You're really undercounting the costs. For starters:
- No time off for good behavior or overcrowding in the federal system.
- Felony conviction on the record is a BIG career-limiter. Kiss the corporate officer slots and pretty much the rest of the white-collar world goodbye. No guns for you, either.
My wife had a problem with such a scumbag some years back. Not only was he raising his own grades, he was changing those of others - sometimes lowering them.
Once somebody has such access and is willing to use it, there's lots of bad stuff they can do: Extortion (by lowering grades of those who DON'T pay for his "grade improvement service"). Harassment (lowering the grades of those who he dislikes / who don't put out / etc.).
And all of it, if not fixed (QUICKLY, so people he's dinged don't flunk out or change their educational/career path), degrades both the school's actual functioning and its reputation, both of which reduce the value of its diplomas.
Colleges are multibillion dollar businesses that perform expensive services and issue certifications that are worth far more to their students in terms of income, future quality of life, and reproductive potential. Corrupting that process can very quickly cause enough damage that a 20 year sentence and a quarter-million-dollar fine would be a slap on the wrist by comparison.
If the kid had stuck to raising his OWN grades it might have been a smaller issue. But he was also committing at least one additional crime by taking a bribe to change another's grades. Now we have a pattern...
Once those things are done, remove restrictions on self defense and we would see a RASH of dead thugs/robbers/rapists.
I used to think that, too.
Back before the shall-issue CCW movement I used to think that, once people started carrying, there would be a short bloodbath as the crooks found out the hard way that people were packing. Then a few states states started experimenting with letting the people arm, and it worked out surprisingly well - leading to a trickle, then a flood, of states joining this bandwagon.
It turns out the crooks aren't THAT stupid after all. When shall-issue goes into effect, most of 'em are smart enough to move to a less-armed area, switch to less confrontational crimes, or find another profession. Of the remainder, most of them are usually not so dumb that, when looking down the wrong end of a barrel, they keep pushing.
Of course a FEW are so dumb, pig-headded, or stoned that they DO keep on. But it's in the low single-digit percent of confrontations. (And then the defender usually doesn't bother to mention it to the cops and thus avoids buying himself trouble. That's why it took Kleck's seminal research to dig out the actual, enormous, effectiveness of with-gun self-defense.)
Net result is that passing shall-issue results in the benefits of the "polite society" right away, minus the bloodbath. Even the crooks end up with a lower getting-hurt-or-dead rate. B-)
It might be a good move to adjust your rhetoric in light of this, to reflect the actual situation. It might be feel-good to talk like every man becomes his own Dirty Harry. But it also scares the uninformed and plays into the hands of the anti-gunners, which makes it harder to actually get the laws fixed.
(Of course with DC v. Heller probably going to the Supremes the whole issue might be decided without legislation, one way or another...)
That's right... Magic cap had a business desktop metaphor including a full-function phone, like you'd have at an office. (HOW did I forget about that?)
I wonder about the timing... Migit it be prior art for any patents Apple or Microsoft get for their phones and/or perhaps for some of the patents the various cellphone companies are deploying against Vonage?
Even if this is a proven method, there's also a cost obstacle to overcome here.
The point of the article is that
- the previous Platinum-based catalyst was about 6 times too expensive to be practical for an automotive application, while
- this one is more than a factor of 6 cheaper, putting it in the running.
In other words they've crossed the affrordability threshold.
If the lifetime testing works out, no roadblocks show up, and something better doesn't come along and obsolete it before it gets deployed, expect this one to actually show up in cars.
However if the payout is spread over 20 years at $1.4million, by the end of the 10 years, inflation will have eaten the value of your 2017 $1.4 million payment to half (750K) in terms of 2007 dollars, and by 2027, the payment will only be worth $350,000 in constant dollars.
Not only that: You also incur the "opportunity cost" of not having much of the money until later.
If you had it earlier, you could bank it at interest or invest it in bonds, stocks, diversified mutual funds, a house, a business, etc. and make additional money that way while still having the principal. This typically beats inflation by a significant amount - and a number of financial instruments are designed to spread the risk to near extinction and collect the broad average of this premium.
Ok, I hear 'odds' like this thrown around all the time. I think it's time to question them.
The trouble with finding people who actually HAVE been hit by lighting 10 times is a matter of conditional probability: Being hit once reduces the probability you'll be alive to be hit again. This adds up after a few hits. So a computation based on the assumption that somebody who's been hit 9 times is going to live out a normal lifespan while waiting for number 10 tends to be a tad off. B-)
The odds can't possibly be in the ballpark of being hit by lightning 10 times, or even 2 times, as there have been many, many big lottery winners, and I have only heard of a couple of people who have been struck by lightning twice.
Sure they can.
Remember: I was talking somebody who buys ONE lottery ticket in his life. Buy a hundred and it's like living for 7,000 years while waiting for your ten hits.
Common carrier status does NOT require explicit legislation. It is a creature of common law. Explicit legislation may codify the details of the obligations and immunities of a PARTICULAR type of common carrier, rather than leaving it to judges and precedent. But it isn't necessary to create such a state.
An ISP may be or may not be a common carrier, depending on its behavior:
- If it accepts all comers on equal terms it's a common carrier. Making no choices it is not obligated to make choices or responsible for those choices. In particular: its customers are responsible for the legality and results of their actions while using the service.
- If it picks and choses, it's not a common carrier. By making choices it becomes responsible for the choices and acquires an obligation to continue to make choices. In particular: If its customers use its service to commit a crime or a tort, the carrier becomes an accessory and/or co-conspirator.
(In Comcast's case there's the additional element of fraud: They could easily have gotten away with traffic shaping. But forging RST packets to disrupt undesired connections is not part of the the protocol specifications that define "internet service".)
It's one form of "the law of small numbers" - getting bogus results from using too small a sample.
Taking a small number of unbiased samples of a truly random process will usually give you something that diverges from the expectation. The entire history of a state lottery constitutes a "small number of samples" for this purpose.
(Of course the analysis has to take into account things like the time some crooks filled all the balls but the "6"es with water and bought a lot of "666" tickets. They had to go for a triple digit number because the three machines get deliberately swapped around and they had no way to control that process. That cheat was really obvious on the televised selection: They used far too much water. So all the balls rolled around the bottom of the machines while the 6es occasionally hopped when they came over the air jet until they eventually jumped into the output spot. B-) )
This is pedantic BUT sometimes (rarely) the lottery's jackpot will grow big enough that you aren't already losing, and you actually have good odds.
But in calculating the odds you have to include more than the payout ratio:
- Payout is over time, lowering the effective value of the money.
- Even if exempt from state taxes, payouts are subject to federal tax.
You need a dollar value expectation FAR more than 1:1 for the actual expectation to exceed 1:1. But this pretty much never happens. The stampede betting starts when a holdover jackpot makes the dollar value expectation exceed 1:1 and the massive betting dilutes the holdover pot, pushing the odds back toward their normal values.
Alternately, I'm making a contribution to a cause I support,...
What cause is that? Higher taxes? Slower economic growth? Greater government corruption?
We ARE talking about the government lotteries here.
If it's a private lottery by a charity you support your position makes perfect sense. But in those cases the payoff is typically a (sometimes large) token contributed by another donor, rather than money in amounts that would make you "fabulously wealthy".
No, not really. Your state is getting paid revenue (supposedly for education around here - not always).
Which is just the excuse they used to get it through.
But money is the ultimate fungible commodity. (That's its whole purpose, after all.) Any amount that the lottery puts into the schools the state government can neglect to put in when they set the next budget. So the effect is that the lottery money goes to the pet projects of the legislature (in a roundabout-on-paper fashion).
Also, you are getting a chance to win the Jackpot...
Yep.
For the smaller ones the payoff is small enough to not matter. Further, the odds are short enough and the players play often enough that the payoff quickly approaches the expectation - usually $0.50 for every $1.00 played. (They take your money and give half of it back in chunks.)
For the big jackpots the odds are typically in the ballpark of being hit by lightning 10 times. And while the payoff typically has a "half the pot" number, it's paid out over a long enough period that you're just getting the INTEREST on the payoff, while the state keeps the principal, making the effective value much lower. (In some cases you have the option to select getting a much lower payout right away, which proves the point...) And then the federal government takes a cut. So the expectation is 'WAY less than $.50 out for every $1.00 in.
Lotteries are a voluntary tax on innumeracy (mathematical illiteracy).
But forgot what the day was. Didn't get it onto my calendar manager, and there was nothing on the main page about the parties on the day(s) of/before them.
Could have made it, too, if I'd known "this is the day". B-(
Oh, well. Maybe in another five years or so... Like after I've retired and moved to Nevada...
the temperature of the water is based on the square of the area you're using to gather sunlight
No it's not.
The collector temperature is related to the sterradial average of the temperatures it "sees" in all directions around it.
If it's in space and "sees" sunlight for the sun's normal subtended angle and 4-degrees absolute empty space around it (mod a sprinkling of distant stars) its equilibrium temperature is about that of a high-orbit satellite at the earth's orbital distance from the sun - i.e. a bit below freezing (since it doesn't hage a greenhouse atmosphere around it to raise the apparent temperature of the black sky by returning some of its own re-radiated heat).
If it's surrounded by optics so that it "sees" the sun in all directions, its equilibrium temperature is that of the solar photosphere.
Same is true here on earth - except that you'd have to put it in a really good vacuum bottle on really good insulating supports to approach solar temperatures. But you can do molten metal temperatures just fine with mirrors of ANY size. (It's just that with smaller mirrors you need a smaller target.)
Yes, efficiency is related to the temperature difference between the hot and cold ends, how fast you can pull heat is proportional to the area of the collector, and pulling heat also drops the temperature of the collector. But you can go for very high efficiency if you're willing to pay to do things right.
And that's exactly what photovoltaics do, on an atomic level, photon-by-photon. (Their current merely moderate efficiency is mainly due to their being tuned to particular photon energies, causing them to miss any photons below that energy level and discard any extra energy from photons above it. Fixes for that are being worked on and so far the best one is quantum-dot coatings, to slice and stack photon energies into "sandwitch fillings" of exactly the desired height.)
Of course efficiency isn't what you're really after. What you're really after is power-per-dollar.
My department has been migrating TO windows.doc format (over my objections) for internal documentation - apparently due to inertia among the managers.
I'm not just annoyed by getting tied to a proprietary format: I'm particularly worried about all the windows tools running, since IMHO our company is a prime target for Spear Phising. (And I know there's been some harvesting going on by ordinary malware because, just today, I got some spam coming in from outside forged to claim it's FROM an internal mailing list.)
I've been pushing for standardizing on an open format - specifically ODF - for some time now. (This has been hard, because the last time I edited a.doc format document with Open Office it broke the hyperlinks, and the last spreadsheet I touched ditto lost a bunch of graph annotation.)
Now the rug gets pulled out from under my credibility (yet again) by the open community itself.
I'm throwing in the towel on this. I'll just sit back and use the Microsoft tools and let IT handle the malware. Open documents can wait until somebody in upper management drives it when it becomes the latest management fad (which probably means when the winter olympics is held in hell). If the company's crown jewels get stolen by a spear-phisher I'm on record for an "I told you so!" and I have enough squirreled away to retire.
So they would need yet another rotor to keep the tail in the air? Or give up the hovering claim and settle for STOL.
Yes. Like a helicopter: Either a tail rotor (up/down rather than right/left) or two sets of cyclogyro wings fore/aft. Else no pitch control and no compensation for the pitch drag from the wing rotation during hovering.
The wings of this thing generate a downwash at the top of the "paddle wheel" which flows down and strikes the wing at the bottom of the paddle wheel. Not one website discussing these planes mentions this. Maintaining control and lift in this situation sounds... challenging.
No worse than a darrieus wind turbine.
Yes there's a downwash. It's velocity is small compared to the speed of the blade. Yes there's a change in the effective angle of attack when the blade goes through the downwash, and that affects lift during part of the cycle. But you just adjust your overall angle of attack to compensate for this and you're done. It means the lift control has to be set a bit more lifty than it would without the downwash (such as in a cyclogyro that only had wings on one of the three spars for any given distance out so none ever "downwashed" another). No big deal.
(By the way: A fixed-blade darrieus style turbine works just fine without adjusting angle of attack at all.)
Very few prototypes were built, and those that were constructed were completely unsuccessful.
It's easy to see why those failed. You can get lift and thrust adjustment out of the rotors, and if you can do that separately on the two sides you can also get yaw and roll control (though the presence of a rudder on the tail implies they're not depending on the rotors for yaw). But for pitch: Zero, zip, nada. That tail assembly depends on a slipstream to give you pitch control. Also there's nothing but the elevator to resist the drag moment of the rotors.
Seems to me that, like a helicopter, a cyclogyro needs either a tail rotor (though pointed up, not sideways) or front-and-rear counter-rotating rotors. (You might POSSIBLY get away with inline counter-rotating rotors and vary drag to get pitch control. But that would introduce all sorts of complexity.)
Aeons ago when I studied to be an aircraft mechanic, they showed us a test film of a mid-sized Bell doing autorotation. Nice controlled demo with lots of black&white squares - think automobile crash tests. Man, those things autorotate like a rock. The gear flattened like paper and the bottom crumpled. Nice slow-mo glass & debris cloud. Any people inside would have had massive spinal fracturing, and very possibly would have been better off dead.
Just let it auto-rotate with no further control and it's like a parachute: Drops at a constant velocity, giving you a nasty hard landing.
What you have to do is change the pitch of the blades just before you'd impact, burning the momentum of the blades to give you a burst of lift and a soft landing. (And maybe you want to come down a bit faster before that, to spin up the blades so you have more momentum in them and thus more stored power to trade for more time and control options near the ground.)
That's a job for a pilot - not some simple mechanism that they'd have had available "aeons ago" when those earlier tests were being run.
I bet even the model you saw hard-landing on unmanned test would do just fine with an appropriate control regime.
More like Lift = about 2 wings average. By changing the angle of attack you can get lift on both the forward and reverse parts of the cycle. (Even if you DO bend the airfoil from a symmetrical shape to improve its lift-drag ratio for one direction at the cost of reducing it for the other - which you still might want to do if the vehicle spends most of its time going "forward".)
A three-blade/rotor cyclogyro has about the same math as three-phase power, by the way. It's a bit less efficient than DC but has other advantages that made it the system of choice for most long-distance power transmission.
With more than one wing (average) producing lift you can downsize the wings in proportion. With the wings moving even when the plane is not you can downsize them a LOT compared to a fixed-wing craft: The latter requires wings big enough to lift the vehicle at taxing speed, which makes them considerably oversized (and over-draggy) for actual flight. They compensate somewhat by adding flaps and slats to change the wing shape to improve lift (at big cost in drag) for takeoff and landing. But there's still a vast difference between the blade area of a fixed-wing and a helicopter. A cyclogyro is on the helicopter side of this gulf.
Also: A cyclogyro doesn't have the same problem as a helicopter when flying faster than the blade's rotation (which causes the blades to lose lift on the "retreating" side, making it tip over and crash.) As you speed up you lose lift on the "backward" part of the cycle but gain it on the "forward" part.
If you want to get really fancy you could modify the wing pitch control so you could transition to keeping all three wings pointing forward in level flight. Then you transition to a triplane. But you have tiny wings compared to a fixed-wing craft. That mode ought to be a LOT more efficient than a fixed-wing, because the wings don't have the take-off/landing size penalty and can be optimized for efficient level flight. (You can even pick the final positions and bend the blades for best lift, at some small cost to the cyclogyro-mode. Also you can use multi-wing interactions for still better performance, like the jib on a sailboat directing air across the mainsail.) But let's stick with the basic machine...
Transmission Mechanism = Very Heavy
Really? Two bearings and a mechanism for adjusting the location of one of them? Plus "rocker" bearings on the wings? Sounds pretty light to me.
Support Structure = Very Very Heavy
Compared to a wing? Or a helicopter blade? Show me...
Pressure Center (Sustentation)= Shifts Vibration = More than a helicopter
Not if you do it right. Adjust the wings to have lift that is a sinusoidal function of position: Bingo: Center and magnitude of the combined lift is constant through the cycle. No vibration at all. (There are other functions that do that as well. But sine is easy.)
So we finally have batteries that can perform as well as (or better than) a (still mostly impractical) flywheel/motor-generator system for "peaking" storage. (TFA's stated losses of about 30% per stop/start cycle look about right for a system where the losses are virtually all in the motor and controller. That would be about 84% efficiency on both start and stop cycles, which is right in the ballpark for a good motor.)
Make that definitely "better than" flywheel peaking.
A flywheel peaking system runs the power through four mechanical/electrical conversions. A battery peaking system runs it through two mechanical/electrical and two electrical/chemical. If the battery's charge/discharge efficiency is better than the motor/generator's conversion efficiency at the power levels required, batteries win on efficiency. And it looks like this one beats the PANTS off a motor/generator.
Slashdot Mirror
You're really undercounting the costs. For starters:
- No time off for good behavior or overcrowding in the federal system.
- Felony conviction on the record is a BIG career-limiter. Kiss the corporate officer slots and pretty much the rest of the white-collar world goodbye. No guns for you, either.
My wife had a problem with such a scumbag some years back. Not only was he raising his own grades, he was changing those of others - sometimes lowering them.
Once somebody has such access and is willing to use it, there's lots of bad stuff they can do: Extortion (by lowering grades of those who DON'T pay for his "grade improvement service"). Harassment (lowering the grades of those who he dislikes / who don't put out / etc.).
And all of it, if not fixed (QUICKLY, so people he's dinged don't flunk out or change their educational/career path), degrades both the school's actual functioning and its reputation, both of which reduce the value of its diplomas.
Colleges are multibillion dollar businesses that perform expensive services and issue certifications that are worth far more to their students in terms of income, future quality of life, and reproductive potential. Corrupting that process can very quickly cause enough damage that a 20 year sentence and a quarter-million-dollar fine would be a slap on the wrist by comparison.
If the kid had stuck to raising his OWN grades it might have been a smaller issue. But he was also committing at least one additional crime by taking a bribe to change another's grades. Now we have a pattern...
Once those things are done, remove restrictions on self defense and we would see a RASH of dead thugs/robbers/rapists.
I used to think that, too.
Back before the shall-issue CCW movement I used to think that, once people started carrying, there would be a short bloodbath as the crooks found out the hard way that people were packing. Then a few states states started experimenting with letting the people arm, and it worked out surprisingly well - leading to a trickle, then a flood, of states joining this bandwagon.
It turns out the crooks aren't THAT stupid after all. When shall-issue goes into effect, most of 'em are smart enough to move to a less-armed area, switch to less confrontational crimes, or find another profession. Of the remainder, most of them are usually not so dumb that, when looking down the wrong end of a barrel, they keep pushing.
Of course a FEW are so dumb, pig-headded, or stoned that they DO keep on. But it's in the low single-digit percent of confrontations. (And then the defender usually doesn't bother to mention it to the cops and thus avoids buying himself trouble. That's why it took Kleck's seminal research to dig out the actual, enormous, effectiveness of with-gun self-defense.)
Net result is that passing shall-issue results in the benefits of the "polite society" right away, minus the bloodbath. Even the crooks end up with a lower getting-hurt-or-dead rate. B-)
It might be a good move to adjust your rhetoric in light of this, to reflect the actual situation. It might be feel-good to talk like every man becomes his own Dirty Harry. But it also scares the uninformed and plays into the hands of the anti-gunners, which makes it harder to actually get the laws fixed.
(Of course with DC v. Heller probably going to the Supremes the whole issue might be decided without legislation, one way or another...)
That's right... Magic cap had a business desktop metaphor including a full-function phone, like you'd have at an office. (HOW did I forget about that?)
... Migit it be prior art for any patents Apple or Microsoft get for their phones and/or perhaps for some of the patents the various cellphone companies are deploying against Vonage?
I wonder about the timing
Even if this is a proven method, there's also a cost obstacle to overcome here.
The point of the article is that
- the previous Platinum-based catalyst was about 6 times too expensive to be practical for an automotive application, while
- this one is more than a factor of 6 cheaper, putting it in the running.
In other words they've crossed the affrordability threshold.
If the lifetime testing works out, no roadblocks show up, and something better doesn't come along and obsolete it before it gets deployed, expect this one to actually show up in cars.
However if the payout is spread over 20 years at $1.4million, by the end of the 10 years, inflation will have eaten the value of your 2017 $1.4 million payment to half (750K) in terms of 2007 dollars, and by 2027, the payment will only be worth $350,000 in constant dollars.
Not only that: You also incur the "opportunity cost" of not having much of the money until later.
If you had it earlier, you could bank it at interest or invest it in bonds, stocks, diversified mutual funds, a house, a business, etc. and make additional money that way while still having the principal. This typically beats inflation by a significant amount - and a number of financial instruments are designed to spread the risk to near extinction and collect the broad average of this premium.
Ok, I hear 'odds' like this thrown around all the time. I think it's time to question them.
The trouble with finding people who actually HAVE been hit by lighting 10 times is a matter of conditional probability: Being hit once reduces the probability you'll be alive to be hit again. This adds up after a few hits. So a computation based on the assumption that somebody who's been hit 9 times is going to live out a normal lifespan while waiting for number 10 tends to be a tad off. B-)
The odds can't possibly be in the ballpark of being hit by lightning 10 times, or even 2 times, as there have been many, many big lottery winners, and I have only heard of a couple of people who have been struck by lightning twice.
Sure they can.
Remember: I was talking somebody who buys ONE lottery ticket in his life. Buy a hundred and it's like living for 7,000 years while waiting for your ten hits.
ISPs are not common carriers.
Wrong.
Common carrier status does NOT require explicit legislation. It is a creature of common law. Explicit legislation may codify the details of the obligations and immunities of a PARTICULAR type of common carrier, rather than leaving it to judges and precedent. But it isn't necessary to create such a state.
An ISP may be or may not be a common carrier, depending on its behavior:
- If it accepts all comers on equal terms it's a common carrier. Making no choices it is not obligated to make choices or responsible for those choices. In particular: its customers are responsible for the legality and results of their actions while using the service.
- If it picks and choses, it's not a common carrier. By making choices it becomes responsible for the choices and acquires an obligation to continue to make choices. In particular: If its customers use its service to commit a crime or a tort, the carrier becomes an accessory and/or co-conspirator.
(In Comcast's case there's the additional element of fraud: They could easily have gotten away with traffic shaping. But forging RST packets to disrupt undesired connections is not part of the the protocol specifications that define "internet service".)
It's one form of "the law of small numbers" - getting bogus results from using too small a sample.
Taking a small number of unbiased samples of a truly random process will usually give you something that diverges from the expectation. The entire history of a state lottery constitutes a "small number of samples" for this purpose.
(Of course the analysis has to take into account things like the time some crooks filled all the balls but the "6"es with water and bought a lot of "666" tickets. They had to go for a triple digit number because the three machines get deliberately swapped around and they had no way to control that process. That cheat was really obvious on the televised selection: They used far too much water. So all the balls rolled around the bottom of the machines while the 6es occasionally hopped when they came over the air jet until they eventually jumped into the output spot. B-) )
This is pedantic BUT sometimes (rarely) the lottery's jackpot will grow big enough that you aren't already losing, and you actually have good odds.
But in calculating the odds you have to include more than the payout ratio:
- Payout is over time, lowering the effective value of the money.
- Even if exempt from state taxes, payouts are subject to federal tax.
You need a dollar value expectation FAR more than 1:1 for the actual expectation to exceed 1:1. But this pretty much never happens. The stampede betting starts when a holdover jackpot makes the dollar value expectation exceed 1:1 and the massive betting dilutes the holdover pot, pushing the odds back toward their normal values.
Alternately, I'm making a contribution to a cause I support, ...
What cause is that? Higher taxes? Slower economic growth? Greater government corruption?
We ARE talking about the government lotteries here.
If it's a private lottery by a charity you support your position makes perfect sense. But in those cases the payoff is typically a (sometimes large) token contributed by another donor, rather than money in amounts that would make you "fabulously wealthy".
You're already losing by buying the ticket.
No, not really. Your state is getting paid revenue (supposedly for education around here - not always).
Which is just the excuse they used to get it through.
But money is the ultimate fungible commodity. (That's its whole purpose, after all.) Any amount that the lottery puts into the schools the state government can neglect to put in when they set the next budget. So the effect is that the lottery money goes to the pet projects of the legislature (in a roundabout-on-paper fashion).
Also, you are getting a chance to win the Jackpot...
Yep.
For the smaller ones the payoff is small enough to not matter. Further, the odds are short enough and the players play often enough that the payoff quickly approaches the expectation - usually $0.50 for every $1.00 played. (They take your money and give half of it back in chunks.)
For the big jackpots the odds are typically in the ballpark of being hit by lightning 10 times. And while the payoff typically has a "half the pot" number, it's paid out over a long enough period that you're just getting the INTEREST on the payoff, while the state keeps the principal, making the effective value much lower. (In some cases you have the option to select getting a much lower payout right away, which proves the point...) And then the federal government takes a cut. So the expectation is 'WAY less than $.50 out for every $1.00 in.
Lotteries are a voluntary tax on innumeracy (mathematical illiteracy).
But forgot what the day was. Didn't get it onto my calendar manager, and there was nothing on the main page about the parties on the day(s) of/before them.
Could have made it, too, if I'd known "this is the day". B-(
Oh, well. Maybe in another five years or so... Like after I've retired and moved to Nevada...
Thanks to you (and others) for setting me straight on this pair of sock-puppets.
Slashdot proves its worth again. B-)
(Too bad their status as big-sounding non-persons wasn't in the original post, but had to wait for the truth squad to assemble. B-( )
the temperature of the water is based on the square of the area you're using to gather sunlight
No it's not.
The collector temperature is related to the sterradial average of the temperatures it "sees" in all directions around it.
If it's in space and "sees" sunlight for the sun's normal subtended angle and 4-degrees absolute empty space around it (mod a sprinkling of distant stars) its equilibrium temperature is about that of a high-orbit satellite at the earth's orbital distance from the sun - i.e. a bit below freezing (since it doesn't hage a greenhouse atmosphere around it to raise the apparent temperature of the black sky by returning some of its own re-radiated heat).
If it's surrounded by optics so that it "sees" the sun in all directions, its equilibrium temperature is that of the solar photosphere.
Same is true here on earth - except that you'd have to put it in a really good vacuum bottle on really good insulating supports to approach solar temperatures. But you can do molten metal temperatures just fine with mirrors of ANY size. (It's just that with smaller mirrors you need a smaller target.)
Yes, efficiency is related to the temperature difference between the hot and cold ends, how fast you can pull heat is proportional to the area of the collector, and pulling heat also drops the temperature of the collector. But you can go for very high efficiency if you're willing to pay to do things right.
And that's exactly what photovoltaics do, on an atomic level, photon-by-photon. (Their current merely moderate efficiency is mainly due to their being tuned to particular photon energies, causing them to miss any photons below that energy level and discard any extra energy from photons above it. Fixes for that are being worked on and so far the best one is quantum-dot coatings, to slice and stack photon energies into "sandwitch fillings" of exactly the desired height.)
Of course efficiency isn't what you're really after. What you're really after is power-per-dollar.
My department has been migrating TO windows .doc format (over my objections) for internal documentation - apparently due to inertia among the managers.
.doc format document with Open Office it broke the hyperlinks, and the last spreadsheet I touched ditto lost a bunch of graph annotation.)
I'm not just annoyed by getting tied to a proprietary format: I'm particularly worried about all the windows tools running, since IMHO our company is a prime target for Spear Phising. (And I know there's been some harvesting going on by ordinary malware because, just today, I got some spam coming in from outside forged to claim it's FROM an internal mailing list.)
I've been pushing for standardizing on an open format - specifically ODF - for some time now. (This has been hard, because the last time I edited a
Now the rug gets pulled out from under my credibility (yet again) by the open community itself.
I'm throwing in the towel on this. I'll just sit back and use the Microsoft tools and let IT handle the malware. Open documents can wait until somebody in upper management drives it when it becomes the latest management fad (which probably means when the winter olympics is held in hell). If the company's crown jewels get stolen by a spear-phisher I'm on record for an "I told you so!" and I have enough squirreled away to retire.
Looks like just an ordinary autogyro. Those have been around for a LONG time.
So they would need yet another rotor to keep the tail in the air? Or give up the hovering claim and settle for STOL.
Yes. Like a helicopter: Either a tail rotor (up/down rather than right/left) or two sets of cyclogyro wings fore/aft. Else no pitch control and no compensation for the pitch drag from the wing rotation during hovering.
The early prototypes didn't have anything to control pitch or resist the pitch rotation from the rotor drag when hovering.
Like helicopters, cyclogryos need a tail rotor (pointed up/down) or fore-and-aft counter-rotating cyclogyro rotors to have six-axis control.
Elsewhere on the board is a link to a video of a small cyclogyro with a vertical tail rotor that runs just fine.
The wings of this thing generate a downwash at the top of the "paddle wheel" which flows down and strikes the wing at the bottom of the paddle wheel. Not one website discussing these planes mentions this. Maintaining control and lift in this situation sounds ... challenging.
No worse than a darrieus wind turbine.
Yes there's a downwash. It's velocity is small compared to the speed of the blade. Yes there's a change in the effective angle of attack when the blade goes through the downwash, and that affects lift during part of the cycle. But you just adjust your overall angle of attack to compensate for this and you're done. It means the lift control has to be set a bit more lifty than it would without the downwash (such as in a cyclogyro that only had wings on one of the three spars for any given distance out so none ever "downwashed" another). No big deal.
(By the way: A fixed-blade darrieus style turbine works just fine without adjusting angle of attack at all.)
Very few prototypes were built, and those that were constructed were completely unsuccessful.
It's easy to see why those failed. You can get lift and thrust adjustment out of the rotors, and if you can do that separately on the two sides you can also get yaw and roll control (though the presence of a rudder on the tail implies they're not depending on the rotors for yaw). But for pitch: Zero, zip, nada. That tail assembly depends on a slipstream to give you pitch control. Also there's nothing but the elevator to resist the drag moment of the rotors.
Seems to me that, like a helicopter, a cyclogyro needs either a tail rotor (though pointed up, not sideways) or front-and-rear counter-rotating rotors. (You might POSSIBLY get away with inline counter-rotating rotors and vary drag to get pitch control. But that would introduce all sorts of complexity.)
Aeons ago when I studied to be an aircraft mechanic, they showed us a test film of a mid-sized Bell doing autorotation. Nice controlled demo with lots of black&white squares - think automobile crash tests. Man, those things autorotate like a rock. The gear flattened like paper and the bottom crumpled. Nice slow-mo glass & debris cloud. Any people inside would have had massive spinal fracturing, and very possibly would have been better off dead.
Just let it auto-rotate with no further control and it's like a parachute: Drops at a constant velocity, giving you a nasty hard landing.
What you have to do is change the pitch of the blades just before you'd impact, burning the momentum of the blades to give you a burst of lift and a soft landing. (And maybe you want to come down a bit faster before that, to spin up the blades so you have more momentum in them and thus more stored power to trade for more time and control options near the ground.)
That's a job for a pilot - not some simple mechanism that they'd have had available "aeons ago" when those earlier tests were being run.
I bet even the model you saw hard-landing on unmanned test would do just fine with an appropriate control regime.
Drag = 3 wings
Lift = 1 wing
More like Lift = about 2 wings average. By changing the angle of attack you can get lift on both the forward and reverse parts of the cycle. (Even if you DO bend the airfoil from a symmetrical shape to improve its lift-drag ratio for one direction at the cost of reducing it for the other - which you still might want to do if the vehicle spends most of its time going "forward".)
A three-blade/rotor cyclogyro has about the same math as three-phase power, by the way. It's a bit less efficient than DC but has other advantages that made it the system of choice for most long-distance power transmission.
With more than one wing (average) producing lift you can downsize the wings in proportion. With the wings moving even when the plane is not you can downsize them a LOT compared to a fixed-wing craft: The latter requires wings big enough to lift the vehicle at taxing speed, which makes them considerably oversized (and over-draggy) for actual flight. They compensate somewhat by adding flaps and slats to change the wing shape to improve lift (at big cost in drag) for takeoff and landing. But there's still a vast difference between the blade area of a fixed-wing and a helicopter. A cyclogyro is on the helicopter side of this gulf.
Also: A cyclogyro doesn't have the same problem as a helicopter when flying faster than the blade's rotation (which causes the blades to lose lift on the "retreating" side, making it tip over and crash.) As you speed up you lose lift on the "backward" part of the cycle but gain it on the "forward" part.
If you want to get really fancy you could modify the wing pitch control so you could transition to keeping all three wings pointing forward in level flight. Then you transition to a triplane. But you have tiny wings compared to a fixed-wing craft. That mode ought to be a LOT more efficient than a fixed-wing, because the wings don't have the take-off/landing size penalty and can be optimized for efficient level flight. (You can even pick the final positions and bend the blades for best lift, at some small cost to the cyclogyro-mode. Also you can use multi-wing interactions for still better performance, like the jib on a sailboat directing air across the mainsail.) But let's stick with the basic machine...
Transmission Mechanism = Very Heavy
Really? Two bearings and a mechanism for adjusting the location of one of them? Plus "rocker" bearings on the wings? Sounds pretty light to me.
Support Structure = Very Very Heavy
Compared to a wing? Or a helicopter blade? Show me...
Pressure Center (Sustentation)= Shifts
Vibration = More than a helicopter
Not if you do it right. Adjust the wings to have lift that is a sinusoidal function of position: Bingo: Center and magnitude of the combined lift is constant through the cycle. No vibration at all. (There are other functions that do that as well. But sine is easy.)
So we finally have batteries that can perform as well as (or better than) a (still mostly impractical) flywheel/motor-generator system for "peaking" storage. (TFA's stated losses of about 30% per stop/start cycle look about right for a system where the losses are virtually all in the motor and controller. That would be about 84% efficiency on both start and stop cycles, which is right in the ballpark for a good motor.)
Make that definitely "better than" flywheel peaking.
A flywheel peaking system runs the power through four mechanical/electrical conversions. A battery peaking system runs it through two mechanical/electrical and two electrical/chemical. If the battery's charge/discharge efficiency is better than the motor/generator's conversion efficiency at the power levels required, batteries win on efficiency. And it looks like this one beats the PANTS off a motor/generator.