The radius block repair involves (extrapolating from the article) 156 strips of aluminum about 1" wide, 10" long and mmm.080" thick. That's about 124 lbs of aluminum added. According to LockMart the Al/Li tank saves 7500 lbs so you are only eating 1.6% of the weight savings.
The NASA fellow mentioned that the problem was fracture toughness, a property not usually checked in quality tests. You can have bad material with high tensile strength and low toughness.
The distinction I see is between free market capitalism and other kinds of capitalism. Obviously (I think?), business is not a natural proponent of competition, it is a natural proponent of profits. And, once established, the most direct way for a business to boost profit is to kill all forms of competition.
Giving business all the tools it needs to shut out competition has been the thrust of the American right since Regan. Deregulation and privileged access to power have given the advantage to the established players. If the right really was interested in the free market, they would be focused on things that can help new companies drive existing companies out of business, not preserve them.
Not to mention their obsession with essentially unproductive and socialist defense spending and strange cultural issues.
If the right really stood for what they say, they would be in favor of incorporation for almost everyone. Face it, most of us do our own retirement funds and insurance nowadays, we are all essentially working for ourselves. It should be official. Why exactly, can Joe Hustler write off his Beamer for driving to work while I can't write off my Toyota? I've never heard a convincing answer to that one.
for YouCut's critical assessment of people who get money and tax breaks to promote an invisible socialist voodoo king who lives in the sky with a plan to imprison billions of people in pits of fire for all of eternity because he loves them.
If your very survival depends on receiving a living wage from a corporation that can simply choose to go away if it is asked to pay for the infrastructure it also uses, then you are not living a "dream" generously provided by altruistic corporations, but in slavery to organizations who can let you starve if they wanted to.
For many years I have not worked directly for a large company, although my industry is dominated by them. I've been working either as a contractor or for small 3rd-tier companies for 15 years. This all started after my engineering R&D job was exported to Ireland in the '80s.
No hard feelings though, things have worked out. The other day I was talking to an old friend of mine who is a vp at mega-corp where I contract now and he good-naturedly called me a bandit. Zing good one, but from my pov I'm just being enterprising. In fact, why does mega-corp get special treatment from various levels of government while tiny outfits like me get treated like pirates (I think that was another word he used) and evil "foreign workers"?
Point is, more and more people are are taking more and more responsibility into their own hands, at what point do those people get credit for being enterprises in their own right, and get compensated for the risk they take on? After all, isn't that what free enterprise is all about? Or is that only for entities that take in more then 8 figures?
If it was up to me we'd be flying around in a 2,000-passenger supersonic oblique flying wing with a pool bar and docking ports for the shuttles that take us up from the airport. But nobody listens.
The 380 is a triumph of industrial synthesis, not aerodynamics. The 787 is similar, though not so triumphant.
Computer aided design (read: CATIA) increases productivity an order of magnitude more than performance. Case in point, instead of physically mocking up all the harnesses for an airplane like the 380, we now do that digitally. But that is just geometric modeling (and kinematic, but not dynamic). And we still get it wrong. The 380's wiring was laid out wrong and that was never caught until someone tried to connect two harnesses that ended a foot apart. Oops. Cost millions to fix.
I agree with you. In fact, you could say we have been making the same airliner over and over since the 707. A tube with swept wings and either two or four engines on the wing. "Revolutionary" means 2% faster or 10% lighter. There is a whole global infrastructure dedicated to making these tubes and wings.
However, I stand by my belief that engineering software is trapped in a time bubble. In 1985 I learned Patran and Nastran. These days I use...Patran and Nastran. Maybe the big shift has been from sol 101 to 106. Patran has the same bugs it did in 1996. And when we do a full scale static test we are just as nervous when the needle gets to 140% as we were back in the day.
And the bible is still Bruhn. Written in the mid '60's.
I need one so I can recalculate my budget spreadsheet in a femtosecond. These nanosecond pauses are getting old.
On a lighter note, so, why isn't this stuff changing our lives? I remember in the late 90's I read a story about how gigaflop computing would revolutionize aeronautics, allowing the full simulation of weird new configurations of aircraft that would be quantum leaps over what we had. Er, have.
Can I answer my own question? I mean, can I answer two of my questions? No, make that three now. Anyway, my perspective is that the kinds of engineers who have the knowledge required to write this kind of software aren't software engineers. In fact, aeronautics is rife with some of the most horrifying software imaginable. Much of it being Excel macros. Seriously. I wrote some of it.
It extracts energy from the potential energy difference between kinetic energy of the atoms in the wind and the atoms on the ground.
I find it easier to think of speed, momentum, and energy flux relative to the moving thing. Call me Eulerian.
If you have a dragless thing moving through a fluid, it will continue to move at the same speed. Now put a device on it to extract energy from the fluid flowing past it. Call it a propeller if you must. A perfectly efficient device will create drag because it extracts kinetic energy from the fluid, thus slowing it down. Unavoidable. The change in momentum of the fluid caused by the energy removal produces a backwards force.
If you have a perfectly efficient energy extractor and a perfectly efficient drive train you can just maintain your speed but not accelerate. Otherwise you would be violating thermodynamics.
So what's the trick? Well, if the fluid flow is at an angle to your direction of travel (due to wind that you aren't headed directly in to or away from) then a component of the energy flux is available to you because when you extract it the resulting unavoidable force is at 90 degrees to your velocity and thus does no work. You get energy but do no work to get it. Magic.
How well you can play that game depends on the efficiency of your propeller (80% on a good day) and your drive train and rolling components. There's no natural law that says whether or not you can go faster than the wind speed.
At first blush you would say if the lift/drag ratio of the sail/wing/apparatus is > 1 (plus a bit for drag) then a wind vehicle can go faster then the absolute flow speed.
The complication is that the range of possible angles of attack you can achieve gets dictated to you by trigonometry. Example, if you are on a beam reach (traveling 90 deg to the prevailing wind) and your speed is equal to the prevailing wind, the apparent flow is rotated 45 deg fwd of abeam. Now, a typical wing might give you an L/D of 20 at something like 10 degres AoA, so you would set your wing (sail) at 55 degrees from abeam. Your lift vector would be 55+90+atan(1/20) ~ 148 degrees from abeam, or 58 degrees off your bow.
Well, that's forward of abeam (90 degrees off the bow), so you have a component of lift pushing forward. It's then just a matter of getting the drag of your superstructure and rolling components down low enough to make that component sufficient to accelerate you just a bit, whereupon you are going faster than the wind.
For a boat, the "rolling components" are another wing in the water (the keel) which imposes more trigonometric limitations that make it tricky but not impossible to achieve this. Normally if it is possible it happens on a broad reach. With rolling vehicles it should be easier.
Most of these amendments have been limited in scope, dealing with only specific provinces, and thus not subject to national debate. None have been subjected to a national referendum.
ref the same wikipedia article. Frankly I didn't know about them, only being aware of the failed Meech and Charlottetown accords which were "real" constitutional amendments as most people understand the term.
I think the GP is right actually. The problematic part of Quebec law is the requirement that French be predominant on all business signs. I can't see that surviving in the US.
Note that the restriction is not on what you can say, it's on the language of business signage. Practically speaking I'm not sure if that means Canada has less free speech that the States.
Given that this was one of only two uses ever of the notwithstanding clause, I don't consider it to be a weakness in the constitution. Think of it more as a shortcut constitutional amendment. Note that notwithstanding overrides expire after five years in order to give voters a chance to express their opinion via a general election it before they are renewed.
The US constitution has...how many amendments? The Canadian Constitution has none, and two uses of the notwithstanding clause. I wouldn't say one is stronger or weaker than the other.
Finally, as clear as the 1st amendment appears to be, we all know you can't say anything you want whenever you want wherever you want. There are limits. The Canadian constitution is explicit about that so when you read them side by side the Canadian text appears wishy-washy, but in effect they are equivalent.
The track is used to accelerate the craft to ramjet speed so it can fly.
Fun fact about rail launchers: to get to LEO speeds, limiting acceleration to 3g's in case you want to carry people, you need a launcher 800 km long. You would probably want the launcher to be inside an evacuated tube to cut down on air resistance and aero heating, but you still might have the problem of exploding once you exit the tube and hit the atmosphere.
This proposal of NASA's is just an flinger to get a ram/scram jet up to ram speeds. You could make a simpler engine that way, you wouldn't have to include turbines to accelerate from a standstill, something ramjets don't do.
There must be a principle out there somewhere that says the universe cannot be accurately simulated by anything smaller than the universe. And if there isn't can I invent it and call it The Principle of Computational Hopelessness?
I find it odd that the decision was based on the fact that Hannah had an "unknown mitochondrial disorder". Is it known that she has *some* mitochondrial disorder, but not specifically what? TFA doesn't say.
But anyway. There is another dynamic at play here. And that is that parents of disabled children have such a hard time getting help. Autism is horrible that way. So, while it's easy to vilify the parents for appearing to abuse the system, they probably feel, with justification, that the system has abused them. Most people in their position just roll over and don't fight; they cope as best they can.
If a society places any particular value on people that chose to have children (and there are reasons to do so), then there has to be some assurance that society, which benefits from children, will commit to meaningful help when things take a turn for the bad. As things stand now, parents can see their entire future slip away if something goes wrong with their kids. If we collectively decide that the risk is completely on parents who chose to have kids then I have to recommend that nobody have kids. You can lose everything.
I'm afraid this falls into the "everyone knows" category. There is zero incentive for anyone official to make such a statement, but if we look at the engines specifically (it's too early in the program for avionics to be selected yet) Embraer is only talking about the V2500 and the CFM56. Neither one is a pure US engine (CFM is 1/2 GE, but the export issues on that engine were settled long ago).
Brasil is developing a C-130-class military transport with no US technology in it specifically to get around ITAR. Scuttlebutt is that Venezuela is the driver but it wouldn't surprise me if most countries are tired of the US sticking their nose in.
Like it wasn't bad enough these poor creatures spend their entire existence as lowly bags of goo. Now they have to spend half their time fleeing from horrific vertebrates that want to squeeze the life-goo right out of them for no discernible reason. Well, not actually fleeing. Trying to flee. Have you ever seen a jellyfish flee? It's sad. Pathetic really. Very slow. You can't even call it fleeing. It's more like moseying. "The jellyfish are moseying for their lives!" See what I mean? Poor things.
The following is based on current estimates, subject to revision etc etc. A 2C average global temperature increase will lead to runaway warming due to permafrost melt and warmer oceans that absorb less CO2. Current emissions will lead to that value occurring around 2030.
To avoid that we would need to start cutting current global emissions by about 2%/year starting next year, down from +3% recent growth. That would make the warming curve top out at less than 2C.
There is no chance a US plan for such reduction will be put in place this year. Maybe by 2015 or so at which time the cuts would have to be more like 5 or 6%/year, down from 3% growth.
No economy can change it's mix of energy use by 9% net a year. So we are going to blow right by the runaway threshold, it's already done.
Slashdot Mirror
Lockheed has championed the closed wing idea for many years. Their concepts usually have 2 engines. Here are other images some dating back to the '80s:
http://aero.stanford.edu/Reports/Nonplanarwings/ClosedSystems.html
http://www.airmailmagazine.com/closed-wing-aircraft-designs (4th picture down)
http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=1986
The radius block repair involves (extrapolating from the article) 156 strips of aluminum about 1" wide, 10" long and mmm .080" thick. That's about 124 lbs of aluminum added. According to LockMart the Al/Li tank saves 7500 lbs so you are only eating 1.6% of the weight savings.
The NASA fellow mentioned that the problem was fracture toughness, a property not usually checked in quality tests. You can have bad material with high tensile strength and low toughness.
Always enjoy your ideas circle.
The distinction I see is between free market capitalism and other kinds of capitalism. Obviously (I think?), business is not a natural proponent of competition, it is a natural proponent of profits. And, once established, the most direct way for a business to boost profit is to kill all forms of competition.
Giving business all the tools it needs to shut out competition has been the thrust of the American right since Regan. Deregulation and privileged access to power have given the advantage to the established players. If the right really was interested in the free market, they would be focused on things that can help new companies drive existing companies out of business, not preserve them.
Not to mention their obsession with essentially unproductive and socialist defense spending and strange cultural issues.
If the right really stood for what they say, they would be in favor of incorporation for almost everyone. Face it, most of us do our own retirement funds and insurance nowadays, we are all essentially working for ourselves. It should be official. Why exactly, can Joe Hustler write off his Beamer for driving to work while I can't write off my Toyota? I've never heard a convincing answer to that one.
for YouCut's critical assessment of people who get money and tax breaks to promote an invisible socialist voodoo king who lives in the sky with a plan to imprison billions of people in pits of fire for all of eternity because he loves them.
barn
For many years I have not worked directly for a large company, although my industry is dominated by them. I've been working either as a contractor or for small 3rd-tier companies for 15 years. This all started after my engineering R&D job was exported to Ireland in the '80s.
No hard feelings though, things have worked out. The other day I was talking to an old friend of mine who is a vp at mega-corp where I contract now and he good-naturedly called me a bandit. Zing good one, but from my pov I'm just being enterprising. In fact, why does mega-corp get special treatment from various levels of government while tiny outfits like me get treated like pirates (I think that was another word he used) and evil "foreign workers"?
Point is, more and more people are are taking more and more responsibility into their own hands, at what point do those people get credit for being enterprises in their own right, and get compensated for the risk they take on? After all, isn't that what free enterprise is all about? Or is that only for entities that take in more then 8 figures?
If it was up to me we'd be flying around in a 2,000-passenger supersonic oblique flying wing with a pool bar and docking ports for the shuttles that take us up from the airport. But nobody listens.
The 380 is a triumph of industrial synthesis, not aerodynamics. The 787 is similar, though not so triumphant.
Computer aided design (read: CATIA) increases productivity an order of magnitude more than performance. Case in point, instead of physically mocking up all the harnesses for an airplane like the 380, we now do that digitally. But that is just geometric modeling (and kinematic, but not dynamic). And we still get it wrong. The 380's wiring was laid out wrong and that was never caught until someone tried to connect two harnesses that ended a foot apart. Oops. Cost millions to fix.
I agree with you. In fact, you could say we have been making the same airliner over and over since the 707. A tube with swept wings and either two or four engines on the wing. "Revolutionary" means 2% faster or 10% lighter. There is a whole global infrastructure dedicated to making these tubes and wings.
However, I stand by my belief that engineering software is trapped in a time bubble. In 1985 I learned Patran and Nastran. These days I use...Patran and Nastran. Maybe the big shift has been from sol 101 to 106. Patran has the same bugs it did in 1996. And when we do a full scale static test we are just as nervous when the needle gets to 140% as we were back in the day.
And the bible is still Bruhn. Written in the mid '60's.
I need one so I can recalculate my budget spreadsheet in a femtosecond. These nanosecond pauses are getting old.
On a lighter note, so, why isn't this stuff changing our lives? I remember in the late 90's I read a story about how gigaflop computing would revolutionize aeronautics, allowing the full simulation of weird new configurations of aircraft that would be quantum leaps over what we had. Er, have.
Can I answer my own question? I mean, can I answer two of my questions? No, make that three now. Anyway, my perspective is that the kinds of engineers who have the knowledge required to write this kind of software aren't software engineers. In fact, aeronautics is rife with some of the most horrifying software imaginable. Much of it being Excel macros. Seriously. I wrote some of it.
I find it easier to think of speed, momentum, and energy flux relative to the moving thing. Call me Eulerian.
If you have a dragless thing moving through a fluid, it will continue to move at the same speed. Now put a device on it to extract energy from the fluid flowing past it. Call it a propeller if you must. A perfectly efficient device will create drag because it extracts kinetic energy from the fluid, thus slowing it down. Unavoidable. The change in momentum of the fluid caused by the energy removal produces a backwards force.
If you have a perfectly efficient energy extractor and a perfectly efficient drive train you can just maintain your speed but not accelerate. Otherwise you would be violating thermodynamics.
So what's the trick? Well, if the fluid flow is at an angle to your direction of travel (due to wind that you aren't headed directly in to or away from) then a component of the energy flux is available to you because when you extract it the resulting unavoidable force is at 90 degrees to your velocity and thus does no work. You get energy but do no work to get it. Magic.
How well you can play that game depends on the efficiency of your propeller (80% on a good day) and your drive train and rolling components. There's no natural law that says whether or not you can go faster than the wind speed.
At first blush you would say if the lift/drag ratio of the sail/wing/apparatus is > 1 (plus a bit for drag) then a wind vehicle can go faster then the absolute flow speed.
The complication is that the range of possible angles of attack you can achieve gets dictated to you by trigonometry. Example, if you are on a beam reach (traveling 90 deg to the prevailing wind) and your speed is equal to the prevailing wind, the apparent flow is rotated 45 deg fwd of abeam. Now, a typical wing might give you an L/D of 20 at something like 10 degres AoA, so you would set your wing (sail) at 55 degrees from abeam. Your lift vector would be 55+90+atan(1/20) ~ 148 degrees from abeam, or 58 degrees off your bow.
Well, that's forward of abeam (90 degrees off the bow), so you have a component of lift pushing forward. It's then just a matter of getting the drag of your superstructure and rolling components down low enough to make that component sufficient to accelerate you just a bit, whereupon you are going faster than the wind.
For a boat, the "rolling components" are another wing in the water (the keel) which imposes more trigonometric limitations that make it tricky but not impossible to achieve this. Normally if it is possible it happens on a broad reach. With rolling vehicles it should be easier.
I don't know why people argue about this.
Let's not forget this gem.
ref the same wikipedia article. Frankly I didn't know about them, only being aware of the failed Meech and Charlottetown accords which were "real" constitutional amendments as most people understand the term.
That's because the Canadian Constitution is a loose collection of written and unwritten law. It's not a single written document.
Um, what? http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/const/Const_index.html
I think the GP is right actually. The problematic part of Quebec law is the requirement that French be predominant on all business signs. I can't see that surviving in the US.
Note that the restriction is not on what you can say, it's on the language of business signage. Practically speaking I'm not sure if that means Canada has less free speech that the States.
Given that this was one of only two uses ever of the notwithstanding clause, I don't consider it to be a weakness in the constitution. Think of it more as a shortcut constitutional amendment. Note that notwithstanding overrides expire after five years in order to give voters a chance to express their opinion via a general election it before they are renewed.
The US constitution has...how many amendments? The Canadian Constitution has none, and two uses of the notwithstanding clause. I wouldn't say one is stronger or weaker than the other.
Finally, as clear as the 1st amendment appears to be, we all know you can't say anything you want whenever you want wherever you want. There are limits. The Canadian constitution is explicit about that so when you read them side by side the Canadian text appears wishy-washy, but in effect they are equivalent.
The rail gun aspect to this is a red herring.
The track is used to accelerate the craft to ramjet speed so it can fly.
Fun fact about rail launchers: to get to LEO speeds, limiting acceleration to 3g's in case you want to carry people, you need a launcher 800 km long. You would probably want the launcher to be inside an evacuated tube to cut down on air resistance and aero heating, but you still might have the problem of exploding once you exit the tube and hit the atmosphere.
This proposal of NASA's is just an flinger to get a ram/scram jet up to ram speeds. You could make a simpler engine that way, you wouldn't have to include turbines to accelerate from a standstill, something ramjets don't do.
There must be a principle out there somewhere that says the universe cannot be accurately simulated by anything smaller than the universe. And if there isn't can I invent it and call it The Principle of Computational Hopelessness?
No story such as this would be complete without pointing out that the Minister of Science and Technology is a creationist.
To the Conservatives, "science" means "whatever we say". No wonder they want to control what actual pesky scientists say.
Will my electric grandma have this?
I find it odd that the decision was based on the fact that Hannah had an "unknown mitochondrial disorder". Is it known that she has *some* mitochondrial disorder, but not specifically what? TFA doesn't say.
But anyway. There is another dynamic at play here. And that is that parents of disabled children have such a hard time getting help. Autism is horrible that way. So, while it's easy to vilify the parents for appearing to abuse the system, they probably feel, with justification, that the system has abused them. Most people in their position just roll over and don't fight; they cope as best they can.
If a society places any particular value on people that chose to have children (and there are reasons to do so), then there has to be some assurance that society, which benefits from children, will commit to meaningful help when things take a turn for the bad. As things stand now, parents can see their entire future slip away if something goes wrong with their kids. If we collectively decide that the risk is completely on parents who chose to have kids then I have to recommend that nobody have kids. You can lose everything.
I'm afraid this falls into the "everyone knows" category. There is zero incentive for anyone official to make such a statement, but if we look at the engines specifically (it's too early in the program for avionics to be selected yet) Embraer is only talking about the V2500 and the CFM56. Neither one is a pure US engine (CFM is 1/2 GE, but the export issues on that engine were settled long ago).
Brasil is developing a C-130-class military transport with no US technology in it specifically to get around ITAR. Scuttlebutt is that Venezuela is the driver but it wouldn't surprise me if most countries are tired of the US sticking their nose in.
It's not easy being bioluminescent.
Like it wasn't bad enough these poor creatures spend their entire existence as lowly bags of goo. Now they have to spend half their time fleeing from horrific vertebrates that want to squeeze the life-goo right out of them for no discernible reason. Well, not actually fleeing. Trying to flee. Have you ever seen a jellyfish flee? It's sad. Pathetic really. Very slow. You can't even call it fleeing. It's more like moseying. "The jellyfish are moseying for their lives!" See what I mean? Poor things.
Perhaps take the safe route and reduce carbon dioxide emissions?
Nice, but it's probably too late already.
The following is based on current estimates, subject to revision etc etc. A 2C average global temperature increase will lead to runaway warming due to permafrost melt and warmer oceans that absorb less CO2. Current emissions will lead to that value occurring around 2030.
To avoid that we would need to start cutting current global emissions by about 2%/year starting next year, down from +3% recent growth. That would make the warming curve top out at less than 2C.
There is no chance a US plan for such reduction will be put in place this year. Maybe by 2015 or so at which time the cuts would have to be more like 5 or 6%/year, down from 3% growth.
No economy can change it's mix of energy use by 9% net a year. So we are going to blow right by the runaway threshold, it's already done.