The working title for "Atlas Shrugged" was "The Strike". Wherein those with talent stopped working for everyone else and went off to live in their own secret utopian enclave. It's elitist enough in it's own right, and I could never understand who actually built all those clever machines the super-geniuses drove/flew/submarined around in. I never really understood why she thought it would work, but then again I'm just a gear-head.
Plus, Rand had big BIG problems ever getting to the point. Why-use-three-words-when-45-thousand-will-do type of thing.
I started in the '80's at a large Canadian aerospace company which a couple of years after I arrived got sold (er, given) to a family of the Canadian Establishment. They promply thereafter exported all the materials R&D work I was doing to Ireland. Then they started playing games trying to lock me into a pension plan, to which I replied screw this, I'll do my own. That didn't go down well.
When I left to become a (much better paid) contractor, my boss took me into his office and told me, "You know, I can't approve of this." Apparently, what bosses really mean when they say they want you to show initiative is "Do what I want even if I don't know what it is, oh and make my life easier and make me look good." Well I know thats true, I'm a boss now too.
The real issue as I have come to know it is not that people are being multitasked like crazy (they are), but that its not easy enough to take that kind of experience and translate it into a startup of your own. Companies want their people to act and think like entrepeneurs, but they don't actually want them to become one, and the governments IMHO help them out with that.
I have noticed reports about this phenomenon before, that the moon's distance from earth is increasing. I assume it's because assymmetric tidal forces are dragging the moon forward.
Assuming that's the case, I did a quick calculation of how large the forward dragging force on the moon would have to be. Assuming I did it right, the force is about 1.31e11 Newtons (roughly 2.94e10 pounds). That compares to the gravitational force between the earth and moon of 1.98e22N, 11 orders of magnitude bigger.
Teller always gets credit for the US fusion bomb, but Stanislaw Ulam is thought my many to deserve it more. Chalk that up to Teller's oversized ego. Here is an interersting article.
A study for the American Physical Society concluded the ABL range against solid fuel ballistic missiles would be about 300km. This is too short to be effective in any of their tactical scenarios because the platform is so valuable it has to stand off a long distance from hostile territory. A range of 600km against liquid fuel missiles would make it useful against North Korea, but probably not Iran.
If you can't see the difference beetween RIM enforcing a valid patent that is used in a real live product, and NTP successfuly enforcing an invalid patent that they never used in anything, then I guess you are unteachable.
But were any of the patents RIM used offensively invalid, as are *all* of NTP's? They have the right to feel hosed, a legal technicality cost them over half a billion dollars. As has been pointed out, RIM must play by the US rules if it wishes to do business there, and it seems leveraging software patents are a fact of life in America, RIM was just playing that game. Were they supposed to forsee paying out that kind of money for patents that *do not exist*? It's positively Kafkayesque.
Here (pdf) are the details of the case up to sept '05. It misses the end-game, most importantly the invalidation of all NTP's relevant patents and the final settlement.
The Saturn V first stage originally had only four engines but as the program went on and the weight grew they needed more lift capacity. As Vau Braun said, there was this space right in the middle of the existing four engines that was just crying out for one more, so they put one there. Interestingly and getting to my point, the central one was not steerable while the other four were. It's just a matter of putting in the minimum amount of hardware to give you the steering authority you need.
I thought the problem on the Soviet N1 was explosive self-disassembly of the oxidizer pumps.
The original Silver Dart; the Buffalo, Beaver, Otter & Twin Otter; the Black Brandt; the Argus; the Dash 7 & 8; the CL-84 tilt wing; the CL215, 215T & 415; the 600/601/604; the GX; the CRJ 200/700/900; the CL41, satellites: the Alouette (1963); the Anik A/B/C/D/E/F; Nimq, Radarsat. Off the top of my head.
...a missile is put basically in a 3 axis gyroscope mount...
The THAAD missile it 20 ft long and weights a ton, putting it in a gymbal would be expensive and pointless because...
...projection screen where RADAR images are being projected...
This is wrong on so many levels. First of all, how does one "project" a radar "image"? Second of all, the THAAD radar is ground-based, not part of the missile. The vehicle is steered to the projected intercept point by commands from the ground. The kill vehicle steers itself to the intercept with an IR seeker.
Maybe the KV hardware test article is gymbal mounted but again, how does one "project" an IR "image" on a "screen"?
...sends a signal to the fins...
THAAD is exoatmospheric. Fins would be useless. It uses vectored thrust.
...A computer program tracks how the missile would have really moved in space...
See now, if you are modeling the dynamics of the vehicle, why bother actually physically moving it? In this case, you aren't testing the vehicle dymanics, you are imposing them, the only purpose of which would be to exersize the seeker mechanisms (of which the missile has none.) Why not simply vary the seeker's simulated target signal (what you call an "image" projected on a "screen" but which is probaby purely electronic)?
IIRC, Perkin-Elmer failed to calibrate the calibration device. The grinding operation was directed by an interferometric gizmo that was adjusted by spacers (fancy talk for "washers"). They had the wrong number of washers.
Every time I talk to a yank they invariably make the joke "We should invade Canada ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha who's going to stop us ha ha ha ha ha ha ha."
It's real funny. I laugh. But anyway if we don't have the water any more to save LA from certain destruction, myabe they won't care so much.
To be ignored by the yanks is bliss.
Now if only we can directly pipeline all our oil to China they'll get off our backs once and for all.
I once submitted a story about how the United States of America once, recently, sent a Canadian Citizen (Maher Arar) to Syria so he could be tortured. It was rejected.
Maybe not everyone knows this...every airplane you ever flew on has cracks
There is a whole branch of structural engineering called damage tolerance which deals with cracks. The certification process for new airplanes deals with it extensively. For example, we must assume that any airplane can have a.050" crack at any location. Such a crack is assumed to grow, and it might get quite long before it must be found. I'm talking inches in length, sometimes.
Of course what I meant was about 70 generations (I just looked it up and the accurate number is about 82). There would be n^81 fissions where n is the average number of neutrons produced per fission that cause other fissions (around 2 in a bomb) and you get about 180 MeV energy released per fission to the environment. 2^81*180 Mev gives about 20 kT.
If you think about it, its not hard to convince yourself a completely accurate numerical simulation of anything requires as many computational elements as there are elements in the real problem, which in this case might be the number of gas molecules in the flow field. Anything less results in discretisation errors unless your field equation (usually a PDE) is completely accurate.
It's getting to the point where F1 spends more money on their zoomy gizmos than most serious engineering companies spend on development. It makes me wonder what the ultimate goal of capitalism really is. One day we'll learn it's really all about rich dudes getting laid and exacting revenge for high school.
More to the point, 75% of what? Maybe what that means is if you invest equal amounts of resources in every discipline on a current-technology car,.75 of the normalized incremental change in the speed around the circut will be due to the investment in aero and.25 will be due to the investment in everything else. I doubt anyone has done such a sensitivity study for real though.
Chernyobl couldn't have become a nuclear bomb no matter what. In a bomb core, you typically get something like 10^70 generations to produce the bang with most of the energy coming form the last 2 or 3. Getting the core to stay together long enough for this to happen is a major challenge.
In a melting reactor even without the control rods, even with enriched U, the material just doesn't stay packed in tightly enough for long enough to explode nuclear-wise. A chemical explosion is another matter.
One of the great insights Neils Bohr had was how the neutron absorption cross-secion of natural U comes to be.
The curve for natural U is continuous with a bump at low (thermal) energies and another bump at high (fast) energies. Bohr figured out this was caused by two isotopes, one that absorbs neutrons only at thermal and fast (> 1MeV) energies (U238), and another that absorbs all neutrons (U235).
U238 does not fission when it absorbs the thermal neutrons, only when it absorbs fast neutrons. U235 will fission when it absorbs any neutron (due to some strange dynamics caused by an odd number of nucleons -- note Pu239 is also odd.) 235 absorbs better at lower energies.
Neutrons released by U fission are mostly in the thermal absorption range of U238, so a chain cannot occur in natural uranium: too many neutrons get absorbed to sustain the reaction and it has no critical mass.
In pure U235, all neutrons released can cause other fissions, it has a critical mass.
Reactor fission is accomplished by using a moderator to slow enough neutrons out of the U238 absorpion range so they can fission the U235. US PWR reactors use water (the H in the H20) as a moderator. H actually absorbs some of the neutrons so a sustained reaction won't occur unless the percentage of 235 is increased (enrichment). CANDU reactors that use the D in D20 leave more neutrons in play so no enrichment is needed.
Of possible interest, D/T fission releases 15 MeV (!) neutrons, in some fission bombs these are used to fission natural U (the so-called fission/fusion/fission reaction). In the Mike shot (10.5 MT), most of the energy came from the U shell, not the fission part of the bomb.
Burt Rutan has done very interesting things over the years, but none of it (so far as I know) has met with large scale economic success.
I think of the Beech Starship, which despite being right down the middle of Burt's canard/composite paradigm didn't sell and was cancelled. The performance simply wasn't the leap forward that people hoped for. I also couldn't help but notice White Knight isn't a canard (neither is the Global Flyer)...a decade ago Burt had a lot of people convinced canards were a quantum leap in efficiency.
Burt's a clever designer, but I'm not convinced he's particularly smart about economics or practicality.
I also have to agree with the parent about SS1..by my rough calculations it develops about 2 or 3 percent of the energy required to reach orbit. Getting up there is actually the easy part. The real barrier is spooling it up to 5 miles a second. If Burt knows of a propulsion system available today that will allow for airline type operations to orbit then he knows something nobody else does.
Take a regular 12" ruler preferably one of those wooden ones or stiff plastic. Hold it on the long edges between your thumb and middle finger (I mean, your thumb on the 6" mark and your index finger on the 15cm mark). Heave it into the air at about 45 degs (up not down), trying to give it some backspin.
With any luck it will fly around a bit, swoopishly. The circulation caused by the back-spin generates lift, same as airfoil-shape induced circulation (faster airflow on top, slower on the bottom) as per that well known Kutta-Joukowski formula s * b * mu * gamma.
Which is apropos of nothing. Also, the Navier-Stokes equations can't be solved around a singularity like the edge without a simplification which usually takes the form of an assumed boundary layer of some sort (probably laminar at these Reynolds numbers which makes it a lot easier). Also, N-S is initial-condition sensitive because the solutions have bad scale missmatch, so you'll want to use your duodecaduple precision math library.
I didn't really understand from the blurb if they were talking about bendy things like paper pages. That would make it a fluid-structural coupled problem. Very tricky. The hardest part of that is getting the fluids guys to return the structures guys' phone calls.
Just a thought, but what happens if one of these robot probes finds life on Mars? I don't think we will be able to go after that, due to the moral aspects of interfering with another life-forms destiny. Even if its bacteria.
In fact, shouldn't man prohibit all travel there until its clear beyond a doubt that there is no life?
Large wind turbines will never work in the U.S. They'll get shot to pieces.
Boeing makes airliner wings in the midwest and ships them to the coast on flatbed railcars. They used to be uncovered, but too many were arriving with bullet holes. They now ship them in covered cars.
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The working title for "Atlas Shrugged" was "The Strike". Wherein those with talent stopped working for everyone else and went off to live in their own secret utopian enclave. It's elitist enough in it's own right, and I could never understand who actually built all those clever machines the super-geniuses drove/flew/submarined around in. I never really understood why she thought it would work, but then again I'm just a gear-head.
Plus, Rand had big BIG problems ever getting to the point. Why-use-three-words-when-45-thousand-will-do type of thing.
I started in the '80's at a large Canadian aerospace company which a couple of years after I arrived got sold (er, given) to a family of the Canadian Establishment. They promply thereafter exported all the materials R&D work I was doing to Ireland. Then they started playing games trying to lock me into a pension plan, to which I replied screw this, I'll do my own. That didn't go down well.
When I left to become a (much better paid) contractor, my boss took me into his office and told me, "You know, I can't approve of this." Apparently, what bosses really mean when they say they want you to show initiative is "Do what I want even if I don't know what it is, oh and make my life easier and make me look good." Well I know thats true, I'm a boss now too.
The real issue as I have come to know it is not that people are being multitasked like crazy (they are), but that its not easy enough to take that kind of experience and translate it into a startup of your own. Companies want their people to act and think like entrepeneurs, but they don't actually want them to become one, and the governments IMHO help them out with that.
Assuming that's the case, I did a quick calculation of how large the forward dragging force on the moon would have to be. Assuming I did it right, the force is about 1.31e11 Newtons (roughly 2.94e10 pounds). That compares to the gravitational force between the earth and moon of 1.98e22N, 11 orders of magnitude bigger.
The STM uses a stylus with a single-atom tip and is about a decade old. IIRC it's a carbon atom.
Teller always gets credit for the US fusion bomb, but Stanislaw Ulam is thought my many to deserve it more. Chalk that up to Teller's oversized ego. Here is an interersting article.
A study for the American Physical Society concluded the ABL range against solid fuel ballistic missiles would be about 300km. This is too short to be effective in any of their tactical scenarios because the platform is so valuable it has to stand off a long distance from hostile territory. A range of 600km against liquid fuel missiles would make it useful against North Korea, but probably not Iran.
If you can't see the difference beetween RIM enforcing a valid patent that is used in a real live product, and NTP successfuly enforcing an invalid patent that they never used in anything, then I guess you are unteachable.
But were any of the patents RIM used offensively invalid, as are *all* of NTP's? They have the right to feel hosed, a legal technicality cost them over half a billion dollars.
As has been pointed out, RIM must play by the US rules if it wishes to do business there, and it seems leveraging software patents are a fact of life in America, RIM was just playing that game. Were they supposed to forsee paying out that kind of money for patents that *do not exist*? It's positively Kafkayesque.
Here (pdf) are the details of the case up to sept '05. It misses the end-game, most importantly the invalidation of all NTP's relevant patents and the final settlement.
I thought the problem on the Soviet N1 was explosive self-disassembly of the oxidizer pumps.
The original Silver Dart; the Buffalo, Beaver, Otter & Twin Otter; the Black Brandt; the Argus; the Dash 7 & 8; the CL-84 tilt wing; the CL215, 215T & 415; the 600/601/604; the GX; the CRJ 200/700/900; the CL41, satellites: the Alouette (1963); the Anik A/B/C/D/E/F; Nimq, Radarsat. Off the top of my head.
Maybe the KV hardware test article is gymbal mounted but again, how does one "project" an IR "image" on a "screen"?
THAAD is exoatmospheric. Fins would be useless. It uses vectored thrust.
See now, if you are modeling the dynamics of the vehicle, why bother actually physically moving it? In this case, you aren't testing the vehicle dymanics, you are imposing them, the only purpose of which would be to exersize the seeker mechanisms (of which the missile has none.) Why not simply vary the seeker's simulated target signal (what you call an "image" projected on a "screen" but which is probaby purely electronic)?Modded +5. Lordy.
IIRC, Perkin-Elmer failed to calibrate the calibration device. The grinding operation was directed by an interferometric gizmo that was adjusted by spacers (fancy talk for "washers"). They had the wrong number of washers.
Science (H) never (u) forgets (b) to (b) calibrate (l) stuff (e).
It's real funny. I laugh. But anyway if we don't have the water any more to save LA from certain destruction, myabe they won't care so much.
To be ignored by the yanks is bliss.
Now if only we can directly pipeline all our oil to China they'll get off our backs once and for all.
Apparently this is more important.
There is a whole branch of structural engineering called damage tolerance which deals with cracks. The certification process for new airplanes deals with it extensively. For example, we must assume that any airplane can have a .050" crack at any location. Such a crack is assumed to grow, and it might get quite long before it must be found. I'm talking inches in length, sometimes.
Of course what I meant was about 70 generations (I just looked it up and the accurate number is about 82). There would be n^81 fissions where n is the average number of neutrons produced per fission that cause other fissions (around 2 in a bomb) and you get about 180 MeV energy released per fission to the environment. 2^81*180 Mev gives about 20 kT.
It's getting to the point where F1 spends more money on their zoomy gizmos than most serious engineering companies spend on development. It makes me wonder what the ultimate goal of capitalism really is. One day we'll learn it's really all about rich dudes getting laid and exacting revenge for high school.
More to the point, 75% of what? Maybe what that means is if you invest equal amounts of resources in every discipline on a current-technology car, .75 of the normalized incremental change in the speed around the circut will be due to the investment in aero and .25 will be due to the investment in everything else. I doubt anyone has done such a sensitivity study for real though.
In a melting reactor even without the control rods, even with enriched U, the material just doesn't stay packed in tightly enough for long enough to explode nuclear-wise. A chemical explosion is another matter.
The curve for natural U is continuous with a bump at low (thermal) energies and another bump at high (fast) energies. Bohr figured out this was caused by two isotopes, one that absorbs neutrons only at thermal and fast (> 1MeV) energies (U238), and another that absorbs all neutrons (U235).
U238 does not fission when it absorbs the thermal neutrons, only when it absorbs fast neutrons. U235 will fission when it absorbs any neutron (due to some strange dynamics caused by an odd number of nucleons -- note Pu239 is also odd.) 235 absorbs better at lower energies.
Neutrons released by U fission are mostly in the thermal absorption range of U238, so a chain cannot occur in natural uranium: too many neutrons get absorbed to sustain the reaction and it has no critical mass.
In pure U235, all neutrons released can cause other fissions, it has a critical mass.
Reactor fission is accomplished by using a moderator to slow enough neutrons out of the U238 absorpion range so they can fission the U235. US PWR reactors use water (the H in the H20) as a moderator. H actually absorbs some of the neutrons so a sustained reaction won't occur unless the percentage of 235 is increased (enrichment). CANDU reactors that use the D in D20 leave more neutrons in play so no enrichment is needed.
Of possible interest, D/T fission releases 15 MeV (!) neutrons, in some fission bombs these are used to fission natural U (the so-called fission/fusion/fission reaction). In the Mike shot (10.5 MT), most of the energy came from the U shell, not the fission part of the bomb.
I think of the Beech Starship, which despite being right down the middle of Burt's canard/composite paradigm didn't sell and was cancelled. The performance simply wasn't the leap forward that people hoped for. I also couldn't help but notice White Knight isn't a canard (neither is the Global Flyer)...a decade ago Burt had a lot of people convinced canards were a quantum leap in efficiency.
Burt's a clever designer, but I'm not convinced he's particularly smart about economics or practicality.
I also have to agree with the parent about SS1..by my rough calculations it develops about 2 or 3 percent of the energy required to reach orbit. Getting up there is actually the easy part. The real barrier is spooling it up to 5 miles a second. If Burt knows of a propulsion system available today that will allow for airline type operations to orbit then he knows something nobody else does.
With any luck it will fly around a bit, swoopishly. The circulation caused by the back-spin generates lift, same as airfoil-shape induced circulation (faster airflow on top, slower on the bottom) as per that well known Kutta-Joukowski formula s * b * mu * gamma.
Which is apropos of nothing. Also, the Navier-Stokes equations can't be solved around a singularity like the edge without a simplification which usually takes the form of an assumed boundary layer of some sort (probably laminar at these Reynolds numbers which makes it a lot easier). Also, N-S is initial-condition sensitive because the solutions have bad scale missmatch, so you'll want to use your duodecaduple precision math library.
I didn't really understand from the blurb if they were talking about bendy things like paper pages. That would make it a fluid-structural coupled problem. Very tricky. The hardest part of that is getting the fluids guys to return the structures guys' phone calls.
In fact, shouldn't man prohibit all travel there until its clear beyond a doubt that there is no life?
Large wind turbines will never work in the U.S. They'll get shot to pieces.
Boeing makes airliner wings in the midwest and ships them to the coast on flatbed railcars. They used to be uncovered, but too many were arriving with bullet holes. They now ship them in covered cars.