Both sets of wings have to be strong enough to act like wings- that requires spars and stuff that are usually run through the center of lift. That makes it difficult to fit in stuff like people and cargo.
You can't sweep the wings at your typical 20 to 40 degree angle, which limits your top speed in either mode.
You can't have wings with the usual asymettrical front-back tapers, limiting your lift and lift/drag characteristics.
You can't have a tail, which makes stability and control very difficult.
Except the 5.5GHz may not be all that fast, as the Z-line of CPUs are the old IBM 360 instruction set, which is is so large, complex, and baroque that it is mostly usually implemented through a thick layer of microcode.
So 5.5GHz may be the speed of the microcode level, the actual "machine instructions" may be a considerable sub-multiple of that.
You left out a few prefixes of "million" and "milli", making your analysis way off, at first. There are 30 million cubic meters per sec of gulf stream flow. there are 3 milligrams of Uranium per cubic meter of seawater. So that's 90 Kilos of Uranium per second.
But you're unlikely to be able to intercept more than a thousandth of the gulf stream, so we're back to 90 g per second. the goofs cancel out!
". The recent admission by the TerraPower group that they decided "to move fuel through the burn wave instead of having the burn wave move through the fuel" is an implicit acknowledgment that they have not found a true TWR solution. "
Their first proposed reactor, which they showed off on their web site for over a year, violated all the basic rules of reactor flux, geometry, and physics. You can't get nuclea material to burn down, like a cigarette, due to basic geometry and entropy. A totally wacko concept that no real nuclear engineer would entertain, not for a minute.
Indeed. I've been parachuted in to several companies with major software issues.
Three had avoided even starting a migration from hardware and databases that hadn't been supported in a decade or more.
Another placehad no concept of file locking or threading, or QA, and was using 8 different programming languages on just one project.
Two companies that handled 80,000 to 300,000 transactions a day did not have any way of simulating input or comparing the input to output.
One company that depended on several million TCP/IP connections a day had no idea that TCP/IP data might not all arrive in one packet.
Another place whose business was dependent on several custom fonts would not believe the veracity of both the Postscript and TrueType font verifiers when they said "your font has 488 serious errors".
About 3/4 of the places had not a clue what SQL injection was and how they were vulnerable.
The quality of the stuff out there is just horrible.
The source-code ripoff is a ridiculous starting point. CP/M was largely written in PL/M, Intel's quasi high level PL/I-like language. QDOS was written in X86 assembly language. There is no possibel pathway between the two, unless you posit that Tim Patterson somehow got a hold of the PL/M source code, and played the role of a super-optimizing cross-compiler. Ridiculous.
A few geek-related pages where I have intimate knowledge of the reality, quite often the Wikipedia page is way, way, way off.
And of course if you make an edit, saying "I WAS THERE, I SPENT 3 YEARS working with that thingy, I HAVE SIX OF THEM IN MY ATTIC", your edit gets removed within an hour, time and again.
Looks to me like that Sun is DANGEROUS, exposing you to about 3,000 times more energy per unit time, for about 110,000 times longer, and with individual photons 500,000 times more energetic.
The 900MHz radio wave photons are so weak they can't excite any atom to any higher energy level, or cause any kind of chemical change, not by a factor of 1000 or more.
A ridiculouos idea, if you're an electrical engineer, for many reasons:
(1) The noise on the wire, for reasonable values of resistors and bandwidth, is down in the low microvolts. If the cable is unshielded, it's going to pick up several microvolts of radio signals per foot. Even if it's really well shielded, we're still talking microvolts per kilometer.
(2) Eve can put a probe signal on the wire, it just has to be random noise. Alice and Bob have no way of proving that a small spike of random noise, only half a standard deviation above the average, isn't perfectly fine Johnson noise coming from the other end. Eve knows the amplitude of the noise she is putting on the wire, so she can subtract that amount, and the difference reveals the values of the resistors.
(3) For any moderately long wire, in the kilometer range, there is a time delay, allowing Eve to inject short bursts of noise and get the resistor info from each end coming back, spread out in time.
(4) Bell Labs proposed this idea, the part about injecting noise inn from both ends, back around 1955.
Ahem, what about the not so insignificant details such as transistor speed, performance, scalability, yield, and reliability?
To get transistors to the level they're at, they've had to be very carefully shrunk and the silicon carefully controlled for resistance and impurity level, something that these deposited semiconductors will be many, many orders of magnitude worse in each and every parameter.
There's not a whole lot of point making transistors that are 1,000 times larger, 1,000,000 more power-hungry, have 100,000 times lower yield, 10,000 times slower, and have 10,000 times shorter life, (as a rough estimate).
While these folks may have made something 100x faster than something else, it's still useless.
It's a phase-change -- that means HEAT, which means it takes time for the storage element to heat up, change phase, and then cool down. It's probably better than using punched cards, maybe even better than 1990 flash memory, but not a whole lot better.
Memory technology today has to work on the nanosecond level-- phase-change is not going to get anywhere near that ballpark.
You also need storage that can be read and written thousands of times without degradation-- phase-change is unlikely to ever get to that level.
"Flying" a "space plane" is a meaningless accomplishment, even if it happened.
It takes a spitload of details, gotten exactly right, to make a safe, practical, reliable aerospace gadget.
The history of development of every thing that zooms has been fraught with a long if not also steep learning curve. It took many tries for the USA to get the X-15 working smoothly. Look up how many years the C-5A, C141, B-58, Atlas, B-1, and Patriot were in "development". Count up how many of those had to go back to the factory after a year to get new wings.
Anybody can put some metal on a booster and call it a "space plane". That does not make it one.
The real test of cold fusion would be detecting neutrons, LOTS of them if they were getting kilowatts of heat. I'm too lazy to calculate again how many neutrons, but it's certainly enough to fry everybody in that room.
You'd think after Pons and that Margarine guy made the same dumb mistake, not claiming scads of neutrons, these guys would patch up that hole.
Now let's not go overboard here. The basic laws of Physics indicate that any "solar powered plane" is going to be a very iffy thing. You can only get 150 watts per square meter of wing surface, that's when the sun is shining and at right angles to the sun. So you're talking about a very slow and very underpowered airplane, with like at best some pitiful and hazardous climb rate.
No way it could ever be certificated for carrying humans.
Rocket fuel was a big research area in the 1950's. Dozens of very good chemists spent a whole load (hundreds of millions of 1950-size dollars) trying to make better rocket fuels.
( One of them wrote a informative and funny book about that time and place ).
The short summary is: Yes, you can make higher oomph rocket fuels and oxidizers with more oxygen in them.
But a lot of the formulas are impractical as:
(0) They were already discovered years ago, and discarded, but chemists don't like to write up their failures, and researchers don't like to read old moldy research summaries anyway.
(1) They're waaay too expensive to make, even for military uses.
(2) They are highly toxic, even more toxic than the widely-used hydrazines, which can kill you in several interesting ways.
(3) They're so unstable, you have to keep them under impossible conditions, like no sound, no vibrations, no light, and under a part per million of crud in the perfectly-smooth and unscratched nickel-plated tanks.
(4) They can't be stored for more than a day or so before the fuel or oxidizer starts decomposing itself or the tank walls.
(5) Too many of the researchers were vaporized while handling the stuff. Literally. Truly. Completely. That tends to make it hard to find substitute researchers to continue working with the same stuff.
(6) For military applications, you need a fuel that can be handled by raw recruits, stored for many months, be pumped quickly into not always totally clean rocket tanks, kept in those loaded rockets for days to months, and tolerate wide temperature swings. These requirements alone disqualify a large percentage of really zippy fuels and oxidizers.
The odds are pretty high against this "new" compound being all that new, or it passing the basic requirements for fuel or oxidizer.
>My bench top pancake style geiger counter detects alpha particles from 35S and beta particles from 32P just fine. I'm sure it would handle plutonium no problem.
Swell. But most folks are not going to lug a lab bench geiger counter on an international trip. Or a 9,000 mile extension cord. Or know how to interpret the readings. In addition the alpha particles from Plutonium have a mean free path in air of about 2 centimeters, so waving around a pancake style sensor tells you nothing.
>All it takes is one cosmic ray, or one decay from an atom of phosphorous in a banana, etc. etc. Risk is proportional to dose. It's managable.
You seem to be ignorant of the effects of Plutonium ingestion. One nanogram of it emits 3 x 10^5 alphas per second, for the length of your life. The Phosphorus in a banana is way spread out. Cosmic rays come at you in random paths. Big diff.
>If we can estimate the exposure, we can calculate exactly how many people we'd expect to get cancer from such an expedition. Again risk is proportional to dose.
You miss the point-- we can't get an exposure reading from a geiger counter. the AVERAGE rad level, as indicated by a geiger counter, is useless information. The counter is not going to register the Plutonium a;lphas, as they don't travel far in air. There are thousands of acres of dusty countryside there, with skazillions of particles of Plutonium. The dust blows around and gets on your skin and into your lungs. There they become point sources of radiation. The namby-pamby average reading of a Geiger counter does not reflect this.
Touring Chernobyl is like walking across a freeway blindfolded, because it's okay, you can't hear any cars.
You see:
(1) The "Quiet Prius" prob: You basic inexpensive Geiger counter, for durability, has a thickish diaphragm over its sensor, which blocks alpha and beta radiation. The element of most concern is Plutonium, which is an Alpha emitter. So, as listening for traffic is not very efficacious at discerning quiet cars, a geiger counter is of no help, indeed, it's less than helpful.
(2) The "Quiet on the average" prob: It does not help that traffic sounds quiet. All it takes is one car to send you flying. Similarly, it does not matter that the radiation level is, on the average, low. All it takes is one particle of Plutonium, nestled against a lung cell, to start a cancer. The cell does not care that averaged over a day, over your whole body, you just picked up a millirad. All it knows is that an alpha particle just smashed into its DNA and caused a mutation. Yes, DNA has some self-repair mechanisms but they're not foolproof.
(3) The "Ivana made it okay" prob-- it does not matter that some dame allegedly snapped some pics years ago. She may be dead or dying now. Plus we will never know how many folks took a similar trip but are now too sick or too dead to post their pics.
(4) The "But Ivan made it across" prob-- It does not matter that your tour guide has been there a dozen times-- You don't know how many other guides are now in the Kiev Home for Comrades With Bad Coughs Who Eventually Keel Over.
Maybe the analogy isn't so bad. Think about whether you'd walk across a quiet freeway before you sign up for this trip.
Back in 1990, I redid the Borland Pascal memory allocator so each block was given its own hardware-protected segment descriptor and length. Worked magnificently, as any reference outside a valid block would immediately fault. Only prob, you could only allocate about 4000 blocks as there were only 4,096 entries in the hardware segment table. So the next refinement was to allocate each block with short pre and postambles set to $12345678 and check thee for overwriting periodically. Worked almost as well, if not so immediately finding the errors.
And no, I did not try to patent this, as I knew the Burroughs machines, since 1961, allocated a fresh memory-protected segment for each array, and using pre and post safety zones sure sounded like an "obvious" thing to do..
I think Chinese Junks have been exceeding the wind speed for like, 5,000 years.
You can also analyze it as a glider by turning the world 90 degrees-- now you have a plane wing, which can have a glide ratio of up to 20-- that is, moving across (down) one unit while moving 20 units downrange (forward).
Slashdot Mirror
Swell idea, except:
Both sets of wings have to be strong enough to act like wings- that requires spars and stuff that are usually run through the center of lift. That makes it difficult to fit in stuff like people and cargo.
You can't sweep the wings at your typical 20 to 40 degree angle, which limits your top speed in either mode.
You can't have wings with the usual asymettrical front-back tapers, limiting your lift and lift/drag characteristics.
You can't have a tail, which makes stability and control very difficult.
Otherwise okay.
Except the 5.5GHz may not be all that fast, as the Z-line of CPUs are the old IBM 360 instruction set, which is is so large, complex, and baroque that it is mostly usually implemented through a thick layer of microcode.
So 5.5GHz may be the speed of the microcode level, the actual "machine instructions" may be a considerable sub-multiple of that.
You left out a few prefixes of "million" and "milli", making your analysis way off, at first. There are 30 million cubic meters per sec of gulf stream flow. there are 3 milligrams of Uranium per cubic meter of seawater. So that's 90 Kilos of Uranium per second.
But you're unlikely to be able to intercept more than a thousandth of the gulf stream, so we're back to 90 g per second. the goofs cancel out!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ATraveling_wave_reactor:
". The recent admission by the TerraPower group that they decided "to move fuel through the burn wave instead of having the burn wave move through the fuel" is an implicit acknowledgment that they have not found a true TWR solution. "
Ridiculous.
Their first proposed reactor, which they showed off on their web site for over a year, violated all the basic rules of reactor flux, geometry, and physics.
You can't get nuclea material to burn down, like a cigarette, due to basic geometry and entropy. A totally wacko concept that no real nuclear engineer would entertain, not for a minute.
Their new design is just a teensy bit less wacko.
Indeed. I've been parachuted in to several companies with major software issues.
Three had avoided even starting a migration from hardware and databases that hadn't been supported in a decade or more.
Another placehad no concept of file locking or threading, or QA, and was using 8 different programming languages on just one project.
Two companies that handled 80,000 to 300,000 transactions a day did not have any way of simulating input or comparing the input to output.
One company that depended on several million TCP/IP connections a day had no idea that TCP/IP data might not all arrive in one packet.
Another place whose business was dependent on several custom fonts would not believe the veracity of both the Postscript and TrueType font verifiers when they said "your font has 488 serious errors".
About 3/4 of the places had not a clue what SQL injection was and how they were vulnerable.
The quality of the stuff out there is just horrible.
The source-code ripoff is a ridiculous starting point. CP/M was largely written in PL/M, Intel's quasi high level PL/I-like language. QDOS was written in X86 assembly language. There is no possibel pathway between the two, unless you posit that Tim Patterson somehow got a hold of the PL/M source code, and played the role of a super-optimizing cross-compiler. Ridiculous.
Very variable in accuracy.
A few geek-related pages where I have intimate knowledge of the reality, quite often the Wikipedia page is way, way, way off.
And of course if you make an edit, saying "I WAS THERE, I SPENT 3 YEARS working with that thingy, I HAVE SIX OF THEM IN MY ATTIC", your edit gets removed within an hour, time and again.
Sigh.
Let's see:
Compared to being hit by sunlight:
param. .Water Meter ..Sun
energy. ..0.1 watts. .300 watts .1 sec/month .1 hr/day
exposure.
photon energy . 6E-25 Joules.. 3E-19 Joules
Looks to me like that Sun is DANGEROUS, exposing you to about 3,000 times more energy per unit time, for about 110,000 times longer, and with individual photons 500,000 times more energetic.
The 900MHz radio wave photons are so weak they can't excite any atom to any higher energy level, or cause any kind of chemical change, not by a factor of 1000 or more.
Say what? ANY company "involved"?
I suspect to make nuclear weapons, you need, like, EVERYTHING. Bricks, mortar, screwdrivers, voltmeters, paper, pencils, pens, pipes (lots of pipes), cars, gasoline, welding rods, drill presses, lathes, etc, etc, etc, etc..............
I think you'd be blocking the buying of almost everything, except maybe nail salon services.
A ridiculouos idea, if you're an electrical engineer, for many reasons:
(1) The noise on the wire, for reasonable values of resistors and bandwidth, is down in the low microvolts. If the cable is unshielded, it's going to pick up several microvolts of radio signals per foot. Even if it's really well shielded, we're still talking microvolts per kilometer.
(2) Eve can put a probe signal on the wire, it just has to be random noise. Alice and Bob have no way of proving that a small spike of random noise, only half a standard deviation above the average, isn't perfectly fine Johnson noise coming from the other end. Eve knows the amplitude of the noise she is putting on the wire, so she can subtract that amount, and the difference reveals the values of the resistors.
(3) For any moderately long wire, in the kilometer range, there is a time delay, allowing Eve to inject short bursts of noise and get the resistor info from each end coming back, spread out in time.
(4) Bell Labs proposed this idea, the part about injecting noise inn from both ends, back around 1955.
My son suggested we name our wireless box "FEMA Death Camp #7327"
Ahem, what about the not so insignificant details such as transistor speed, performance, scalability, yield, and reliability?
To get transistors to the level they're at, they've had to be very carefully shrunk and the silicon carefully controlled for resistance and impurity level, something that these deposited semiconductors will be many, many orders of magnitude worse in each and every parameter.
There's not a whole lot of point making transistors that are 1,000 times larger, 1,000,000 more power-hungry, have 100,000 times lower yield, 10,000 times slower, and have 10,000 times shorter life, (as a rough estimate).
While these folks may have made something 100x faster than something else, it's still useless.
It's a phase-change -- that means HEAT, which means it takes time for the storage element to heat up, change phase, and then cool down. It's probably better than using punched cards, maybe even better than 1990 flash memory, but not a whole lot better.
Memory technology today has to work on the nanosecond level-- phase-change is not going to get anywhere near that ballpark.
You also need storage that can be read and written thousands of times without degradation-- phase-change is unlikely to ever get to that level.
"Flying" a "space plane" is a meaningless accomplishment, even if it happened.
It takes a spitload of details, gotten exactly right, to make a safe, practical, reliable aerospace gadget.
The history of development of every thing that zooms has been fraught with a long if not also steep learning curve.
It took many tries for the USA to get the X-15 working smoothly.
Look up how many years the C-5A, C141, B-58, Atlas, B-1, and Patriot were in "development". Count up how many of those had to go back to the factory after a year to get new wings.
Anybody can put some metal on a booster and call it a "space plane". That does not make it one.
This is unusable. On my iMac, Safari pegs out at 100% and the fans spool up to top speed. NFG.
Reedeeculous.
The real test of cold fusion would be detecting neutrons, LOTS of them if they were getting kilowatts of heat. I'm too lazy to calculate again how many neutrons, but it's certainly enough to fry everybody in that room.
You'd think after Pons and that Margarine guy made the same dumb mistake, not claiming scads of neutrons, these guys would patch up that hole.
Now let's not go overboard here. The basic laws of Physics indicate that any "solar powered plane" is going to be a very iffy thing. You can only get 150 watts per square meter of wing surface, that's when the sun is shining and at right angles to the sun. So you're talking about a very slow and very underpowered airplane, with like at best some pitiful and hazardous climb rate.
No way it could ever be certificated for carrying humans.
Rocket fuel was a big research area in the 1950's. Dozens of very good chemists spent a whole load (hundreds of millions of 1950-size dollars) trying to make better rocket fuels.
( One of them wrote a informative and funny book about that time and place ).
The short summary is: Yes, you can make higher oomph rocket fuels and oxidizers with more oxygen in them.
But a lot of the formulas are impractical as:
(0) They were already discovered years ago, and discarded, but chemists don't like to write up their failures, and researchers don't like to read old moldy research summaries anyway.
(1) They're waaay too expensive to make, even for military uses.
(2) They are highly toxic, even more toxic than the widely-used hydrazines, which can kill you in several interesting ways.
(3) They're so unstable, you have to keep them under impossible conditions, like no sound, no vibrations, no light, and under a part per million of crud in the perfectly-smooth and unscratched nickel-plated tanks.
(4) They can't be stored for more than a day or so before the fuel or oxidizer starts decomposing itself or the tank walls.
(5) Too many of the researchers were vaporized while handling the stuff. Literally. Truly. Completely. That tends to make it hard to find substitute researchers to continue working with the same stuff.
(6) For military applications, you need a fuel that can be handled by raw recruits, stored for many months, be pumped quickly into not always totally clean rocket tanks, kept in those loaded rockets for days to months, and tolerate wide temperature swings. These requirements alone disqualify a large percentage of really zippy fuels and oxidizers.
The odds are pretty high against this "new" compound being all that new, or it passing the basic requirements for fuel or oxidizer.
If you read TFA, it turns out what they have done so far is drill a tiny hole.
Everything else is still TBD. Things like:
(1) Figuring out how to get a thread of DNA to enter the hole.
(2) Figuring out how to push it through the hole.
(3) Figuring out how to read the bases, which are electrically equivalent and somewhat shielded by the phosphorous backbones..
(4) Figuring how to keep DNA and other crud from getting wedged in this nanometer-width hole.
Somehow I think they're doing this all backwards-- doing the trivial part first and announcing what at first glance appears to be total success.
>My bench top pancake style geiger counter detects alpha particles from 35S and beta particles from 32P just fine. I'm sure it would handle plutonium no problem.
Swell. But most folks are not going to lug a lab bench geiger counter on an international trip. Or a 9,000 mile extension cord. Or know how to interpret the readings. In addition the alpha particles from Plutonium have a mean free path in air of about 2 centimeters, so waving around a pancake style sensor tells you nothing.
>All it takes is one cosmic ray, or one decay from an atom of phosphorous in a banana, etc. etc. Risk is proportional to dose. It's managable.
You seem to be ignorant of the effects of Plutonium ingestion. One nanogram of it emits 3 x 10^5 alphas per second, for the length of your life. The Phosphorus in a banana is way spread out. Cosmic rays come at you in random paths. Big diff.
>If we can estimate the exposure, we can calculate exactly how many people we'd expect to get cancer from such an expedition. Again risk is proportional to dose.
You miss the point-- we can't get an exposure reading from a geiger counter. the AVERAGE rad level, as indicated by a geiger counter, is useless information. The counter is not going to register the Plutonium a;lphas, as they don't travel far in air. There are thousands of acres of dusty countryside there, with skazillions of particles of Plutonium. The dust blows around and gets on your skin and into your lungs. There they become point sources of radiation. The namby-pamby average reading of a Geiger counter does not reflect this.
Touring Chernobyl is like walking across a freeway blindfolded, because it's okay, you can't hear any cars.
You see:
(1) The "Quiet Prius" prob: You basic inexpensive Geiger counter, for durability, has a thickish diaphragm over its sensor, which blocks alpha and beta radiation. The element of most concern is Plutonium, which is an Alpha emitter. So, as listening for traffic is not very efficacious at discerning quiet cars, a geiger counter is of no help, indeed, it's less than helpful.
(2) The "Quiet on the average" prob: It does not help that traffic sounds quiet. All it takes is one car to send you flying. Similarly, it does not matter that the radiation level is, on the average, low. All it takes is one particle of Plutonium, nestled against a lung cell, to start a cancer. The cell does not care that averaged over a day, over your whole body, you just picked up a millirad. All it knows is that an alpha particle just smashed into its DNA and caused a mutation. Yes, DNA has some self-repair mechanisms but they're not foolproof.
(3) The "Ivana made it okay" prob-- it does not matter that some dame allegedly snapped some pics years ago. She may be dead or dying now. Plus we will never know how many folks took a similar trip but are now too sick or too dead to post their pics.
(4) The "But Ivan made it across" prob-- It does not matter that your tour guide has been there a dozen times-- You don't know how many other guides are now in the Kiev Home for Comrades With Bad Coughs Who Eventually Keel Over.
Maybe the analogy isn't so bad. Think about whether you'd walk across a quiet freeway before you sign up for this trip.
Saw the ppt show. There's nothing there.
Just some very basic blather about encoding and redundancy.
Absolutely nothing new.
And AFAICT they have not done any actual DNA coding and decoding.
Perhaps they would have done everyone a service by actually estimating the time and cost of encoding/decoding 90GB.
Perhaps they left that part out as the numbers would be so dismal.
Back in 1990, I redid the Borland Pascal memory allocator so each block was given its own hardware-protected segment descriptor and length. Worked magnificently, as any reference outside a valid block would immediately fault. Only prob, you could only allocate about 4000 blocks as there were only 4,096 entries in the hardware segment table. So the next refinement was to allocate each block with short pre and postambles set to $12345678 and check thee for overwriting periodically. Worked almost as well, if not so immediately finding the errors.
And no, I did not try to patent this, as I knew the Burroughs machines, since 1961, allocated a fresh memory-protected segment for each array, and using pre and post safety zones sure sounded like an "obvious" thing to do..
Good Grief, what happened to, like, research?
I think Chinese Junks have been exceeding the wind speed for like, 5,000 years.
You can also analyze it as a glider by turning the world 90 degrees-- now you have a plane wing, which can have a glide ratio of up to 20-- that is, moving across (down) one unit while moving 20 units downrange (forward).