Anyone with just a regular old consumer grade digital camera and a tripod can do the same (shorter exposure later that summer).
What, take a picture of Space Rods? Galileo couldn't do that! He didn't have the advanced technology of cheapo digital cameras to see these amazing creatures. Now found even in space!
Or maybe he could, but despite the myths was actually just a tool of the establishment, covering up the TRUTH!
Or that the idea that we're all infected by "body thetans" who give us mental diseases is "uncommon", when all the Scientologists (I don't know how many there are) believe this.
Actually I wonder how many of them haven't reached a high enough level to know that they believe that. OT III was a pretty high level I thought, now that I think of it I have no idea if that is the first time "body thetans" are mentioned as the thing the audits are supposedly purging.
In fact, back when lasers were first invented, people referred to them as "a solution looking for a problem". They were so cool, but for a while nobody could think of anything useful to do with them.
Silly folks.
"Insufficient awesome" is the problem, and lasers are the answer.
I hope you aren't also the kind of smart guy who complains when the researcher says their discovery might help find a cure for cancer, even when that's highly speculative at best. Otherwise what are the supposed to say?
A number of the patches incorporate the idea of stars representing lost crew members, but I agree #3 is the best overall. The clean design is very appealing, and I like them showing all five shuttles*. #8 is flashy, but not in a meaningful way -- the shape is supposed to evoke a fine diamond or jewel? Who cares? #10 has a nice concept, the shuttle returning home, with stars showing missions and other stars showing lost astronauts. But the space field is too cluttered with random stuff yet would look too empty without it.
I vote #3. Uh, NASA is reading/. comments right?
* That flew. But seriously, who cares about Enterprise?
But to claim that they could completely replace the Blackbird is a bit much. Spy sats all follow known orbits. It is possible to compute those orbits and avoid/hide from spy sats. Both sides of the cold war did that a lot, which is part of the reason why the U2 and Blackbird were so useful.
Indeed, thanks for saying that so I didn't have to. Being able to put a camera over something whenever you want is a big advantage for spy planes.
But I'm sure there have been cases since its retirement where government or military leaders sat back and went "if only we still had a Blackbird".
Eh I'm not so sure. What would that be?
And on that note, the U-2 is still in active use (they call it the TR-1 now). So one of the ironies there is that the U-2 outlasted its replacement.. by a lot. If anything, it shows that there's still use for long range human recon planes (compared to spy sats). Though I guess UAVs are gonna completely take over that role soon enough.
Well yeah. The reason we built the SR-71 in the first place was so that we could fly over a country with sophisticated anti-aircraft defenses and have it not be shot down (like happened to the U-2). Once the cold war was over, suddenly all the places we were interested in were places where even a U-2 is essentially invulnerable. So why send a plane that is as impressive in its expense and wastefulness as it is in performance?
UAVs are pretty much already the "eye in the sky" of choice. They're a lot better in many respects. For one, they're cheaper so if they do get shot down it's not as big a deal, and there's no pilot for them to parade around on video. For two, they have vastly superior loiter capability to previous spy planes.
If we ever get in a scuffle with Russia or China or something, we may want something with SR-71-like capabilities, but that's no reason to keep the project alive for however many decades or fund a speculative replacement. In a pinch, I'm sure something like the JSF is flexible enough to be made into a spy plane.
The REAL problem that virtually nobody tackles here is that games are now developed in 30fps because they must render in high-def resolutions. When you're trying to crank out 1080p with high dynamic range and AA and etc, you've got to trim the fat somewhere, and that somewhere is pretty universally framerate.
You must be talking about consoles. PC games have been rendering in "high def" resolutions for years without being limited to 30fps. If current gen consoles can't handle more, then the solution is simply more horsepower and it will likely be solved in the next generation.
Any problem whose solution is "wait one Moore's Law generation" doesn't seem like a particularly tricky one.
The combination of "hardly enough energy to bother with, once you've averaged it out over the year" and "peak energy high and fast enough to blow a hole through anything not specifically engineered to take it" just isn't very exciting...
You know, I've never thought of how a bolt of lightning is simultaneously bad-ass and yet too meager to be useful before your post. Huh.
"Heating the air within the wall using a temporary heat source such as steam starts the vortex. The heat required to sustain the vortex once established can be the natural heat content of warm humid air or can be provided in cooling towers located outside of the cylindrical wall and upstream of the deflectors."
And where does the energy come from for the steam, or for the cooling tower? Yes you can get mechanical energy from convection, that only happens when there's a temperature differential. Where is the energy to create this temperature differential coming from?
That's the point of the greenhouse in the solar tower -- it traps the solar energy to heat the air and create the differential to create convection currents significant enough to generate useful power. That's where the energy comes from. Where does the energy come from to boil the water or cycle it in the cooling towers? That's the input to the system.
If the design assumes a source of steam, why not use the steam to push a turbine directly? That's how most fuels are turned into electricity.
Oh and the other thing I noticed was missing: the place where this kinetic energy was converted to electrical. That's again why the solar tower's operation is obvious -- the turbine goes in the tower where the highest winds are. I wasn't sure but maybe the design showed the generators in the inlet ducts of the vortex generator? Seems suboptimal. Or maybe it just seems that way because that means the entire vortex represents nothing but waste energy. But all the energy in the water gushing through a hydro plant is also waste so...
The heat comes into the system as sunlight heating bodies of water and causing evaporation
So, you have to build this thing near/over a lake?
I guess based on the original "why don't they..." premise I'm still thinking of this being built in Arizona, where "moist" is not a word I would use to describe the atmosphere.
Sounds very cool and plausible in theory, but does it actually work?
Yeah, I haven't heard anything yet that sounds like some kind of perpetual motion machine type of crack-pottery, I'm just missing some details on what energy source it's actually using and how it converts it into electricity.
I believe the universe had no beginning, will have no end, and either way it doesn't matter because the entire span of my life is so short I'll never know either way.
And you know what? If all you had said is that you have this belief, then I wouldn't have taken issue with your post at all. I have beliefs too. You can have a good, rational discussion about beliefs as long as you acknowledge them as such. Beliefs aren't evidence, though, which is where philosophy diverges from science even though the latter is based in the former.
The point was and is, just as when the Catholic Church was considered the guardian of all knowledge, (at least in Europe,) and an observation was made which pointed out that one of their stances was incorrect, (by being in direct contravention to what was observed,) they resisted, tormented those who disagreed, but ultimately had to revise their position when it became obvious they were wrong; so it is today.
And my counter point is that if the Church was Science, Copernicus and Galileo would have been heralded as heroes and revolutionaries because they had extensive and convincing evidence to support the heliocentric theory. Did you not read my post? The Big Bang Theory was such a revolution. It was not the favored theory, and only became so because of it's ridiculous success at making predictions that were later shown to be true! The reason physicists resist contention to such a theory is because there is so much evidence behind it, that it would take a great deal of truly surprising evidence to overturn it. But if you have a theory which produces such evidence, then your name will go down in history along with similar revolutionaries like Einstein, Heisenberg, Faraday, Young, etc.
Someone like me points out a theory has a problem, but that theory is so entrenched in the minds of its adherents that people try to shout him down, rather than listen, or instead make patronizing remarks.
Oh, and "those silly scientists, they don't understand infinity, or things without a beginning!" or "Big Bang Theory is just an appeal to authority", both of which are demonstrably untrue, isn't patronizing? Please! I'm patronizing you because you think that not understanding physics is a solid basis for insulting the intelligence and integrity of physicists everywhere. That deserves a patronizing tone.
The nice thing about science though, is that eventually, observation TRUMPS hypothesis, no matter how dearly cherished, so I don't really need to argue this point, I can simply wait.
And exactly WHAT observation leads you to believe that you're right? Oh, right, you're just sitting on your ass and waiting. You're not making any observations. You have no evidence for your theory. All the actual observational evidence points towards the Big Bang Theory being correct. You're just imagining and wishing that future observations will prove you right. Now who exactly is operating based on belief and dogma here?
Science is willing to accept that Big Bang Theory is wrong as long as compelling evidence comes along. Is your Church of the Ego willing to similarly accept this possibility? Or are you going to be sitting around your hole life, assuming you'll eventually be proven right?
You keep saying "observation triumphs", so you seem to be blissfully unaware of how observation has verified the current theory. If you really believed what you say, wouldn't that interest you?
Oh, and then there's the CMB. Interestingly enough, if that's radiant energy from the supposed "Bang", how exactly did the Earth get IN FRONT OF IT, for our radio-telescopes to be in position to intercept it? We'd have to be IN FRONT of the expanding sphere, or on the surface of the light-cone, as it were, to see it. This would require the matter which would one day become the Earth, to have travelled FASTER than light, wouldn't it?
Hehe. See, you don't even understand the CMB well enough to realize what's truly mind-boggling about it. It's not just that we can see this remnant of the Big Bang, it's that we see it roughly uniformly in all directions. So we aren't "in front of the expanding sphere", because then we'd see the CMB from only one direction and at once instant. Instead we're INSIDE the sphere in which the Big Bang took place, and the CMB emanated from all points in space and we're seeing the far reaches of it.
See, the Big Bang was not an explosion in space, it was an explosion of space.
And where are the "Climate Change" people on this one. Oh wait, there are no carbon emissions/pollution, just dumping lots of hot air.
Yes, and therefore it's insignificant to climate change, which is why we're cool with it. Really. The amount of heat humans produce is insignificant. It's greenhouse gasses that trap more of the solar radiation that are the problem.
Oh, sorry, I'm supposed to think that anything that changes the environment at all is equally bad. Us environmentalists aren't supposed to think about the actual magnitude or consequences. My bad!
Basically yes, it starts oxidizing right away and releases energy in the process. Burning aluminum is just really fast oxidation.
You're right that combustion is just an oxidation reaction, you're totally wrong that all aluminum is burning. The outside layer that's exposed to air oxidizes immediately. That layer of aluminum oxide then protects all the lower layers from oxidation. That's why aluminum is generally considered rust-proof, that's why all the things around you that are made of aluminum aren't collapsing, and it's why when you want your aluminum to oxidize, like these guys, you have to make a special alloy to ensure that it happens.
And then there's plastics, and plenty of other stable chemicals who have energy stored inside them.
No, the vast majority of electricity use ends up as waste heat pretty quickly, electronics, lighting,motors, heating (obviously), cooling etc.
Yes like I said most is lost as waste heat. However you said it's all lost, and that's simply not true unless you're talking time scales beyond the lifetime of our planet. And in some cases, like aluminum production, most is lost as heat, but a quite significant 36% is actually going into the aluminum.
A mile up, you would be lucky to find air that is 60F and 10% RH, which would be about 13.25 cubic feet per lb dry air +8 grains. If you fully saturate it by evaporating water, you only end up with 53F air and you have added 52 grains of water...
Well don't leave me hanging... what's the density of the humidified air?
Sorry, no. The energy source in a tornado is the updraft along the whole column. Once a vortex is started, it would store energy in its updraft and could easily rip off the base and start wandering around, leaving a trail of destruction, even if the energy would finally dissipate.
No, the temperature differential is the energy source. The updraft is how that energy is transfered. And once energy was no longer being supplied, then the energy in the tornado would immediately begin to decrease. As the remaining energy was transfered higher into the atmosphere, there would be less energy near the ground. Tornadoes are not self-sustaining.
Uh you're talking about the solar updraft tower, which makes perfect sense to me. I was talking about the vortex engine the OP linked to, and on which I didn't see any obvious energy input mechanism. It just says "warm water".
Yes. Is all aluminum burning? No. Then is the supposition that all electrical devices release all their energy as waste heat true? No. Some of it can be stored for essentially arbitrary periods of time (the fact that aluminum burns being the big hint that reversing the process involves putting energy in). Eventually everything is heat. But only for definitions of "eventually" that have nothing to do with the original question of net heat in the atmosphere.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone with just a regular old consumer grade digital camera and a tripod can do the same (shorter exposure later that summer).
What, take a picture of Space Rods? Galileo couldn't do that! He didn't have the advanced technology of cheapo digital cameras to see these amazing creatures. Now found even in space!
Or maybe he could, but despite the myths was actually just a tool of the establishment, covering up the TRUTH!
In the event that you are or ever become married, you'll probably want to rethink your position regarding anniversaries.
What is someone was missing from an elbow down? Would the system see that as someone with it pointing directly at the device?
No, it would correctly detect it, but would make snickering noises, and automatically name that player's avatars "Lefty", and so forth.
You heard it here first: Natal is a jerk.
Or that the idea that we're all infected by "body thetans" who give us mental diseases is "uncommon", when all the Scientologists (I don't know how many there are) believe this.
Actually I wonder how many of them haven't reached a high enough level to know that they believe that. OT III was a pretty high level I thought, now that I think of it I have no idea if that is the first time "body thetans" are mentioned as the thing the audits are supposedly purging.
It involves pigeons, doesn't it?
So it doesn't matter if someone captures the initial handshake.
It matters if they can break the public key encryption, and thus discover the shared private key.
In fact, back when lasers were first invented, people referred to them as "a solution looking for a problem". They were so cool, but for a while nobody could think of anything useful to do with them.
Silly folks.
"Insufficient awesome" is the problem, and lasers are the answer.
Frankly, I think that they would do a lot better if they started out with a pork roast.
Well then you'd start another holy war over whether or not it's sacrilegious to smother the Host in barbecue sauce.
I hope you aren't also the kind of smart guy who complains when the researcher says their discovery might help find a cure for cancer, even when that's highly speculative at best. Otherwise what are the supposed to say?
A number of the patches incorporate the idea of stars representing lost crew members, but I agree #3 is the best overall. The clean design is very appealing, and I like them showing all five shuttles*. #8 is flashy, but not in a meaningful way -- the shape is supposed to evoke a fine diamond or jewel? Who cares? #10 has a nice concept, the shuttle returning home, with stars showing missions and other stars showing lost astronauts. But the space field is too cluttered with random stuff yet would look too empty without it.
I vote #3. Uh, NASA is reading /. comments right?
* That flew. But seriously, who cares about Enterprise?
Nobody wants to see a space truck until they need a delivery.
You know how it is.
You get a space truck, and suddenly everyone wants your help moving their space sofas to their new space apartment.
But to claim that they could completely replace the Blackbird is a bit much. Spy sats all follow known orbits. It is possible to compute those orbits and avoid/hide from spy sats. Both sides of the cold war did that a lot, which is part of the reason why the U2 and Blackbird were so useful.
Indeed, thanks for saying that so I didn't have to. Being able to put a camera over something whenever you want is a big advantage for spy planes.
But I'm sure there have been cases since its retirement where government or military leaders sat back and went "if only we still had a Blackbird".
Eh I'm not so sure. What would that be?
And on that note, the U-2 is still in active use (they call it the TR-1 now). So one of the ironies there is that the U-2 outlasted its replacement.. by a lot. If anything, it shows that there's still use for long range human recon planes (compared to spy sats). Though I guess UAVs are gonna completely take over that role soon enough.
Well yeah. The reason we built the SR-71 in the first place was so that we could fly over a country with sophisticated anti-aircraft defenses and have it not be shot down (like happened to the U-2). Once the cold war was over, suddenly all the places we were interested in were places where even a U-2 is essentially invulnerable. So why send a plane that is as impressive in its expense and wastefulness as it is in performance?
UAVs are pretty much already the "eye in the sky" of choice. They're a lot better in many respects. For one, they're cheaper so if they do get shot down it's not as big a deal, and there's no pilot for them to parade around on video. For two, they have vastly superior loiter capability to previous spy planes.
If we ever get in a scuffle with Russia or China or something, we may want something with SR-71-like capabilities, but that's no reason to keep the project alive for however many decades or fund a speculative replacement. In a pinch, I'm sure something like the JSF is flexible enough to be made into a spy plane.
So then you're relying on the temperature difference between normal, unheated air and the top of the vortex.
Doesn't sound like a massive source of energy.
I like the greenhouse better.
The REAL problem that virtually nobody tackles here is that games are now developed in 30fps because they must render in high-def resolutions. When you're trying to crank out 1080p with high dynamic range and AA and etc, you've got to trim the fat somewhere, and that somewhere is pretty universally framerate.
You must be talking about consoles. PC games have been rendering in "high def" resolutions for years without being limited to 30fps. If current gen consoles can't handle more, then the solution is simply more horsepower and it will likely be solved in the next generation.
Any problem whose solution is "wait one Moore's Law generation" doesn't seem like a particularly tricky one.
The combination of "hardly enough energy to bother with, once you've averaged it out over the year" and "peak energy high and fast enough to blow a hole through anything not specifically engineered to take it" just isn't very exciting...
You know, I've never thought of how a bolt of lightning is simultaneously bad-ass and yet too meager to be useful before your post. Huh.
"Heating the air within the wall using a temporary heat source such as steam starts the vortex. The heat required to sustain the vortex once established can be the natural heat content of warm humid air or can be provided in cooling towers located outside of the cylindrical wall and upstream of the deflectors."
And where does the energy come from for the steam, or for the cooling tower? Yes you can get mechanical energy from convection, that only happens when there's a temperature differential. Where is the energy to create this temperature differential coming from?
That's the point of the greenhouse in the solar tower -- it traps the solar energy to heat the air and create the differential to create convection currents significant enough to generate useful power. That's where the energy comes from. Where does the energy come from to boil the water or cycle it in the cooling towers? That's the input to the system.
If the design assumes a source of steam, why not use the steam to push a turbine directly? That's how most fuels are turned into electricity.
Oh and the other thing I noticed was missing: the place where this kinetic energy was converted to electrical. That's again why the solar tower's operation is obvious -- the turbine goes in the tower where the highest winds are. I wasn't sure but maybe the design showed the generators in the inlet ducts of the vortex generator? Seems suboptimal. Or maybe it just seems that way because that means the entire vortex represents nothing but waste energy. But all the energy in the water gushing through a hydro plant is also waste so...
The heat comes into the system as sunlight heating bodies of water and causing evaporation
So, you have to build this thing near/over a lake?
I guess based on the original "why don't they..." premise I'm still thinking of this being built in Arizona, where "moist" is not a word I would use to describe the atmosphere.
Sounds very cool and plausible in theory, but does it actually work?
Yeah, I haven't heard anything yet that sounds like some kind of perpetual motion machine type of crack-pottery, I'm just missing some details on what energy source it's actually using and how it converts it into electricity.
I believe the universe had no beginning, will have no end, and either way it doesn't matter because the entire span of my life is so short I'll never know either way.
And you know what? If all you had said is that you have this belief, then I wouldn't have taken issue with your post at all. I have beliefs too. You can have a good, rational discussion about beliefs as long as you acknowledge them as such. Beliefs aren't evidence, though, which is where philosophy diverges from science even though the latter is based in the former.
The point was and is, just as when the Catholic Church was considered the guardian of all knowledge, (at least in Europe,) and an observation was made which pointed out that one of their stances was incorrect, (by being in direct contravention to what was observed,) they resisted, tormented those who disagreed, but ultimately had to revise their position when it became obvious they were wrong; so it is today.
And my counter point is that if the Church was Science, Copernicus and Galileo would have been heralded as heroes and revolutionaries because they had extensive and convincing evidence to support the heliocentric theory. Did you not read my post? The Big Bang Theory was such a revolution. It was not the favored theory, and only became so because of it's ridiculous success at making predictions that were later shown to be true! The reason physicists resist contention to such a theory is because there is so much evidence behind it, that it would take a great deal of truly surprising evidence to overturn it. But if you have a theory which produces such evidence, then your name will go down in history along with similar revolutionaries like Einstein, Heisenberg, Faraday, Young, etc.
Someone like me points out a theory has a problem, but that theory is so entrenched in the minds of its adherents that people try to shout him down, rather than listen, or instead make patronizing remarks.
Oh, and "those silly scientists, they don't understand infinity, or things without a beginning!" or "Big Bang Theory is just an appeal to authority", both of which are demonstrably untrue, isn't patronizing? Please! I'm patronizing you because you think that not understanding physics is a solid basis for insulting the intelligence and integrity of physicists everywhere. That deserves a patronizing tone.
The nice thing about science though, is that eventually, observation TRUMPS hypothesis, no matter how dearly cherished, so I don't really need to argue this point, I can simply wait.
And exactly WHAT observation leads you to believe that you're right? Oh, right, you're just sitting on your ass and waiting. You're not making any observations. You have no evidence for your theory. All the actual observational evidence points towards the Big Bang Theory being correct. You're just imagining and wishing that future observations will prove you right. Now who exactly is operating based on belief and dogma here?
Science is willing to accept that Big Bang Theory is wrong as long as compelling evidence comes along. Is your Church of the Ego willing to similarly accept this possibility? Or are you going to be sitting around your hole life, assuming you'll eventually be proven right?
You keep saying "observation triumphs", so you seem to be blissfully unaware of how observation has verified the current theory. If you really believed what you say, wouldn't that interest you?
Oh, and then there's the CMB. Interestingly enough, if that's radiant energy from the supposed "Bang", how exactly did the Earth get IN FRONT OF IT, for our radio-telescopes to be in position to intercept it? We'd have to be IN FRONT of the expanding sphere, or on the surface of the light-cone, as it were, to see it. This would require the matter which would one day become the Earth, to have travelled FASTER than light, wouldn't it?
Hehe. See, you don't even understand the CMB well enough to realize what's truly mind-boggling about it. It's not just that we can see this remnant of the Big Bang, it's that we see it roughly uniformly in all directions. So we aren't "in front of the expanding sphere", because then we'd see the CMB from only one direction and at once instant. Instead we're INSIDE the sphere in which the Big Bang took place, and the CMB emanated from all points in space and we're seeing the far reaches of it.
See, the Big Bang was not an explosion in space, it was an explosion of space.
And where are the "Climate Change" people on this one. Oh wait, there are no carbon emissions /pollution, just dumping lots of hot air.
Yes, and therefore it's insignificant to climate change, which is why we're cool with it. Really. The amount of heat humans produce is insignificant. It's greenhouse gasses that trap more of the solar radiation that are the problem.
Oh, sorry, I'm supposed to think that anything that changes the environment at all is equally bad. Us environmentalists aren't supposed to think about the actual magnitude or consequences. My bad!
Basically yes, it starts oxidizing right away and releases energy in the process. Burning aluminum is just really fast oxidation.
You're right that combustion is just an oxidation reaction, you're totally wrong that all aluminum is burning. The outside layer that's exposed to air oxidizes immediately. That layer of aluminum oxide then protects all the lower layers from oxidation. That's why aluminum is generally considered rust-proof, that's why all the things around you that are made of aluminum aren't collapsing, and it's why when you want your aluminum to oxidize, like these guys, you have to make a special alloy to ensure that it happens.
And then there's plastics, and plenty of other stable chemicals who have energy stored inside them.
No, the vast majority of electricity use ends up as waste heat pretty quickly, electronics, lighting,motors, heating (obviously), cooling etc.
Yes like I said most is lost as waste heat. However you said it's all lost, and that's simply not true unless you're talking time scales beyond the lifetime of our planet. And in some cases, like aluminum production, most is lost as heat, but a quite significant 36% is actually going into the aluminum.
A mile up, you would be lucky to find air that is 60F and 10% RH, which would be about 13.25 cubic feet per lb dry air +8 grains. If you fully saturate it by evaporating water, you only end up with 53F air and you have added 52 grains of water...
Well don't leave me hanging... what's the density of the humidified air?
Sorry, no. The energy source in a tornado is the updraft along the whole column. Once a vortex is started, it would store energy in its updraft and could easily rip off the base and start wandering around, leaving a trail of destruction, even if the energy would finally dissipate.
No, the temperature differential is the energy source. The updraft is how that energy is transfered. And once energy was no longer being supplied, then the energy in the tornado would immediately begin to decrease. As the remaining energy was transfered higher into the atmosphere, there would be less energy near the ground. Tornadoes are not self-sustaining.
Uh you're talking about the solar updraft tower, which makes perfect sense to me. I was talking about the vortex engine the OP linked to, and on which I didn't see any obvious energy input mechanism. It just says "warm water".
Ever see aluminum burn?
Yes. Is all aluminum burning? No. Then is the supposition that all electrical devices release all their energy as waste heat true? No. Some of it can be stored for essentially arbitrary periods of time (the fact that aluminum burns being the big hint that reversing the process involves putting energy in). Eventually everything is heat. But only for definitions of "eventually" that have nothing to do with the original question of net heat in the atmosphere.