And by the way, LiI, lithium iodide, probably has a lower melting point and electrolytic decomposition temperature, than most of the other crap, like lithium chloride. Plus there may be aprotic polar solvents that really drop the melting point of it, but they might be different than the ones in lithium batteries, because at high temperature the molten lithium might attack the oxygen in the organic molecules. Similarly hexafluorophosphate may be unstable against molten lithium at high temperature, but any elemental atomic ion, such as iodide, is stable against any kind of attack. And the choices are not that many in elemental things, such as sodium sulfur battery uses sulfide, but for lithium selenide might be better, less bonding strength and better energy efficiency to electrolyze it back to lithium metal, but it's hard to get your hand on hydrogen selenide, or even to find a way to make selenium go into the selenide form. With iodine the standard way to make HI, hydroiodic acid, is through scrap iron and water, then distill with acid, and HI is a much stronger acid than HCl, muriatic acid, but it's electrolytic decomposition voltage is lower, so it's possible to have reactions that go forward based on acidity, yet they drive your electric energy costs into cheaper domain. Arsenide is another topic, but who wants to work around potential arsine, or even hydrogen selenide, and nitride should be a stronger bond than arsenide, unless the acidity says differently, just like iodine replaces chlorine, even though the bond strength is less. Telluride and antimonide are completely off the table, but sulfide and bromide might be considered. And then come the very complex ions, such as antimoniofluoride, but good luck finding something so very tightly bound that the lithium cannot go after the fluoride or oxygen bound in it. Maybe non-oxgyen or fluorine containing organic anions, that lithium has no interest in cracking to pieces, might work, but there are very few of sufficiently high carbanion or even azonion acidity and electronegativity aromatic compounds that might work.
Lithium is very special in that it does form a nitride, and does so at room temperature. There are very few elements that successfully form a nitride, including Li,Mg, but not Na(sodium). for instance. In fact the only binary nitrogen compound of sodium is sodium azide, NaN3, and a simple way to make elemental sodium in the lab is by heating sodium azide. The azide has much better long term storage properties than sodium metal, in a lab environment with small quantities, where bulk cost and energy efficiency is not a huge factor.
The colored people got out of hand in Chicago and cannot be contained, so the only thing Microsoft can do is help them stay dumb and blow their money on fancy things that are glittery but useless at the core. Like some of the buses public transports buy lately, the old school buses used to kick ass, but the new fancy shmancy ones, you can just look at them, and it's so obvious what a friggin maintenance nightmare and budget nightmare they must be, even if peddling some new envirofriendly bullcrap. The bank account is the first environment that needs to be made friendly, before everything else. It's like, people should not eat a beautiful deer but let it go on its way, but if they are really hungry, then go ahead, eat it. Fuck the environment, learn to live. Them old buses polluting the world full of carbon dioxide were not that much worse when the whole city is headed the way of Detroit, straight into bankruptcy. Who's got money to blow on envirofriendly crap? Shenzen China, yeah, cuz they are rich. What we need to learn in the US is how to outcompete Shenzen, at what they do best. We used to sell something for $10, but Chinese competition sells it for $0.50, so we throw our hands up, go on welfare, and cry all day about unable to compete with unfair competition, they don't have OSHA, EPA, insurance, housing and the like that we have to pay, so we can't sell the stuff for $0.50. I say fuck that. Find a way to put a "Made in USA" label on it and sell it for $0.49 next to the "Made in China" stuff at Dollar General or Dollar Tree, or even Walmart. When I buy a shirt, at Walmart, for $6.99 for a gorgeous piece, that says "Made in Bangladesh," I think there should be another shirt right next to it, that's even better, selling for $5.99 that says "Made in Boston, USA." Why can't they make 5.99 shirts in Boston USA? Well, let's see, in Bangladesh they don't have to pay Obamacare, they don't have to pay huge housing cost, they don't have to pay the huge commute cost, they don't have to pay the huge taxes, they don't have to pay.. etc.,etc., etc. What the fuck happened to the American worker being uncompetitive in the global market place? Oh wait, we're supposed to turn into the intellectual property capital of the world, all you gotta do is take the economic base overseas, and let people start their own businesses, with the only option being intellectual property: such as songs, videos, pictures, books, software, the initiative coming at you straight from Microsoft and gang. And once we can get everyone in the Land of the Free agree to intellectual property, Da Man is gonna hog all thoughts like he hogs all housing, and collect. You will pay a thinking fee, on any thoughts you have, because Da Man successfully took over all possible intellectual property thoughts, unless you can prove that you can meditate and have your mind go completely blank, and then you're excused for those minutes or hours you spend meditating, but in the rest of your life, you better pay off. We don't own you, slavery is illegal, but we own your thoughts. Pay up bitch.
I for one picked up a new motto lately : "live insurance free or die." Fuck all this mandatory insurance. Like mandatory gambling, I know how to gamble right, not the government telling me what bets I should make. Fucking maffiozos walking into a pub selling business protection insurance - 50% of your profits in my pocket. Fuck you guys, says the owner. Next day there is a bomb exploding in the pub, and the owner told, see, you should have bought that business protection insurance. Now it's like I have to fight tooth and nail not to get sick, from the purposeful infections and x-rays, and have to watch ultra careful when I drive for all these trap situations that have multiplied a lot since I stopped buying car insurance too. I used to have no problem with car insurance, but that's my answer to mandatory health insurance: "live free or die." Insurance free that is.
When I was growing up we mostly had blackboards and chalk, pens/pencils and notebooks, and textbooks. And a lot of the indian and asian students that the postgrad classes in the US were flooded with when I was in college as an undergrad, that's how they grew up, with black chalkboards (or sometimes green) and white chalk. Though when the school got an 286 IBM AT, I'd be playing Simcity on it a lot, or more like somebody would be playing it and the rest watch. But when it comes to quality education, sometimes a pencil and a piece of paper is more robust than a computer. I for one could not imagine tutoring math to somebody on a computer, instead of a pen and paper, it would only get in the way, the only thing to tutor on a computer is how to use a computer, not how to get your shit done in daily life. Like how to look up math information - the computer is one way, the school library books on shelves another - but when it comes to teaching, and explaining, even the paper book or the computer just get in the way compared to a pencil/pen and piece of paper.
When I tutored math in college in the 90's I got paid $5/hr. And I got drained and tired in 3 evening hrs. It wasn't really worth it as a job, it did not really cover the living expenses. I think these teachers that get paid so much do so because they have to work with retards, and the harder the work the more you get paid, and even then it's not worth the effort sometimes. Some things money just can't buy. I was lucky to work with really smart subjects so that's why I must have been paid so little. Btw, I don't know why, but as soon as I looked at Rahm Emmanuel's photo, it occurred to me that he is very smart, good sense of humor, but he's gay. At least he's not coming out of the closet, but there may be more to the Chicago gang's pushing same sex marriages than just "let's everybody be nice to each other, live and let live." I for one don't support same sex marriage, and can't stand homosexual males (I mean I can work with them or coexist with them as long as they act normal, but I don't wanna hear any of their stuff, or see them flirt), and I absolutely loooove lesbians, whether they are bisexual or they deny me and I only get to watch, or even if they do other guys and each other but deny me, but let me watch, I love that shit. I'm a masochist. I also like jobs that are mildly painful, as long as no permanent harm is done, and the pain is not too great. I think you need to be mildly masochist and get off on the pain and suffering involved to be really good at any job, and get satisfaction from the endurance.
Don't get too excited over it. They are zapping iron and water particles with electric, and they probably detected some bound nitrogen in the water, but the energy consumption was huge. In order to make any news release that has any point, they are guesstimating that long term they can drop the price to 2/3 of Haber-Bosch. I wanna see that. In fact I take two electric wires, make them spark, even an empty butane lighter, and keep sparking the flint stone on it, or two pieces of granite smacked together, sparking, I can create stinky air that's bound nitrogen, and dissolves into a cup of water nearby, and voila, bound nitrogen. But the cost is huge. So is the cost of getting nitrogen through the calcium cyanamide process, or Birkeland-Eyde process, or just simple cyanide making ways, such as soda ash plus charcoal melted down with nitrogen blown through it in the presence of iron dust. Those are all expensive ways to make nitrogen, and so is probably this method. First of all they lack a good molecular nitrogen binding catalyst, though reduced iron itself is the Haber-Bosch catalyst of choice. The triple bond in molecular nitrogen is extremely strong, and it takes a lot of finesse to squeeze it into something active, with low activation energy at low temperatures, which then reacts with hydrogen and oxygen. Life uses some molybdenum iron sulfur centered extremely complex enzymes, and chemists have been able to also bind some at room temperature, using I think Ruthenium based catalysts, but once it's bound and reacted, there is no regeneration reaction, or maybe it can go 2 or 3 cycles and then the catalyst is ruined, and it's expensive to recycle separately into new catalyst. So far.
However, there was a patent from the 70's that caught my eye. Namely lithium metal in dry air, will form lithium oxide on the surface, however, going under that there is a continuous corrosion that creates nearly pure Li3N, lithium nitride. Now the cost of lithium regeneration from hydroxide is huge, so I had this idea of not reacting it with water, but some organic hydride, more weakly protic than water, such as methanol, if it reacts, then electrolyzing back the lithium metal, or winning it back with something like sodium, as shown in the patent for lithium borohydride creation via sodium borohydride and methyl borate pathway. Methanol is probably not the correct choice, but there might be something that makes the whole thing energy efficient. If nothing else I was thinking about this method of converting windmill energy into fertilizer, on a yeoman farmer scale, as a yeoman farmer cannot afford 200 atmospheres (200x14.7psi~3000 psi) and vessels that can withstand it, but you can make lithium in a pot at atmospheric pressure such as electrolytically, on very small scales, even if you have to waste a lot of energy by reacting it with water, and recovering lithium metal from the lithium hydroxide that forms.
MSDS's are often useless for anything but the very basic informations. You're better off reading some chemistry book from 1850 about a material, to learn to know it, and understand it, than from an MSDS. And MSDS is only there to cover a corporation's ass from lawsuits, as they are always unrealistic, like with a bar of soap they might say you wear full protective clothing, rubber gloves, steel toe shoes, rubber apron, faceshield, safety glasses, ear protection, and hardhats. Almost any chemical place or even metal processing place is anal retentive on safety, and they often won't let you wear tennis shoes. There is a whole lot of difference in how tired you get from simply what kind of shoes you wear, if you're on your feet all day, and being tired is the number one safety issue ever, making the wrong decisions, making mistakes, and human error. Steel toe shoes with stupid metatarsals are ridiculous when you could dance around in comfy tennis shoes just fine. It's all about covering the corporate butt from getting fucked by hungry lawyers, who think everything is relative, it's all just a matter of making money.
I've got hit by ammonia one time. I had to lift a bucket of fully concentrated liquid ammonia, into a chemical plant electrolysis tank, so I open the lid, reach down, take a deep breath, lift and dump. The take a deep breath part was the mistake and I couldn't smell much for like a week. I mean it did not hurt or anything, or even burn bad, compared to say, forgetting about a caustic soda drop on your skin, and 20 minutes later it's painful, and it's too late, cuz even if you wash it off it hurts like a bitch for 3 days. It just knocked my sense of smell out. After being through a lot of chemical jobs, handling things like like paint, caustic soda, nitric acid, hydrochloric acid, 100% glacial acetic acid, acetone rubdown of benches nightly, your sense of smell gets dulled to where it's easy to work with the stench on a worm farm, so it does have some positive sides to it too.
squid is not that full of ammonia. In fact if you really wanna be an environmentalist, save your own piss and the urea that's in it and convert it with a fuel cell to energy. But you don't piss enough to make up for your daily commnute, it's probably enough to get you to the grocery store and back in a smart car sized thingie, but that's it. The nitrogen (urea aka carbamide) in your piss is a waste product, and it represents less energy than your total body energy consumption during a day, or less than 2-3000 kcal, and your total bodily energy budget is a whole lot less than your daily commute energy budget, unless of course you're riding a bicycle and not a car, in which case your total body energy budget includes the bicycle energy budget. Bicycles are very energy efficient, but they are very very very tiring for commutes that last over 20-30 minutes, such as 50 minute commutes, especially in non flat terrain, where the downhill part is fun, but the uphill is a bitch, to where you have to get off and push the bike, walking. Gas bicycles might help, and in China there is an electric bicycle revolution, but I think their commute distances are much smaller on average than in the US, so in the US only gas bicycles have the range, electric ones run out of juice halfway there. Bicycles are also clumsy, and you can't take them inside the bus. If somebody like Steve Jobs or whoever designed Segway or the Rubik Erno cube, put their minds to it, they could come up with some really neatly foldable compact and light magnesium/titanium bikes that you can carry on your back inside a bus, and keep it with you in your seat. One of the key things then is small tire size and huge gear ratios to cut down on pedaling and still get a lot of distance out of it. But small radius wheels are also bad on rough terrain, they feel every tiny hole to the max, whereas a large wheel would bridge the pothole, and not get stuck in it.
Fertilizer plant explosions are not caused by ammonia, but nitrate, often as ammonium nitrate. Ammonia by itself is not explosive, in fact it won't even burn in air and will snuff out a fire. You need a fuel cell to efficiently use it.
PS. I just looked it up and the Wikipedia page says: "The combustion of ammonia in air is very difficult in the absence of a catalyst (such as platinum gauze), as the temperature of the flame is usually lower than the ignition temperature of the ammonia-air mixture. The flammable range of ammonia in air is 16–25%.[17]" PS PS. By the way that 16-25% flammable range is not 16-25% oxygen concentration range, but ammonia fuel concentration range, as ammonia easily burns in pure 100% oxygen. In 100% oxygen there no nitrogen diluent from the air to steal some off the combustion heat and drop the flame temperature, so the flame temperature is higher in oxygen, but it's not high enough in air to keep up a combustion flame.
Why reduce the population when you can run away into outer space, and make a lot of room for everybody there? It's gonna be a while before we run out of room in outer space, unlike down here on the surface of this planet. Maybe we just need to find ways to stack people on top of each other more efficiently. Like in a downtown area, when room gets expensive, everything grows upwards, towards the sky, and you get sky scrapers from it. Or even on chicken farms, the chicken sit on top of each other, like 4 layers high, and it's more cost efficient like that, less property tax needed (as I think property tax and real estate tax is the real reason why chickens have to suffer like that, it's not even real estate price, because there is a lot of that go go around in some places, but the continuous price of having too much real estate, and the taxes over it.) So in the future once we hit 10 billion people, we're gonna say, that's it people, the planet is full, we gotta build a 2nd floor throughout the planet, and put all the new people on the 2nd floor, til we hit 20 billion, then we need a 3rd floor, and so on, and people are not allowed to fuck and reproduce until they complete the 2nd floor to put the new people in their area. Farming becomes an issue though, as it's hard to see how a multistory farm can efficiently distribute and share sunlight to where the productivity of each floor does not drop to say 1/3, or by 66%, for each floor, but, by, say, only 10%.
Algae can fix their own nitrogen with energy derived from photosynthesis, so releasing more nitrogen into the environment does not create algal blooms, because their limiting nutrient is still gonna be limiting, which is usually phosphorous. That's the reason why phosphorous containing detergents are banned, to keep the algae starving for it and not blooming so much.
And by the way, if the pressurization cost is so high at the Haber Bosh process, they could do it in stages, just like desalination reverse osmosis that uses pressurization, I think there they use 3 stages or more to recoup pressure from stage to stage, and make the whole thing more economical. I know it would not save all the energy, but it could save some.
Also. I have a feeling these guys are lying about 2/3 energy of the Haber Bosch efficiency. Haber Bosch is so far the most energy efficient nitrogen fixation process we know of, and things like the Birkeland Eyde process, that use sparks and plasma to ionize and fixate nitrogen, even with a magnetically stretched coiled up plasma, don't come anywhere close in efficiency, but of course, over there the issue is the rate of quenching, as nitrous oxide that forms at high temperature due to entropy, reverses back to the stable states on cooling, unless it doesn't have time. So if these guys found a different way to activate nitrogen, and really control the reaction mechanisms, that would be neat.
Also, ammonia fuel cells are the future of the hydrogen economy, or even safe air flights that can be safely smacked into WTC towers, because ammonia does not burn with a flame in air, therefore won't melt a building's structural components, I mean it would probably kill and choke anyone present on the impact floor by dowsing them in liquid ammonia vapors, but at least the people above and below would be safe, and the building would not collapse. Ammonia is toxic, but not combustible or explosive. You win some, you lose some, with it. The most important one being carbon free, and carbon tax free, and greenhouse gas emission free, without needing to recycle anything, such as boric acid, or aluminum, silicon, lithium, magnesium, or even carbon dioxide. Though lithium, or boron, or even lithium borate, might find a way to beat ammonia even if needing recycling. Ammonia is a liquid/gas that can be cleanly pumped and emitted, with clear advantages over solids like coal, that need shoveling/feeding/ash handling or solution materials like lithium borate. Someone said borohydrides are so nasty that hydrazine is fun compared to them, and hydrazine is definitely nastier than ammonia.
Chlorate based explosives are easier to make than nitrate based ones. All you need is a bag of road salt, electricity, and a pot of hot water at 60C, and some carbon anodes that don't get chewed by the chlorine gas. I think matches are made from chlorates, but you have to shave a lot of match heads down to get any kind of punch. I remember when I was a kid we used to have fun making exploding noises from match heads. All you need is two male screw bolts and a female nut, about 3/8-1/2". You dp (double penetrate) the female nut from both sides with the two male bolts, and have match shavings between them. I mean you only screw one of them in halfway, shave the matches like into a cup, then screw the other one on very very tight, then loosen like a 10th of a turn, or don't even need to loosen it. Now you take a piece of plastic bag, or even a rag, and tie it to one of the bolt head ends, to make it into a tail, to create aerodynamic drag. with a piece of wire. About a 4 inch or 6 inch tail should suffice on a 1/2 inch set of bolts, that are like 12 inch total length when assembled. Pick it up by the tail, and swing it real high up in the air, so that when it comes down, it comes lined up nicely with the bare bolt aiming directly toward the cement or even asphalt sidewalk, and the plastic bag aerodynamic drag tail end pointing up. When it hits the ground, the contents explode from the sudden shock, and make a really nice, loud noise. Then you can go pick it up, unscrew it, reload, and do it again, but it does eat a lot of matches, like 3 shots out of a small matchbox of 50 matches. We also used to have fun with carbide, (calcium carbide) we stole from the welding acetylene generators from the nearby construction sites. You'd drop a small piece into a wine or beer bottle that the drunkard construction people would leave laying around empty, filled 3/4 with water, then cork it (back in the day they had corks), and wait til it goes pop, and shoots the cork up real high in the air. Then find the cork again, and re-cork it, and repeat. Not as fun as the double screwed match explosion, but it's cheaper when you're so broke, that you can't afford to buy matches under a communist regime, but the calcium carbide is free, you find in for free in the acetylene generators at the construction site. Of course you gotta go when the security guard is gone drinking his sane mind away at the nearby pub, and when he comes back all drunk, he can't run straight to catch you. We all knew the most important trick when running from the security guard if you accidentally bump into him while playing hide and seek, is to run, and when running, take sudden sharp turns, and being a 7 year old kid and him like a 50 year old, running in huge safety rubber boots compared to your tennis shoes, he has a lot of inertia and keeps running straight, and you can escape like that. But one time one of them conspired with a regular on the street person, who was walking her girls, and grabbed me, for him, and I couldn't run away, so I had to take him home, and my mother, to appease his anger, gave him some brandy shots. And all was good, and he wasn't angry at me from than on when he saw me from the distance, because he remembered the free alcohol, but he was still orchestrating ways in his mind to catch me again and get some more alcohol, and I, and my buddies, we had to be careful not to get caught. But we had creative ways to have fun and kill time after coming home from standing in line for bread for like a whole friggin hour, til the bread truck arrived. When you're a 7 year old, and there is a moblike crowd that starts stirring when the line breaks down (kind of like a crowder concert, where people are really excited and try to get close to the stage) sometimes you get lifted from two sides and your feet don't touch the ground, and get carried like that til you land on your feet again, and people acted like that because sometimes the ones at the end would be told that that's it, come back later, we're out of bread. So anyway, we also used to steal half inch
Thanks for telling me about that. I'm testing it out to see if I get newlines without inserting br html codes. Here it goes, let's see if it works: Tadaa!!!
PS. Oh man, it did work in the preview, but now I'm gonna lose that edge of insanity that adds a special annoying touch to my posts, and people might end up thinking I'm just another sane person. Now I'll have to try extra hard to post blocks of text, without hitting the enter key. Oh wait, that's how I post anyway, when I started posting here in April after like a 4 year break, I tried at first hitting Enter and formatting my text, just to watch it all flow together, and I was too lazy to add the br br html newline characters, so I just started posting like this. Now I'm too used to it, and love how the anti-terrorist FBI/CIA newbies that have to read through all this get annoyed and pissed, and sometimes bitch about it. It's like special stress testing for them, so they get used to their job not being always rain and sunshine when it comes to etiquette and proper behavior, and they gotta learn how to get past these things and not sweat the small stuff, before they can graduate and move onto more important and truly dangerous crazy people who, unlike me, they actually believe in what they say, and mean it, and don't know the meaning of sarcasm. I'm still dangerous with the way I talk, abusing free speech, but I have good excuses too. Or not. Oh well, this is Slashdot, and nobody is forced to read it, unless they want to, or somebody pays them to do it, and then it's like if you don't really want to do it, you can always try to find a different occupation for yourself. There, I made a nice big block of text again, on purpose, without newlines in it.
You must be a guy. Eww. Or maybe not, because only women get off on eating that crap. They say the Creator must be male, else sperm would taste like chocolate, or vanilla. But not many females care about silly things like Eulerian tours, so you must be a guy, after all.
There was a survey about color blindness earlier on/., and a fairly high percentage said they were color blind, in a percentage high enough to think that almost 100%, if not at least 70% or 80% of posters on here are male, as color blindness is very rare in females. A bug needs good color vision to find a flower with the compound eyes, also a monkey to estimate the ripeness of banana from a distance, but dogs are all color blind, so for a predator it may not be important to see ripeness, compared to motion, and color might get in the way. And of the sexes, the males are the more predatory or war-like, and color blindness may not make such a big difference. In particular back in the day I used to watch black and white TV just fine, no big deal, and even these days some porn pictures on the Internet are posted black and white, and to me they look just as good as the colored ones, as far as the things that matter in it are concerned. It's nice to have color, but a lot of sculptors of nude bodies, like ancient Greek nude ones, don't bother painting their sculptures some body color, and they look just fine and sexy as they are, colorless.
I'm a huge fan of having an actual pilot sit inside each plane, or even a body suit of the Mechwarrior game type, and not have too much artificial intelligence, not less but also not more than necessary. Just like Einstein said, a scientific theory should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. Also being able to drop back to full manual mode instead of fly by wire would be a nice feature, together with hand picking and choosing what radio frequencies of uv/infrared/microwave/uhf/sw to communicate on, or use as radar, or letting the plane go into auto mode and hop on all frequencies, or exclude some of them. In this day and age police uses laser radars, so it should not be that expensive to outfit a plane with like 100 of these distributed over the surface, laser LED's that can be automatically picked based on the direction of intended communication. or even manually in fall back mode, and in manual clumsy mode perhaps the cone spread of light beam would have to be very wide to be captured by the other plane. You can think of scenarios that get so manual that the other plane pilot can read the light flashes coming from his teammate as tee tee tah tah morse code signals with his own eyes, and they could be triggered manually by the other pilot. The worst part of any automation is not being able to drop back to robust, but slow speed manual mode, and a lot of automation fails miserably, and if not built modularly, like an old computer motherboard with slots where you can swap out defective sub units without having to understand how they work on the inside, sometimes the whole device is down for forever (having at least two swappable subunits for each function could be a good redundancy, or have spares on hand, and distributing functions into the old Unix philosophy of everything does one thing and does it very well, and then you hook them together to make a functioning whole, could be applied). I understand sometimes modularity is not possible, or it's too much overhead, it all comes down the economics, and a keen sense of profit, or punch per dollar invested, as neither no modularity or full modularity going out of control, may be the proper choice. Same with redundancy, too much redundancy is not money well spent, no redundancy may also not be money well spent. It all comes down to style sometimes, as humans have two eyeballs, redundant(but two gives stereo vision), two ears(two gives directional finding better than a single one that still gets some from the earlobe shape modulation by itself), two kidneys, two hands, but only one heart, or one liver. Also there has got to be a shit load of UAV's wasted in crashes, because of automation and complexity, but also because there is no pilot in them to be very responsible, who's able to drop back to manual mode, else he can't really be responsible for malfunctioning things he cannot control. But a UAV can pull high g-s that makes pilots faint, and could also be dispersed into loosely connected small particles that pass radar aimed at them, something not possible with a pilot.(There are these various acoustic absorber features in auditoriums that deaden sound, something similar with a lot of depth could be used as a radar absorbent skin, to where you don't have to pass the incoming wave all the way through the plane, just deep enough inside absorbing waveguide shapes for it to decay to very low levels and not echo back, and the various frequency absorption features could be stack on each other, as in black paint for uv and visible/ir absorber things/ terahertz absorber things / microwave absorbing features with aperture sizes the same as your satellite dish sensor and UHF absorber craters the size of your UHF antenna, so the plane looks like a giant golf ball with dimples in it, same for VHF, now you're talking VHF antenna sized dimples, and these features can be stacked on top of each other, as in absorption, not reflection at acute angles giving the low radar signature, together with increased dimpled golf-ball like aerodynamic performance from a turbul
I did not mean satellite GPS, but interplane relative positioning system, RPS, from a reference plane, or center of gravity of all planes, whatever. Friendly planes could be in constant radio/radar contact with each other, and know each other's positions, to where they could relay information about signals received, and use the distance between themselves in the computations to see better, just like radio astronomers looking at the same object across the globe get much better coordinated resolution than a single one by itself. Every plane might have to carry its own atomic clock, and take relativistic effects into consideration when it comes to syncing clocks and such. They would show up on their own radar screens as friendly, together with communication radio signals, and you can combine many frequencies to hop and both act as radar and communication channels at the same time, by listening to the radar echoes on a frequency they purposely exclude from the hopping sequences, until the return signal arrives. That's the easy radar, where you get to wait for a return, but there is also Doppler slight frequency shift effects that cost really serious money, but also measure speed of the target, and come up with an estimate of the next position arrangement of the swarm, and might be kept in mind as an option but not used due to cost reasons. The GPS satellites are too far away for accuracy, but each plane can act as a beacon, at a barely perceptible signal to noise ratio, that dynamically adjusts by counting how many frames are dropped, so the signal doesn't spread to the enemy miles away, but it's easily read within a few hundred yards of each other in the sky. When communicating of course you may need more signal to noise, than when just doing simple radar, and during radio silence, you may switch to directionally adjustable infrared or optical laser communication (by having an DAD detector like setup where, where you pick which LED you wanna shoot from instead of having to rotate something mechanically to aim at the friendly plane) , that does not spread all over the place to the enemy, but stays focused an localized, and in all cases excludes forward direction when stalking up, so stray laser beams don't accidentally get detected by the enemy. Also x-rays or uv-rays might have better decay characteristics in air, so you can use higher amplitudes locally, but if it misses a friendly plane, or the cone or radiation covering the plane is too wide so some of it passes around the friendly plane, just in case you have enemy detectors off to the side not just the forward attacking direction, it would be preferable that the optical or highly focused electromagnetic signal decays and doesn't travel for miles. And you could have a range of devices with various usable frequencies, from x-ray/uv/visible/infrared/terahertz/microwave/UHF/VHF/FM/SW/AM/LW radio frequencies, and pick and choose as you need. You may even hop from infrared to SW (that could be construed as some amateur radio stray signal bouncing off the ionosphere, and you would not be hopping frequencies there, but encode your information on top of some standard radio talk, as stenography) to radar microwave to terahertz ten minutes at a time, so whoever is listening would have radio silence on the other frequencies. Once you used a frequency for communication, and you give away your presence, you might as well get as much out of it as possible, so use to for both communication and radar, but I don't think you can get good radar out of SW, though UHF probably works decent, as UHF and VHF are what the main article topic is talking about, compared to higher frequency microwave. It's impossible to get radar out of AM and LW, unless you're looking at a zeppelin or carrier sized object, and it's not worth the effort. The enemy would have to be listening on ALL frequencies at the same time. Also, for instance, LW throughput is miserable, one Morse code word a minute sometimes, but it's the only thing that works universally for a device that has to function on a fighter plane, th
Jamming ability is always a good thing, but can be dangerous, because if it's coming from you, a fighterjet airplane, it's a simple form or radar, the enemy cut the radar emitters, and listen, and measure your signal triangulated, like cell phone towers measure cellphone position. You'd again need at least 2, or better 3, or better 4 enemy planes interacting via enough distance between them that the signal timing difference is enough to calculate the triangulated(if on same level) or more like tetrahedronated (any 3d position) position coming at them. The more planes in the enemy swarm, knowing the distance between themselves, the better the resolution, just like the more GPS satellites on sensors, the better the calculated resolution.
There is a way to get any wavelength out of any short piece of antenna, even much shorter than half wavelength or quarter wavelength that are ideal, with a coil that creates a longer characteristic length, as done with police car antennas at the base for semi-long wavelengths, or really done with am radio antennas, for huge wavelengths. But as you say accuracy drops, and for precise targeting, you'd need more than one plane interact, via a separation distance between them. You got two eyeballs, and every time I see people who have a really huge spacing between their eyes, and their eyeballs almost drop off at the edge of their face, I think they must have very good stereo and distance vision. Same goes with high performance binoculars, the eye-spacing is enlarged with prisms, or even radio astronomy things where receivers around the globe interact, and two or three of them can get a very good resolution, almost equivalent to as if the space between them was also filled up with radio receivers. So in this sense a key in long wave radar is interaction between 2 or 3 planes, and using the distance between them for more precision, like using the increased distance from a binocular with prisms for better vision. There is no such thing as true stealth, as far as we know it, in the radio-frequency sense, any object, like a fighterjet, is a huge size with a different impedance than free space, and reflects wavelengths that are halfwave of their overall size, no matter what kind of stealthing technology you use. Even in the 1st gulf war, when Saddam invaded Kuwait, there were for sale some Czech long wavelength radars, but there are standard radars that hillbillies use around the poorer Muslim world and places like Africa, and traditional funky shaped stealth technology works great against them, but not against the long wavelength ones, for which it's almost useless to use square shapes, and it's better to go back to aerodynamic shapes and speed, like the Blackbird plane used to be, non stealth, but so fast, that it outran any rocket shot at it. But it's very limited on range, very expensive on fuel, and lacks maneuverability, because it's aerodynamically very stable, and for best maneuverability you need highly unstable fast turning fly by wire planes. One exception to stealthing might be an airplane that you can divide up into tiny objects, so they pass a wave coming at them like Scipio passed Hannibal's elephants at the Battle of Zama, or like a wave breaking wall on a lake passes much of the waves if it has lots of large gaps, and the ratio of pass area to reflection area is high, and then it's harder to find an overall characteristic wavelength. But by their very presence, even the very small wave breaking pillars, that you would use as a loosely connected set of pieces to make out your UAV airplane that passes waves shot at it, even the small amount of pieces there modify the overall "dielectric constant" of free space, and create a disturbance in the 377 ohm impedance, and create a transmission-cable impedance mismatch like reflection, if they don't act like proper Ethernet or SCSI cable terminators, or anti-reflection coatings on a lens. There is a new field in physics, with negative dielectric constants, where, under certain conditions, you can make weird shapes that act and shape waves as if their dielectric constant were negative, and you could use those to balance out the average dielectric constant increase created by the parts of your "sieve-UAV-plane," but there is some really funky math involved, and I'm too stupid to comprehend it, and so is pretty much everybody else I know, or the whole military leadership of the country, but you don't have to comprehend how it works if it works, and you can find smart enough people to comprehend it. Also this negative impedance or negative dielectric constant behavior might be at some characteristic wavelength only, so you would have to sense what frequency beam is shot at you, and adjust the spacing or sieve-mesh of your UAV to match that, and then the game goes to simultaneo
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And by the way, LiI, lithium iodide, probably has a lower melting point and electrolytic decomposition temperature, than most of the other crap, like lithium chloride. Plus there may be aprotic polar solvents that really drop the melting point of it, but they might be different than the ones in lithium batteries, because at high temperature the molten lithium might attack the oxygen in the organic molecules. Similarly hexafluorophosphate may be unstable against molten lithium at high temperature, but any elemental atomic ion, such as iodide, is stable against any kind of attack. And the choices are not that many in elemental things, such as sodium sulfur battery uses sulfide, but for lithium selenide might be better, less bonding strength and better energy efficiency to electrolyze it back to lithium metal, but it's hard to get your hand on hydrogen selenide, or even to find a way to make selenium go into the selenide form. With iodine the standard way to make HI, hydroiodic acid, is through scrap iron and water, then distill with acid, and HI is a much stronger acid than HCl, muriatic acid, but it's electrolytic decomposition voltage is lower, so it's possible to have reactions that go forward based on acidity, yet they drive your electric energy costs into cheaper domain. Arsenide is another topic, but who wants to work around potential arsine, or even hydrogen selenide, and nitride should be a stronger bond than arsenide, unless the acidity says differently, just like iodine replaces chlorine, even though the bond strength is less. Telluride and antimonide are completely off the table, but sulfide and bromide might be considered. And then come the very complex ions, such as antimoniofluoride, but good luck finding something so very tightly bound that the lithium cannot go after the fluoride or oxygen bound in it. Maybe non-oxgyen or fluorine containing organic anions, that lithium has no interest in cracking to pieces, might work, but there are very few of sufficiently high carbanion or even azonion acidity and electronegativity aromatic compounds that might work.
Lithium is very special in that it does form a nitride, and does so at room temperature. There are very few elements that successfully form a nitride, including Li,Mg, but not Na(sodium). for instance. In fact the only binary nitrogen compound of sodium is sodium azide, NaN3, and a simple way to make elemental sodium in the lab is by heating sodium azide. The azide has much better long term storage properties than sodium metal, in a lab environment with small quantities, where bulk cost and energy efficiency is not a huge factor.
The colored people got out of hand in Chicago and cannot be contained, so the only thing Microsoft can do is help them stay dumb and blow their money on fancy things that are glittery but useless at the core. Like some of the buses public transports buy lately, the old school buses used to kick ass, but the new fancy shmancy ones, you can just look at them, and it's so obvious what a friggin maintenance nightmare and budget nightmare they must be, even if peddling some new envirofriendly bullcrap. The bank account is the first environment that needs to be made friendly, before everything else. It's like, people should not eat a beautiful deer but let it go on its way, but if they are really hungry, then go ahead, eat it. Fuck the environment, learn to live. Them old buses polluting the world full of carbon dioxide were not that much worse when the whole city is headed the way of Detroit, straight into bankruptcy. Who's got money to blow on envirofriendly crap? Shenzen China, yeah, cuz they are rich. What we need to learn in the US is how to outcompete Shenzen, at what they do best. We used to sell something for $10, but Chinese competition sells it for $0.50, so we throw our hands up, go on welfare, and cry all day about unable to compete with unfair competition, they don't have OSHA, EPA, insurance, housing and the like that we have to pay, so we can't sell the stuff for $0.50. I say fuck that. Find a way to put a "Made in USA" label on it and sell it for $0.49 next to the "Made in China" stuff at Dollar General or Dollar Tree, or even Walmart. When I buy a shirt, at Walmart, for $6.99 for a gorgeous piece, that says "Made in Bangladesh," I think there should be another shirt right next to it, that's even better, selling for $5.99 that says "Made in Boston, USA." Why can't they make 5.99 shirts in Boston USA? Well, let's see, in Bangladesh they don't have to pay Obamacare, they don't have to pay huge housing cost, they don't have to pay the huge commute cost, they don't have to pay the huge taxes, they don't have to pay .. etc.,etc., etc. What the fuck happened to the American worker being uncompetitive in the global market place? Oh wait, we're supposed to turn into the intellectual property capital of the world, all you gotta do is take the economic base overseas, and let people start their own businesses, with the only option being intellectual property: such as songs, videos, pictures, books, software, the initiative coming at you straight from Microsoft and gang. And once we can get everyone in the Land of the Free agree to intellectual property, Da Man is gonna hog all thoughts like he hogs all housing, and collect. You will pay a thinking fee, on any thoughts you have, because Da Man successfully took over all possible intellectual property thoughts, unless you can prove that you can meditate and have your mind go completely blank, and then you're excused for those minutes or hours you spend meditating, but in the rest of your life, you better pay off. We don't own you, slavery is illegal, but we own your thoughts. Pay up bitch.
I for one picked up a new motto lately : "live insurance free or die." Fuck all this mandatory insurance. Like mandatory gambling, I know how to gamble right, not the government telling me what bets I should make. Fucking maffiozos walking into a pub selling business protection insurance - 50% of your profits in my pocket. Fuck you guys, says the owner. Next day there is a bomb exploding in the pub, and the owner told, see, you should have bought that business protection insurance. Now it's like I have to fight tooth and nail not to get sick, from the purposeful infections and x-rays, and have to watch ultra careful when I drive for all these trap situations that have multiplied a lot since I stopped buying car insurance too. I used to have no problem with car insurance, but that's my answer to mandatory health insurance: "live free or die." Insurance free that is.
When I was growing up we mostly had blackboards and chalk, pens/pencils and notebooks, and textbooks. And a lot of the indian and asian students that the postgrad classes in the US were flooded with when I was in college as an undergrad, that's how they grew up, with black chalkboards (or sometimes green) and white chalk.
Though when the school got an 286 IBM AT, I'd be playing Simcity on it a lot, or more like somebody would be playing it and the rest watch. But when it comes to quality education, sometimes a pencil and a piece of paper is more robust than a computer. I for one could not imagine tutoring math to somebody on a computer, instead of a pen and paper, it would only get in the way, the only thing to tutor on a computer is how to use a computer, not how to get your shit done in daily life. Like how to look up math information - the computer is one way, the school library books on shelves another - but when it comes to teaching, and explaining, even the paper book or the computer just get in the way compared to a pencil/pen and piece of paper.
I 2nd that.
Because private schools are not full of retarded children.
When I tutored math in college in the 90's I got paid $5/hr. And I got drained and tired in 3 evening hrs. It wasn't really worth it as a job, it did not really cover the living expenses. I think these teachers that get paid so much do so because they have to work with retards, and the harder the work the more you get paid, and even then it's not worth the effort sometimes. Some things money just can't buy. I was lucky to work with really smart subjects so that's why I must have been paid so little.
Btw, I don't know why, but as soon as I looked at Rahm Emmanuel's photo, it occurred to me that he is very smart, good sense of humor, but he's gay. At least he's not coming out of the closet, but there may be more to the Chicago gang's pushing same sex marriages than just "let's everybody be nice to each other, live and let live." I for one don't support same sex marriage, and can't stand homosexual males (I mean I can work with them or coexist with them as long as they act normal, but I don't wanna hear any of their stuff, or see them flirt), and I absolutely loooove lesbians, whether they are bisexual or they deny me and I only get to watch, or even if they do other guys and each other but deny me, but let me watch, I love that shit. I'm a masochist. I also like jobs that are mildly painful, as long as no permanent harm is done, and the pain is not too great. I think you need to be mildly masochist and get off on the pain and suffering involved to be really good at any job, and get satisfaction from the endurance.
Don't get too excited over it. They are zapping iron and water particles with electric, and they probably detected some bound nitrogen in the water, but the energy consumption was huge. In order to make any news release that has any point, they are guesstimating that long term they can drop the price to 2/3 of Haber-Bosch. I wanna see that. In fact I take two electric wires, make them spark, even an empty butane lighter, and keep sparking the flint stone on it, or two pieces of granite smacked together, sparking, I can create stinky air that's bound nitrogen, and dissolves into a cup of water nearby, and voila, bound nitrogen. But the cost is huge. So is the cost of getting nitrogen through the calcium cyanamide process, or Birkeland-Eyde process, or just simple cyanide making ways, such as soda ash plus charcoal melted down with nitrogen blown through it in the presence of iron dust. Those are all expensive ways to make nitrogen, and so is probably this method. First of all they lack a good molecular nitrogen binding catalyst, though reduced iron itself is the Haber-Bosch catalyst of choice. The triple bond in molecular nitrogen is extremely strong, and it takes a lot of finesse to squeeze it into something active, with low activation energy at low temperatures, which then reacts with hydrogen and oxygen. Life uses some molybdenum iron sulfur centered extremely complex enzymes, and chemists have been able to also bind some at room temperature, using I think Ruthenium based catalysts, but once it's bound and reacted, there is no regeneration reaction, or maybe it can go 2 or 3 cycles and then the catalyst is ruined, and it's expensive to recycle separately into new catalyst. So far.
However, there was a patent from the 70's that caught my eye. Namely lithium metal in dry air, will form lithium oxide on the surface, however, going under that there is a continuous corrosion that creates nearly pure Li3N, lithium nitride. Now the cost of lithium regeneration from hydroxide is huge, so I had this idea of not reacting it with water, but some organic hydride, more weakly protic than water, such as methanol, if it reacts, then electrolyzing back the lithium metal, or winning it back with something like sodium, as shown in the patent for lithium borohydride creation via sodium borohydride and methyl borate pathway. Methanol is probably not the correct choice, but there might be something that makes the whole thing energy efficient. If nothing else I was thinking about this method of converting windmill energy into fertilizer, on a yeoman farmer scale, as a yeoman farmer cannot afford 200 atmospheres (200x14.7psi~3000 psi) and vessels that can withstand it, but you can make lithium in a pot at atmospheric pressure such as electrolytically, on very small scales, even if you have to waste a lot of energy by reacting it with water, and recovering lithium metal from the lithium hydroxide that forms.
MSDS's are often useless for anything but the very basic informations. You're better off reading some chemistry book from 1850 about a material, to learn to know it, and understand it, than from an MSDS. And MSDS is only there to cover a corporation's ass from lawsuits, as they are always unrealistic, like with a bar of soap they might say you wear full protective clothing, rubber gloves, steel toe shoes, rubber apron, faceshield, safety glasses, ear protection, and hardhats. Almost any chemical place or even metal processing place is anal retentive on safety, and they often won't let you wear tennis shoes. There is a whole lot of difference in how tired you get from simply what kind of shoes you wear, if you're on your feet all day, and being tired is the number one safety issue ever, making the wrong decisions, making mistakes, and human error. Steel toe shoes with stupid metatarsals are ridiculous when you could dance around in comfy tennis shoes just fine. It's all about covering the corporate butt from getting fucked by hungry lawyers, who think everything is relative, it's all just a matter of making money.
I've got hit by ammonia one time. I had to lift a bucket of fully concentrated liquid ammonia, into a chemical plant electrolysis tank, so I open the lid, reach down, take a deep breath, lift and dump. The take a deep breath part was the mistake and I couldn't smell much for like a week. I mean it did not hurt or anything, or even burn bad, compared to say, forgetting about a caustic soda drop on your skin, and 20 minutes later it's painful, and it's too late, cuz even if you wash it off it hurts like a bitch for 3 days. It just knocked my sense of smell out. After being through a lot of chemical jobs, handling things like like paint, caustic soda, nitric acid, hydrochloric acid, 100% glacial acetic acid, acetone rubdown of benches nightly, your sense of smell gets dulled to where it's easy to work with the stench on a worm farm, so it does have some positive sides to it too.
squid is not that full of ammonia. In fact if you really wanna be an environmentalist, save your own piss and the urea that's in it and convert it with a fuel cell to energy. But you don't piss enough to make up for your daily commnute, it's probably enough to get you to the grocery store and back in a smart car sized thingie, but that's it. The nitrogen (urea aka carbamide) in your piss is a waste product, and it represents less energy than your total body energy consumption during a day, or less than 2-3000 kcal, and your total bodily energy budget is a whole lot less than your daily commute energy budget, unless of course you're riding a bicycle and not a car, in which case your total body energy budget includes the bicycle energy budget. Bicycles are very energy efficient, but they are very very very tiring for commutes that last over 20-30 minutes, such as 50 minute commutes, especially in non flat terrain, where the downhill part is fun, but the uphill is a bitch, to where you have to get off and push the bike, walking. Gas bicycles might help, and in China there is an electric bicycle revolution, but I think their commute distances are much smaller on average than in the US, so in the US only gas bicycles have the range, electric ones run out of juice halfway there. Bicycles are also clumsy, and you can't take them inside the bus. If somebody like Steve Jobs or whoever designed Segway or the Rubik Erno cube, put their minds to it, they could come up with some really neatly foldable compact and light magnesium/titanium bikes that you can carry on your back inside a bus, and keep it with you in your seat. One of the key things then is small tire size and huge gear ratios to cut down on pedaling and still get a lot of distance out of it. But small radius wheels are also bad on rough terrain, they feel every tiny hole to the max, whereas a large wheel would bridge the pothole, and not get stuck in it.
Fertilizer plant explosions are not caused by ammonia, but nitrate, often as ammonium nitrate. Ammonia by itself is not explosive, in fact it won't even burn in air and will snuff out a fire. You need a fuel cell to efficiently use it.
PS. I just looked it up and the Wikipedia page says:
"The combustion of ammonia in air is very difficult in the absence of a catalyst (such as platinum gauze), as the temperature of the flame is usually lower than the ignition temperature of the ammonia-air mixture. The flammable range of ammonia in air is 16–25%.[17]"
PS PS. By the way that 16-25% flammable range is not 16-25% oxygen concentration range, but ammonia fuel concentration range, as ammonia easily burns in pure 100% oxygen. In 100% oxygen there no nitrogen diluent from the air to steal some off the combustion heat and drop the flame temperature, so the flame temperature is higher in oxygen, but it's not high enough in air to keep up a combustion flame.
Why reduce the population when you can run away into outer space, and make a lot of room for everybody there? It's gonna be a while before we run out of room in outer space, unlike down here on the surface of this planet. Maybe we just need to find ways to stack people on top of each other more efficiently. Like in a downtown area, when room gets expensive, everything grows upwards, towards the sky, and you get sky scrapers from it. Or even on chicken farms, the chicken sit on top of each other, like 4 layers high, and it's more cost efficient like that, less property tax needed (as I think property tax and real estate tax is the real reason why chickens have to suffer like that, it's not even real estate price, because there is a lot of that go go around in some places, but the continuous price of having too much real estate, and the taxes over it.) So in the future once we hit 10 billion people, we're gonna say, that's it people, the planet is full, we gotta build a 2nd floor throughout the planet, and put all the new people on the 2nd floor, til we hit 20 billion, then we need a 3rd floor, and so on, and people are not allowed to fuck and reproduce until they complete the 2nd floor to put the new people in their area. Farming becomes an issue though, as it's hard to see how a multistory farm can efficiently distribute and share sunlight to where the productivity of each floor does not drop to say 1/3, or by 66%, for each floor, but, by, say, only 10%.
Algae can fix their own nitrogen with energy derived from photosynthesis, so releasing more nitrogen into the environment does not create algal blooms, because their limiting nutrient is still gonna be limiting, which is usually phosphorous. That's the reason why phosphorous containing detergents are banned, to keep the algae starving for it and not blooming so much.
And by the way, if the pressurization cost is so high at the Haber Bosh process, they could do it in stages, just like desalination reverse osmosis that uses pressurization, I think there they use 3 stages or more to recoup pressure from stage to stage, and make the whole thing more economical. I know it would not save all the energy, but it could save some.
Also. I have a feeling these guys are lying about 2/3 energy of the Haber Bosch efficiency. Haber Bosch is so far the most energy efficient nitrogen fixation process we know of, and things like the Birkeland Eyde process, that use sparks and plasma to ionize and fixate nitrogen, even with a magnetically stretched coiled up plasma, don't come anywhere close in efficiency, but of course, over there the issue is the rate of quenching, as nitrous oxide that forms at high temperature due to entropy, reverses back to the stable states on cooling, unless it doesn't have time. So if these guys found a different way to activate nitrogen, and really control the reaction mechanisms, that would be neat.
Also, ammonia fuel cells are the future of the hydrogen economy, or even safe air flights that can be safely smacked into WTC towers, because ammonia does not burn with a flame in air, therefore won't melt a building's structural components, I mean it would probably kill and choke anyone present on the impact floor by dowsing them in liquid ammonia vapors, but at least the people above and below would be safe, and the building would not collapse. Ammonia is toxic, but not combustible or explosive. You win some, you lose some, with it. The most important one being carbon free, and carbon tax free, and greenhouse gas emission free, without needing to recycle anything, such as boric acid, or aluminum, silicon, lithium, magnesium, or even carbon dioxide. Though lithium, or boron, or even lithium borate, might find a way to beat ammonia even if needing recycling. Ammonia is a liquid/gas that can be cleanly pumped and emitted, with clear advantages over solids like coal, that need shoveling/feeding/ash handling or solution materials like lithium borate. Someone said borohydrides are so nasty that hydrazine is fun compared to them, and hydrazine is definitely nastier than ammonia.
Chlorate based explosives are easier to make than nitrate based ones. All you need is a bag of road salt, electricity, and a pot of hot water at 60C, and some carbon anodes that don't get chewed by the chlorine gas. I think matches are made from chlorates, but you have to shave a lot of match heads down to get any kind of punch. I remember when I was a kid we used to have fun making exploding noises from match heads. All you need is two male screw bolts and a female nut, about 3/8-1/2". You dp (double penetrate) the female nut from both sides with the two male bolts, and have match shavings between them. I mean you only screw one of them in halfway, shave the matches like into a cup, then screw the other one on very very tight, then loosen like a 10th of a turn, or don't even need to loosen it. Now you take a piece of plastic bag, or even a rag, and tie it to one of the bolt head ends, to make it into a tail, to create aerodynamic drag. with a piece of wire. About a 4 inch or 6 inch tail should suffice on a 1/2 inch set of bolts, that are like 12 inch total length when assembled. Pick it up by the tail, and swing it real high up in the air, so that when it comes down, it comes lined up nicely with the bare bolt aiming directly toward the cement or even asphalt sidewalk, and the plastic bag aerodynamic drag tail end pointing up. When it hits the ground, the contents explode from the sudden shock, and make a really nice, loud noise. Then you can go pick it up, unscrew it, reload, and do it again, but it does eat a lot of matches, like 3 shots out of a small matchbox of 50 matches. We also used to have fun with carbide, (calcium carbide) we stole from the welding acetylene generators from the nearby construction sites. You'd drop a small piece into a wine or beer bottle that the drunkard construction people would leave laying around empty, filled 3/4 with water, then cork it (back in the day they had corks), and wait til it goes pop, and shoots the cork up real high in the air. Then find the cork again, and re-cork it, and repeat. Not as fun as the double screwed match explosion, but it's cheaper when you're so broke, that you can't afford to buy matches under a communist regime, but the calcium carbide is free, you find in for free in the acetylene generators at the construction site. Of course you gotta go when the security guard is gone drinking his sane mind away at the nearby pub, and when he comes back all drunk, he can't run straight to catch you. We all knew the most important trick when running from the security guard if you accidentally bump into him while playing hide and seek, is to run, and when running, take sudden sharp turns, and being a 7 year old kid and him like a 50 year old, running in huge safety rubber boots compared to your tennis shoes, he has a lot of inertia and keeps running straight, and you can escape like that. But one time one of them conspired with a regular on the street person, who was walking her girls, and grabbed me, for him, and I couldn't run away, so I had to take him home, and my mother, to appease his anger, gave him some brandy shots. And all was good, and he wasn't angry at me from than on when he saw me from the distance, because he remembered the free alcohol, but he was still orchestrating ways in his mind to catch me again and get some more alcohol, and I, and my buddies, we had to be careful not to get caught. But we had creative ways to have fun and kill time after coming home from standing in line for bread for like a whole friggin hour, til the bread truck arrived. When you're a 7 year old, and there is a moblike crowd that starts stirring when the line breaks down (kind of like a crowder concert, where people are really excited and try to get close to the stage) sometimes you get lifted from two sides and your feet don't touch the ground, and get carried like that til you land on your feet again, and people acted like that because sometimes the ones at the end would be told that that's it, come back later, we're out of bread. So anyway, we also used to steal half inch
Thanks for telling me about that.
I'm testing it out to see if I get newlines without inserting br html codes.
Here it goes,
let's see if it works:
Tadaa!!!
PS. Oh man, it did work in the preview, but now I'm gonna lose that edge of insanity that adds a special annoying touch to my posts, and people might end up thinking I'm just another sane person. Now I'll have to try extra hard to post blocks of text, without hitting the enter key. Oh wait, that's how I post anyway, when I started posting here in April after like a 4 year break, I tried at first hitting Enter and formatting my text, just to watch it all flow together, and I was too lazy to add the br br html newline characters, so I just started posting like this. Now I'm too used to it, and love how the anti-terrorist FBI/CIA newbies that have to read through all this get annoyed and pissed, and sometimes bitch about it. It's like special stress testing for them, so they get used to their job not being always rain and sunshine when it comes to etiquette and proper behavior, and they gotta learn how to get past these things and not sweat the small stuff, before they can graduate and move onto more important and truly dangerous crazy people who, unlike me, they actually believe in what they say, and mean it, and don't know the meaning of sarcasm. I'm still dangerous with the way I talk, abusing free speech, but I have good excuses too. Or not. Oh well, this is Slashdot, and nobody is forced to read it, unless they want to, or somebody pays them to do it, and then it's like if you don't really want to do it, you can always try to find a different occupation for yourself. There, I made a nice big block of text again, on purpose, without newlines in it.
You must be a guy. Eww. Or maybe not, because only women get off on eating that crap. They say the Creator must be male, else sperm would taste like chocolate, or vanilla. But not many females care about silly things like Eulerian tours, so you must be a guy, after all.
/., and a fairly high percentage said they were color blind, in a percentage high enough to think that almost 100%, if not at least 70% or 80% of posters on here are male, as color blindness is very rare in females. A bug needs good color vision to find a flower with the compound eyes, also a monkey to estimate the ripeness of banana from a distance, but dogs are all color blind, so for a predator it may not be important to see ripeness, compared to motion, and color might get in the way. And of the sexes, the males are the more predatory or war-like, and color blindness may not make such a big difference. In particular back in the day I used to watch black and white TV just fine, no big deal, and even these days some porn pictures on the Internet are posted black and white, and to me they look just as good as the colored ones, as far as the things that matter in it are concerned. It's nice to have color, but a lot of sculptors of nude bodies, like ancient Greek nude ones, don't bother painting their sculptures some body color, and they look just fine and sexy as they are, colorless.
There was a survey about color blindness earlier on
You must be a woman.
I'm a huge fan of having an actual pilot sit inside each plane, or even a body suit of the Mechwarrior game type, and not have too much artificial intelligence, not less but also not more than necessary. Just like Einstein said, a scientific theory should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. Also being able to drop back to full manual mode instead of fly by wire would be a nice feature, together with hand picking and choosing what radio frequencies of uv/infrared/microwave/uhf/sw to communicate on, or use as radar, or letting the plane go into auto mode and hop on all frequencies, or exclude some of them. In this day and age police uses laser radars, so it should not be that expensive to outfit a plane with like 100 of these distributed over the surface, laser LED's that can be automatically picked based on the direction of intended communication. or even manually in fall back mode, and in manual clumsy mode perhaps the cone spread of light beam would have to be very wide to be captured by the other plane. You can think of scenarios that get so manual that the other plane pilot can read the light flashes coming from his teammate as tee tee tah tah morse code signals with his own eyes, and they could be triggered manually by the other pilot. The worst part of any automation is not being able to drop back to robust, but slow speed manual mode, and a lot of automation fails miserably, and if not built modularly, like an old computer motherboard with slots where you can swap out defective sub units without having to understand how they work on the inside, sometimes the whole device is down for forever (having at least two swappable subunits for each function could be a good redundancy, or have spares on hand, and distributing functions into the old Unix philosophy of everything does one thing and does it very well, and then you hook them together to make a functioning whole, could be applied). I understand sometimes modularity is not possible, or it's too much overhead, it all comes down the economics, and a keen sense of profit, or punch per dollar invested, as neither no modularity or full modularity going out of control, may be the proper choice. Same with redundancy, too much redundancy is not money well spent, no redundancy may also not be money well spent. It all comes down to style sometimes, as humans have two eyeballs, redundant(but two gives stereo vision), two ears(two gives directional finding better than a single one that still gets some from the earlobe shape modulation by itself), two kidneys, two hands, but only one heart, or one liver. Also there has got to be a shit load of UAV's wasted in crashes, because of automation and complexity, but also because there is no pilot in them to be very responsible, who's able to drop back to manual mode, else he can't really be responsible for malfunctioning things he cannot control. But a UAV can pull high g-s that makes pilots faint, and could also be dispersed into loosely connected small particles that pass radar aimed at them, something not possible with a pilot.(There are these various acoustic absorber features in auditoriums that deaden sound, something similar with a lot of depth could be used as a radar absorbent skin, to where you don't have to pass the incoming wave all the way through the plane, just deep enough inside absorbing waveguide shapes for it to decay to very low levels and not echo back, and the various frequency absorption features could be stack on each other, as in black paint for uv and visible /ir absorber things/ terahertz absorber things / microwave absorbing features with aperture sizes the same as your satellite dish sensor and UHF absorber craters the size of your UHF antenna, so the plane looks like a giant golf ball with dimples in it, same for VHF, now you're talking VHF antenna sized dimples, and these features can be stacked on top of each other, as in absorption, not reflection at acute angles giving the low radar signature, together with increased dimpled golf-ball like aerodynamic performance from a turbul
I did not mean satellite GPS, but interplane relative positioning system, RPS, from a reference plane, or center of gravity of all planes, whatever. Friendly planes could be in constant radio/radar contact with each other, and know each other's positions, to where they could relay information about signals received, and use the distance between themselves in the computations to see better, just like radio astronomers looking at the same object across the globe get much better coordinated resolution than a single one by itself. Every plane might have to carry its own atomic clock, and take relativistic effects into consideration when it comes to syncing clocks and such. They would show up on their own radar screens as friendly, together with communication radio signals, and you can combine many frequencies to hop and both act as radar and communication channels at the same time, by listening to the radar echoes on a frequency they purposely exclude from the hopping sequences, until the return signal arrives. That's the easy radar, where you get to wait for a return, but there is also Doppler slight frequency shift effects that cost really serious money, but also measure speed of the target, and come up with an estimate of the next position arrangement of the swarm, and might be kept in mind as an option but not used due to cost reasons. The GPS satellites are too far away for accuracy, but each plane can act as a beacon, at a barely perceptible signal to noise ratio, that dynamically adjusts by counting how many frames are dropped, so the signal doesn't spread to the enemy miles away, but it's easily read within a few hundred yards of each other in the sky. When communicating of course you may need more signal to noise, than when just doing simple radar, and during radio silence, you may switch to directionally adjustable infrared or optical laser communication (by having an DAD detector like setup where, where you pick which LED you wanna shoot from instead of having to rotate something mechanically to aim at the friendly plane) , that does not spread all over the place to the enemy, but stays focused an localized, and in all cases excludes forward direction when stalking up, so stray laser beams don't accidentally get detected by the enemy. Also x-rays or uv-rays might have better decay characteristics in air, so you can use higher amplitudes locally, but if it misses a friendly plane, or the cone or radiation covering the plane is too wide so some of it passes around the friendly plane, just in case you have enemy detectors off to the side not just the forward attacking direction, it would be preferable that the optical or highly focused electromagnetic signal decays and doesn't travel for miles. And you could have a range of devices with various usable frequencies, from x-ray/uv/visible/infrared/terahertz/microwave/UHF/VHF/FM/SW/AM/LW radio frequencies, and pick and choose as you need. You may even hop from infrared to SW (that could be construed as some amateur radio stray signal bouncing off the ionosphere, and you would not be hopping frequencies there, but encode your information on top of some standard radio talk, as stenography) to radar microwave to terahertz ten minutes at a time, so whoever is listening would have radio silence on the other frequencies. Once you used a frequency for communication, and you give away your presence, you might as well get as much out of it as possible, so use to for both communication and radar, but I don't think you can get good radar out of SW, though UHF probably works decent, as UHF and VHF are what the main article topic is talking about, compared to higher frequency microwave. It's impossible to get radar out of AM and LW, unless you're looking at a zeppelin or carrier sized object, and it's not worth the effort. The enemy would have to be listening on ALL frequencies at the same time. Also, for instance, LW throughput is miserable, one Morse code word a minute sometimes, but it's the only thing that works universally for a device that has to function on a fighter plane, th
What he means is get out from your mother's basement and see the sunlight outside.
Having windows on a rotating cylinder space station might just be simply annoying, if there is a sundown and sunup every 3 minutes.
On demand jamming ability is a good way to draw fire though from a pilot in dire straits, even if you invite an attack on yourself with it.
Jamming ability is always a good thing, but can be dangerous, because if it's coming from you, a fighterjet airplane, it's a simple form or radar, the enemy cut the radar emitters, and listen, and measure your signal triangulated, like cell phone towers measure cellphone position. You'd again need at least 2, or better 3, or better 4 enemy planes interacting via enough distance between them that the signal timing difference is enough to calculate the triangulated(if on same level) or more like tetrahedronated (any 3d position) position coming at them. The more planes in the enemy swarm, knowing the distance between themselves, the better the resolution, just like the more GPS satellites on sensors, the better the calculated resolution.
There is a way to get any wavelength out of any short piece of antenna, even much shorter than half wavelength or quarter wavelength that are ideal, with a coil that creates a longer characteristic length, as done with police car antennas at the base for semi-long wavelengths, or really done with am radio antennas, for huge wavelengths. But as you say accuracy drops, and for precise targeting, you'd need more than one plane interact, via a separation distance between them. You got two eyeballs, and every time I see people who have a really huge spacing between their eyes, and their eyeballs almost drop off at the edge of their face, I think they must have very good stereo and distance vision. Same goes with high performance binoculars, the eye-spacing is enlarged with prisms, or even radio astronomy things where receivers around the globe interact, and two or three of them can get a very good resolution, almost equivalent to as if the space between them was also filled up with radio receivers. So in this sense a key in long wave radar is interaction between 2 or 3 planes, and using the distance between them for more precision, like using the increased distance from a binocular with prisms for better vision. There is no such thing as true stealth, as far as we know it, in the radio-frequency sense, any object, like a fighterjet, is a huge size with a different impedance than free space, and reflects wavelengths that are halfwave of their overall size, no matter what kind of stealthing technology you use. Even in the 1st gulf war, when Saddam invaded Kuwait, there were for sale some Czech long wavelength radars, but there are standard radars that hillbillies use around the poorer Muslim world and places like Africa, and traditional funky shaped stealth technology works great against them, but not against the long wavelength ones, for which it's almost useless to use square shapes, and it's better to go back to aerodynamic shapes and speed, like the Blackbird plane used to be, non stealth, but so fast, that it outran any rocket shot at it. But it's very limited on range, very expensive on fuel, and lacks maneuverability, because it's aerodynamically very stable, and for best maneuverability you need highly unstable fast turning fly by wire planes. One exception to stealthing might be an airplane that you can divide up into tiny objects, so they pass a wave coming at them like Scipio passed Hannibal's elephants at the Battle of Zama, or like a wave breaking wall on a lake passes much of the waves if it has lots of large gaps, and the ratio of pass area to reflection area is high, and then it's harder to find an overall characteristic wavelength. But by their very presence, even the very small wave breaking pillars, that you would use as a loosely connected set of pieces to make out your UAV airplane that passes waves shot at it, even the small amount of pieces there modify the overall "dielectric constant" of free space, and create a disturbance in the 377 ohm impedance, and create a transmission-cable impedance mismatch like reflection, if they don't act like proper Ethernet or SCSI cable terminators, or anti-reflection coatings on a lens. There is a new field in physics, with negative dielectric constants, where, under certain conditions, you can make weird shapes that act and shape waves as if their dielectric constant were negative, and you could use those to balance out the average dielectric constant increase created by the parts of your "sieve-UAV-plane," but there is some really funky math involved, and I'm too stupid to comprehend it, and so is pretty much everybody else I know, or the whole military leadership of the country, but you don't have to comprehend how it works if it works, and you can find smart enough people to comprehend it. Also this negative impedance or negative dielectric constant behavior might be at some characteristic wavelength only, so you would have to sense what frequency beam is shot at you, and adjust the spacing or sieve-mesh of your UAV to match that, and then the game goes to simultaneo