Lets see how much of my teenage years I can remember...
1) Drilled out the barrel of a decorative brass cannon, emptied out about 200 firecrakers into it, mashed up a bunch of pellets from the pellet gun, stuck a fuse in it, lit it, ran. There was a large explosion. Never found the cannon.
2) That was so cool, tried to make gunpowder. Could never make that work very well so...
3) Made nitro glycerine. Really bad nitro glycerine, but we did manage to blow up the test tube it was in and miraculously not ourselves.
4) Made a video in the chem lab at high school, pretending to be the Devil by turning on the two bunsen-burner gas outlets on either side of the teachers podium and lit them, cool flames shooting 5 feet into the air on either side with my friend standing between them trying to look devilish.
Etc etc. I mean, come on. Everyone thinks flames and blowing stuff up is cool. I suppose if I was a kid today I'd get sent to a psychologist.
In 1976 my brother and I literally camped in front of the TV for two weeks to watch the Montreal Olympics. It was the most exciting thing I'd ever seen (and I wanted to marry Nadia Comaneci).
Thirty years later I'll admit maybe I've changed more than the Olympics but I can't get into it anymore. It's a forum for political wankery and sports personality market development. Other countries are allowed in for no other reason than to give the US and the other big countries someone to beat. That may seem unkind, but it's the inevitable consequence of the focus on nationalism at the games. Some people say there should be no national identification at the games, and while it'll never happen, it would be better.
The games seem to me now on par with the Academy Awards, an exercise in marketing and self-promotion for political units and soon-to-be millionaire sports personalities. The big countries that host the games brought the concept of self promotion to the games, which inevitably leads to politics which inevitably leads to protests. They brought this on themselves.
Free Tibet!
Re:Selling you yesterday's future today
on
NASA Turns 50
·
· Score: 1
Yes I do know that...all credit to Frank Whittle and the German fellow whose name escapes me. The American jet engine, I believe, was born when they got their hands on a Whittle in the early 40's and GE essentially copied it.
Still, it would be hard to deny that the great number of experimental jets that the US built in the 50's wasn't the primary impetus behind the growth of the jet. The UK was also doing good things at the same time.
Re:Selling you yesterday's future today
on
NASA Turns 50
·
· Score: 1
...still no cost-effective launch system.
That will require airline-type operations. That will require higher design margins. That will require higher payload mass ratio. That will require air breathing. That will require SCRAM.
At the end of WWII Boeing was already making modern pressurized semi-monocoque airplanes just like we have today (the B29). All that was needed was the jet engine to create the air transportation system we have now.
We know NASA can make space planes. They lack the engine.
Unfortunately even HRH (His Royal Hairness) Branson doesn't have the checking account to fund the development of one of those. I believe the US government could do it just like they did with the jet engine. Why don't they?
Because of the fear that, were LEO to open up like atmospheric air travel has, then just anybody (read Iran, N. Korea, a wealthy individual) could zip their little spaceships over the continental United States at will, unannounced, any time, with anything on board.
The way things are now, only the big boys get to play astronaut. Why do you think the US recently announced a policy position that would allow them to shoot down anything in space they felt like?
...I have been joined in this fight by many fine men and women all across the country, lawyers and defendants alike. We learn from each other, and help and support and get strength from each other.
I would be curious to know what sort of network of support is available to defendants. The tone of the article led me to believe it's almost hopeless:
The RIAA's expert witnesses have been deposed only once so far in these cases.
and:
In the contested cases, the defendants are without the resources needed to challenge
the plaintiffs' pleadings...
and especially:
Only a single case in four years, Capitol v. Thomas,11 has ever gone to trial, and that one only because the judge denied the defendant's attorney's motion for leave to withdraw.
z is related to the Seebeck coeff (which tells you how much voltage a given delta-temp gives you in a material), the resistivity and thermal conductivity. It is multiplied by T (the average temp at which the performance is measured) to give a non-dimensional number.
zT doesn't tell you the efficiency because that would depend on the delta T (next para), but it is roughly proportional to it for given operating conditions. zT = 1 materials have efficiency maybe around 5% under best conditions, for zt = 3 you might be around 20%. Notice that if you know S and delta T you know the voltage: you can do some simple circuit calcs with a matched impedance and get the power it will generate. Compare that to the heat energy you get from the delta T and the thermal conductivity and you can get an efficiency, but instead of that lets just throw out some round numbers.
Remember efficiency depends on the delta T due to the 2nd law of thermodyamics. The smaller delta T is the lower the max theoretical efficiency is. If the engine exhaust is at lets say 500F the max efficiency any device could get would be 1 - (492 + 72)/(492 + 500) = 43%. So that would be 78kW of your 180kW for a thermodynamically perfect device.
So if you can get maybe 20% out of thermoelectrics under the best conditions, the low-temp engine exhaust scenario would probably mean you could get at best 10%. So 20kW or so I'd guess. Once you design an actual system it would probably be more like 5 or 10kW.
Ok look, here we have two perfectly fine posts containing perhaps a certain level of snark but for God's sake why must they be modded this way?
We all have our stories about mod kiddies getting power mad but if a thread like this is judged so beyond the pale of/. sensibility that it must be hidden from default readers then holy heck I'll just go ask my grandmother how much she likes big band music, it would have about the same about of bite as this place does nowadays.
Soon it'll be to the point where the members with the worst karma will be the most interesting and the ones with the best karma will be so boring we'll all want to kill ourselves.
The Apollo 17 video will send shivers up and down your spine I guarantee it.
* Most unfortunately, the videos are in Quicktime(tm) format. If you, like me, use Windows, go here to get Quicktime. If you have NoScript, disable it for that page because there is a script that autodetects your OS. Download the most basic player and uncheck all options because Apple tries to install all sorts of incredibly annoying nag- and crap-ware. Also make sure you do not select auto-update because thats another level of nagging to upgrade to a paid service. Finally, use Spybot to disable the Apple updater in your startup list.
True, he might be a coward, I didn't know him. But I found that comment by the prosecutor to be tawdry. This is a complete tragedy from A to Z and now isn't the time for some bureaucrat to be spouting off his moralizing judgments about someone's character as if life is some lame religion comic book.
But I guess the bureaucrat feels safe because nobody would dare defend Davidson. Surprise, Law & Order flunkie, you don't have to like Davidson to recognize a pandering wannabe hero to the kind of people who need to understand the world by pinning a label (written in crayon) to everything, even if it is a corpse.
Oops that accidentally got modded troll, so there it is again just in case there is someone here who isn't afraid of ideas they don't agree with.
True, he might be a coward, I didn't know him. But I found that comment by the prosecutor to be tawdry. This is a complete tragedy from A to Z and now isn't the time for some bureaucrat to be spouting off his moralizing judgments about someone's character as if life is some lame religion comic book.
But I guess the bureaucrat feels safe because nobody would dare defend Davidson. Surprise, Law & Order flunkie, you don't have to like Davidson to recognize a pandering wannabe hero to the kind of people who need to understand the world by pinning a label (written in crayon) to everything, even if it is a corpse.
I know for a fact that red dye #40 makes my toddler into the raging tatrum monster from hell. It's like a damn switch. Thousands upon thousands of parents also know the same thing. Does civilization depend on red dye #40? No. So why do we even bother to allow its continued use? Because we can't live without Fruit Loops?
Contrast that with the epidemic of paediatric brain tumours that doesn't exist which would be predicted by this fella's hypothesis and the explosion of cell use by kids over the past decade.
But no, we have to get our attention-whoring faces on CNN so we go after the sexed up cell phone cancer monster under the bed.
Ef that. Get the effin red dye #40 out of the effin food chain. That actually has a chance to make someone's life better. Which I thought was supposed to be the goal of medicine. But ohhhh no cellphones are just too near & dear to the self image of that dual income dual SUV child-a-phobic couple giving us the rolling eyeballs at the restaurant as the kid runs screaming around and around and around the table, what a treat that was.
Mythbusters used the wrong kind of airframe for testing. It does make a big difference. The flimsy little unpressurized airplane they used was going to break no matter what they fired at it. They did a re-do of that test and concluded frozen was worse.
Part-23 aircraft (little airplanes) have to withstand a 2-lb bird hitting the windscreen at max flap speed. Part-25 aircraft (airliners) have to withstand an 8-lb bird hitting the empennage at cruse speed and a 4-lb bird hitting anywhere else including the wind screen at cruise speed. There is a whole aviation sub-industry devoted to testing and designing for bird impact.
In real life using a frozen chicken is a mistake nobody would ever make. I say this because in the bird impact business it is well known that bird density, a more subtle effect than frozen/thawed, is important. Chickens are more dense than flying birds and create higher peak impact transients. Chicken guns don't fire chickens any more, they fire freshly killed ducks or geese.
If I read this (table A1 p117) the top four employment categories are 1) Manufacturing 2) Retail 3) Health Care and 4) Hotels. Do any of these sound safe from outsourcing? Not to me.
The US invested mightily and fostered the genius it took to create it's amazing economy. India did not, they can do that now if they want. They will catch up eventually, but why on Earth would you help your competition? Maybe it's not about America, maybe it's about greed which, contrary to neo-con oversimplified-theory-so-the-senator-from-Nebraska-can-understand-it isn't always good.
I bet India has some very very bright people. Probably bright enough to be CIO or CEO of a major company. Probably bright enough to be a lobbyist. Oh right, CEO's are unique individuals with rare qualities that only their buddy CEO's at the club can recognize and set the compensation for.
So anyway, H1-B visas for lobbyists and CEO's. And tax this wanker's bonus back because lynching is apparently forbidden or something.
On the other hand Lou Dobbs scares me. I dunno, like a xenophobic populist or something.
There was quite a bit of interesting analysis of the American legal system surrounding the Conrad Black case. A nice example is here.
A relevant point is 5) Statute creep.
"One of the ugliest features of American justice is the way that laws designed to address very particular situations are allowed to metastasize and be applied to anything a prosecutor fancies."
The overarching theme is this: in the American justice system, the deck is heavily stacked in favour of the prosecution. This is popular with the voting public because it feels like "tough on crime" but it doesn't necessarily serve justice.
I tried to read the writing on the box and at first I thought I could read HL-33 9/24 which is a type of threaded fastener called a Hi-Lok, -33 is stainless which would make sense to use in carbon but I don't think that's what's in the box. 9/24 is a nonstandard size anyway I don't think it exists.
The writing appears to be dimensions, the boxes are used for ergonomic tests to make sure the various black boxes inside the vehicle can go in and out the doors. This is typical Rutan construction with rounded cutouts to avoid stress concentrations, that works well in carbon construction because theres not much ductility in the material. Mockup fit tests like these are typical and sometimes work better than trying to simulate it in CAD.
There's a QA label at the top, the QA department has measured and labelled the boxes.
Admittedly the box looks like it's being used as a weight at the time the picture was taken. But not for bonding, I seriously doubt any bonding is being done in the assembly jig, or at room temp. On a craft like this the bonding must be done in an oven or autoclave and the bond prep must be done in a clean room which as has been pointed out this facility isn't.
From the look of the structure I believe this may be a non-flying prototype, at least the fuse and wing pods. But for limited production vehicles like this and prototyping shops like Scaled things don't always look high-tech pretty so it my be flight hardware, R&D often looks like this.
Even taking the average of about 1 hydrogen atom per cc, if you had a tube 1 cm in diameter that stretched from here to Alpha Centauri, the total mass inside the tube would be 3e-12 grams.
So yes theres stuff out there, but it wouldn't ruffle your hair if you put the convertible top down on your spaceship.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets see how much of my teenage years I can remember...
1) Drilled out the barrel of a decorative brass cannon, emptied out about 200 firecrakers into it, mashed up a bunch of pellets from the pellet gun, stuck a fuse in it, lit it, ran. There was a large explosion. Never found the cannon.
2) That was so cool, tried to make gunpowder. Could never make that work very well so...
3) Made nitro glycerine. Really bad nitro glycerine, but we did manage to blow up the test tube it was in and miraculously not ourselves.
4) Made a video in the chem lab at high school, pretending to be the Devil by turning on the two bunsen-burner gas outlets on either side of the teachers podium and lit them, cool flames shooting 5 feet into the air on either side with my friend standing between them trying to look devilish.
Etc etc. I mean, come on. Everyone thinks flames and blowing stuff up is cool. I suppose if I was a kid today I'd get sent to a psychologist.
In 1976 my brother and I literally camped in front of the TV for two weeks to watch the Montreal Olympics. It was the most exciting thing I'd ever seen (and I wanted to marry Nadia Comaneci).
Thirty years later I'll admit maybe I've changed more than the Olympics but I can't get into it anymore. It's a forum for political wankery and sports personality market development. Other countries are allowed in for no other reason than to give the US and the other big countries someone to beat. That may seem unkind, but it's the inevitable consequence of the focus on nationalism at the games. Some people say there should be no national identification at the games, and while it'll never happen, it would be better.
The games seem to me now on par with the Academy Awards, an exercise in marketing and self-promotion for political units and soon-to-be millionaire sports personalities. The big countries that host the games brought the concept of self promotion to the games, which inevitably leads to politics which inevitably leads to protests. They brought this on themselves.
Free Tibet!
Yes I do know that...all credit to Frank Whittle and the German fellow whose name escapes me. The American jet engine, I believe, was born when they got their hands on a Whittle in the early 40's and GE essentially copied it.
Still, it would be hard to deny that the great number of experimental jets that the US built in the 50's wasn't the primary impetus behind the growth of the jet. The UK was also doing good things at the same time.
...still no cost-effective launch system.
That will require airline-type operations. That will require higher design margins. That will require higher payload mass ratio. That will require air breathing. That will require SCRAM.
At the end of WWII Boeing was already making modern pressurized semi-monocoque airplanes just like we have today (the B29). All that was needed was the jet engine to create the air transportation system we have now.
We know NASA can make space planes. They lack the engine.
Unfortunately even HRH (His Royal Hairness) Branson doesn't have the checking account to fund the development of one of those. I believe the US government could do it just like they did with the jet engine. Why don't they?
Because of the fear that, were LEO to open up like atmospheric air travel has, then just anybody (read Iran, N. Korea, a wealthy individual) could zip their little spaceships over the continental United States at will, unannounced, any time, with anything on board.
The way things are now, only the big boys get to play astronaut. Why do you think the US recently announced a policy position that would allow them to shoot down anything in space they felt like?
That's flamebait but nonetheless...
It's not as if Java never had any buffer overflows.
As for C/C++, with great power comes great responsibility, either that or for the love of Pete use an std::vector.
...I have been joined in this fight by many fine men and women all across the country, lawyers and defendants alike. We learn from each other, and help and support and get strength from each other.
I would be curious to know what sort of network of support is available to defendants. The tone of the article led me to believe it's almost hopeless:
The RIAA's expert witnesses have been deposed only once so far in these cases.
and:
In the contested cases, the defendants are without the resources needed to challenge the plaintiffs' pleadings...
and especially:
Only a single case in four years, Capitol v. Thomas,11 has ever gone to trial, and that one only because the judge denied the defendant's attorney's motion for leave to withdraw.
z is related to the Seebeck coeff (which tells you how much voltage a given delta-temp gives you in a material), the resistivity and thermal conductivity. It is multiplied by T (the average temp at which the performance is measured) to give a non-dimensional number.
zT doesn't tell you the efficiency because that would depend on the delta T (next para), but it is roughly proportional to it for given operating conditions. zT = 1 materials have efficiency maybe around 5% under best conditions, for zt = 3 you might be around 20%. Notice that if you know S and delta T you know the voltage: you can do some simple circuit calcs with a matched impedance and get the power it will generate. Compare that to the heat energy you get from the delta T and the thermal conductivity and you can get an efficiency, but instead of that lets just throw out some round numbers.
Remember efficiency depends on the delta T due to the 2nd law of thermodyamics. The smaller delta T is the lower the max theoretical efficiency is. If the engine exhaust is at lets say 500F the max efficiency any device could get would be 1 - (492 + 72)/(492 + 500) = 43%. So that would be 78kW of your 180kW for a thermodynamically perfect device.
So if you can get maybe 20% out of thermoelectrics under the best conditions, the low-temp engine exhaust scenario would probably mean you could get at best 10%. So 20kW or so I'd guess. Once you design an actual system it would probably be more like 5 or 10kW.
Ok look, here we have two perfectly fine posts containing perhaps a certain level of snark but for God's sake why must they be modded this way?
/. sensibility that it must be hidden from default readers then holy heck I'll just go ask my grandmother how much she likes big band music, it would have about the same about of bite as this place does nowadays.
We all have our stories about mod kiddies getting power mad but if a thread like this is judged so beyond the pale of
Soon it'll be to the point where the members with the worst karma will be the most interesting and the ones with the best karma will be so boring we'll all want to kill ourselves.
I wasn't aware of the player that is recommended on the nasa.gov site: VLC:
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
I tried it out and it works well for me so I got rid of Quicktime.
I browsed quickly through the site and didn't see any video.
Two of my very favorite things to watch, and I could literally sit and watch them over and over for weeks are the Apollo 11 and 17 landing videos.
NASA has placed online full video libraries for both Apollo 11 and Apollo 17. *
The actual Apollo 11 landing is here (16 minutes).
The actual Apollo 17 landing is here (4 minutes).
The Apollo 17 video will send shivers up and down your spine I guarantee it.
* Most unfortunately, the videos are in Quicktime(tm) format. If you, like me, use Windows, go here to get Quicktime. If you have NoScript, disable it for that page because there is a script that autodetects your OS. Download the most basic player and uncheck all options because Apple tries to install all sorts of incredibly annoying nag- and crap-ware. Also make sure you do not select auto-update because thats another level of nagging to upgrade to a paid service. Finally, use Spybot to disable the Apple updater in your startup list.
Quoting a line from TFA is informative. Hm.
True, he might be a coward, I didn't know him. But I found that comment by the prosecutor to be tawdry. This is a complete tragedy from A to Z and now isn't the time for some bureaucrat to be spouting off his moralizing judgments about someone's character as if life is some lame religion comic book.
But I guess the bureaucrat feels safe because nobody would dare defend Davidson. Surprise, Law & Order flunkie, you don't have to like Davidson to recognize a pandering wannabe hero to the kind of people who need to understand the world by pinning a label (written in crayon) to everything, even if it is a corpse.
Oops that accidentally got modded troll, so there it is again just in case there is someone here who isn't afraid of ideas they don't agree with.
SpamAssassin (+5 Funny)
Too bad it wasn't you and the 4 or 5 people that modded you funny in the car with him. (-1 Troll)
Awww did daddy hurt the poor widdle moderators feelings? Awww poor widdle poopy ur such a cute widdle moderator yes you are!
Too bad it wasn't you and the 4 or 5 people that modded you funny in the car with him.
Celebrating someone killing their family. Fuck you.
I second that.
Quoting a line from TFA is informative. Hm.
True, he might be a coward, I didn't know him. But I found that comment by the prosecutor to be tawdry. This is a complete tragedy from A to Z and now isn't the time for some bureaucrat to be spouting off his moralizing judgments about someone's character as if life is some lame religion comic book.
But I guess the bureaucrat feels safe because nobody would dare defend Davidson. Surprise, Law & Order flunkie, you don't have to like Davidson to recognize a pandering wannabe hero to the kind of people who need to understand the world by pinning a label (written in crayon) to everything, even if it is a corpse.
I know for a fact that red dye #40 makes my toddler into the raging tatrum monster from hell. It's like a damn switch. Thousands upon thousands of parents also know the same thing. Does civilization depend on red dye #40? No. So why do we even bother to allow its continued use? Because we can't live without Fruit Loops?
Contrast that with the epidemic of paediatric brain tumours that doesn't exist which would be predicted by this fella's hypothesis and the explosion of cell use by kids over the past decade.
But no, we have to get our attention-whoring faces on CNN so we go after the sexed up cell phone cancer monster under the bed.
Ef that. Get the effin red dye #40 out of the effin food chain. That actually has a chance to make someone's life better. Which I thought was supposed to be the goal of medicine. But ohhhh no cellphones are just too near & dear to the self image of that dual income dual SUV child-a-phobic couple giving us the rolling eyeballs at the restaurant as the kid runs screaming around and around and around the table, what a treat that was.
Mythbusters used the wrong kind of airframe for testing. It does make a big difference. The flimsy little unpressurized airplane they used was going to break no matter what they fired at it. They did a re-do of that test and concluded frozen was worse.
Part-23 aircraft (little airplanes) have to withstand a 2-lb bird hitting the windscreen at max flap speed. Part-25 aircraft (airliners) have to withstand an 8-lb bird hitting the empennage at cruse speed and a 4-lb bird hitting anywhere else including the wind screen at cruise speed. There is a whole aviation sub-industry devoted to testing and designing for bird impact.
In real life using a frozen chicken is a mistake nobody would ever make. I say this because in the bird impact business it is well known that bird density, a more subtle effect than frozen/thawed, is important. Chickens are more dense than flying birds and create higher peak impact transients. Chicken guns don't fire chickens any more, they fire freshly killed ducks or geese.
Nooo it won't have Sidewinders, it will have a Stinger.
See cuz it's small.
Small right? Like a...
Bug...
Annnnnd...
<spontaneously implodes>
Ah, you see? Now I know!
I must excuse my outburst, someone took the Vodka bottle from my bottom drawer so I had to get by with seven coffees this morning.
Perhaps I'll ask the janitor sleeping under my desk if he knows where the bottle went.
I have a simple question and I must so humbly ask forgiveness for my ignorance but...
WHAT THE FUCK DOES OHNOITSROLAND MEAN FER CHRISSAKE
The broken link if for a pdf download at http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1089&context=globaldocs
If I read this (table A1 p117) the top four employment categories are 1) Manufacturing 2) Retail 3) Health Care and 4) Hotels. Do any of these sound safe from outsourcing? Not to me.
The US invested mightily and fostered the genius it took to create it's amazing economy. India did not, they can do that now if they want. They will catch up eventually, but why on Earth would you help your competition? Maybe it's not about America, maybe it's about greed which, contrary to neo-con oversimplified-theory-so-the-senator-from-Nebraska-can-understand-it isn't always good.
I bet India has some very very bright people. Probably bright enough to be CIO or CEO of a major company. Probably bright enough to be a lobbyist. Oh right, CEO's are unique individuals with rare qualities that only their buddy CEO's at the club can recognize and set the compensation for.
So anyway, H1-B visas for lobbyists and CEO's. And tax this wanker's bonus back because lynching is apparently forbidden or something.
On the other hand Lou Dobbs scares me. I dunno, like a xenophobic populist or something.
There was quite a bit of interesting analysis of the American legal system surrounding the Conrad Black case. A nice example is here.
A relevant point is 5) Statute creep.
"One of the ugliest features of American justice is the way that laws designed to address very particular situations are allowed to metastasize and be applied to anything a prosecutor fancies."
The overarching theme is this: in the American justice system, the deck is heavily stacked in favour of the prosecution. This is popular with the voting public because it feels like "tough on crime" but it doesn't necessarily serve justice.
I tried to read the writing on the box and at first I thought I could read HL-33 9/24 which is a type of threaded fastener called a Hi-Lok, -33 is stainless which would make sense to use in carbon but I don't think that's what's in the box. 9/24 is a nonstandard size anyway I don't think it exists.
The writing appears to be dimensions, the boxes are used for ergonomic tests to make sure the various black boxes inside the vehicle can go in and out the doors. This is typical Rutan construction with rounded cutouts to avoid stress concentrations, that works well in carbon construction because theres not much ductility in the material. Mockup fit tests like these are typical and sometimes work better than trying to simulate it in CAD.
There's a QA label at the top, the QA department has measured and labelled the boxes.
Admittedly the box looks like it's being used as a weight at the time the picture was taken. But not for bonding, I seriously doubt any bonding is being done in the assembly jig, or at room temp. On a craft like this the bonding must be done in an oven or autoclave and the bond prep must be done in a clean room which as has been pointed out this facility isn't.
From the look of the structure I believe this may be a non-flying prototype, at least the fuse and wing pods. But for limited production vehicles like this and prototyping shops like Scaled things don't always look high-tech pretty so it my be flight hardware, R&D often looks like this.
In our neighbourhood it's a a lot less dense than average.
Even taking the average of about 1 hydrogen atom per cc, if you had a tube 1 cm in diameter that stretched from here to Alpha Centauri, the total mass inside the tube would be 3e-12 grams.
So yes theres stuff out there, but it wouldn't ruffle your hair if you put the convertible top down on your spaceship.