had solved the "reboot to install" problem.
Next I tried to install Flash. Yikes! My experience mimicked the article...what in the hell do I do with tar.gz or
Video card: Same story as Flash, nVidia's site gave me a link to a file, but why wouldn't it install? I tried a half-dozen different walkthroughs on various forums, with console commands of "sudo" this and "apt-get" that and finally installed something called "Envy". Finally, Ubuntu accepted the new drivers. Yay, video card works (2 hours later!)
Neat side effect...with the new video drivers, my touchpad is no longer twitchy. That's nice.
After my first weekend, I feel pretty good, but then I am used to suffering through Windows OS installs and upgrades, and compared to past Windows installs this was only equally painful, but not an improvement in any way.
Sound still does not work, I'm going to go forum-hunting again.
Bottom line, if the machine didn't come completely pre-installed and pre-configured with Ubuntu, I would never recommend the experience to another noob, especially not one who wasn't determined and fearless about troubleshooting.
My Wii, DS, and Xbox all have quirky issues with my own secured wireless router (which only works with Windows and Linux after many late nights of driver tweaking). They only work if I leave mine unsecured, which I won't do (since I also "share" my music across my house computers as a "virtual jukebox")
They all connect automatically to my neighbor's (don't know which one) unsecured signal however, so I admit that I leech on them for Mario Kart and CoD4 sessions.
"...thanks for the complement"
...unless you were making clever wordplay with the set theory definition or other of the many mathematical meanings of the word, in which case well-punned, sir!
You misspelled compliment, your lack of attention does not befit an engineer--urge to bomb rising...
5. Awful textbooks
...LA student trying to get into Engineering grad program, in which case their grades won't mean a thing since they don't have the prequisite classes anyway. ...Eng student trying to get into a LA grad program, in which case your cover letter and other experience/recommendations are going to carry more weight than you engineering grades (the LA program won't care about how you scored in Fourier Analysis)
...see points 3 & 4 above. Again, it sounds like either a crappy school, or a student who shouldn't be an engineer and should look for other degree programs.
Some are good in the popular subjects, many are terrible in the niche subjects. Engineering is a lower-population specialty, with less competition and incentive for quality textbooks to rise to prominence. Some fields have only a handful (2 or 3) authoritative texts *at all* anywhere. This syndrome is just as noticeable in obscure niche Liberal Arts fields as well, you just aren't a LA major and so you don't notice it.
4. Professors are rarely encouraging
Having been in plenty of classes in both Liberal Arts, Engineering, and Science, sucky professor exist *everywhere*. If you don't like your professor, register for a different class section. Good ones not available at your school? Well, you didn't research your program/school very well, did you...
3. Dearth of quality counseling
Same as above point...
2. Inflated grades
This only matters for 2 scenarios...
1. Boring Assignments
No, his definition was trying to verbalize F=ma, and he is quite correct. The key is his "relative to another mass". For example, your weight standing on the moon is less, due to the smaller mass of the moon.
Weight is a measure of force. On the IIS you have a cancelation of forces: the centripetal acceleration of the orbit exactly cancels the acceleration of gravity, leaving you with a delta of zero--a stable orbit, weightlessness. You are conflating 'weight' and 'mass'.
In your elevator freefall example, it isn't an illusion of weightlessness, it *is* weightlessness. Your mass however does not change.
Private pilot here. I was taking off in a Cessna 150 behind a 777 out of Paine Field in Everett. I waited the standard delay, plus an extra minute offered by the tower, before taxiing out for take off. Wakes last a long time, and taking off about 100' above the runway I hit the remaining wake. It flipped me past wings vertical one direction, then immediately flipped me over 180 degrees the other direction, then yanked me back to level. I had the controls to the opposite stops fighting the rolls and it didn't make the slightest difference.
The rating on the Cessna at that speed wouldn't break the wings, they would only stall out, but it's still just as bad when on climb out with no recovery room.
I kept on after that in normal climb out, scared but otherwise ok.
I submit the theory that you are simultaneously inside and outside of the pub, until you read my post. You will then collapse into a definite inside/outside pub state.
Because this state collapse must be physically and mentally very disorienting for you, you would definitely need a beer after such an experience. You would therefore head quickly to the nearest pub.
This suggests that you actually exist perpetually in an "inside pub" state, just at varying degrees of intoxication based on how often you click refresh.
Please reply and confirm your current state.
Absolutely the same here...I'm an engineer/drafter that spends 40+ hrs a week at the keyboard, plus loves computer gaming at home. Around 10 years ago, I started getting rather serious RSI symptoms. Pain-spikes, numbness, tingling, it was progressing fast.
Shortly after that same time I started a martial arts class for fun. We routinely did a lot of different hand form exercises (fists, grips, tiger claws, etc) that would turn my wrists and forearms to jelly during classes.
Shortly thereafter (over about 3-6 months), my RSI symptoms lessened and gradually dissappeared. I'm now 10 years older, still do my kung-fu drills part time, and can spend entire days on a keyboard without the slightest pain or twinge and come home and play games until dawn.
Rock-climbing is likely very similar in the strength and flexibility of movement of the fingers and wrists. I fully credit kung fu for "curing" my RSI. I'm just glad that I coincidentally discovered it when I did.
"...I know people who work for aerospace who ( and this may not be normal ) get paid overtime..."
I am an engineer in aerospace. I'm classified salaried OT exempt, but still get paid overtime because of union contract agreements. It isn't 1.5 time, OT is billed as straight hourly plus an additional pittance, but at least it is extra pay. When on call, I get to bill any received phone calls as logged OT. Pretty good huh?
Down sides you say? Of course there are. As part of a negotiated union contract, I have zero merit based pay raises or bonuses and no control over my future salary. I am locked into a formulaic pay raise schedule and even if my boss wanted to pay me more for doing a kick-ass job (or pay the lazy desk-nappers less), the union contract wouldn't allow it.
Of course I could always flip to independent contractor, but then I have to manage all of my health benefits, insurance, etc which may or may not end up equitable in the long run.
*shrug* I get to work on cool stuff though, and get paid average-to-decent, so all things considered I can't really complain.
"...However, their are SOME "Republicans" who tend to think..."
When "some" becomes "most", perhaps you need to either redefine what Republican means, our create a new label that accurately describes your beliefs and platform. As it is, Republican has lost its useful context and meaning in language if it also requires a qualifier to clarify that you're not one of "those" Republicans.
I touch type, and am very used to my own particular keyboard. The moment I sit down at a different keyboard (my wife's laptop, a public station, a horrendous split-ergonomic keyboard), then I revert to hunt-and-peck mode. I'll also type differntly if I don't have my ergonomic puffy wrist pad for my hands.
Simply a horrid idea.