Peon: We've counted 12 possible events out of 789,567,345,754,234,567,876 (est) neutrinos passing thru the detector.
TS: Hmm, that's as expected, totally useless number of events to draw any inferences from. Keep at it.
(Next day)
South Pole Grant Administrator: Hey, TS, got any news I can tell Washington? Your grant approval comittee meeting for the Big Project is next week!
TS: Oh, yes, Er, Um, hte data we got from their previous infusion of cash indicates Big Things, the possible proff of String Theory, SuperGravity, The AntiMacassar Postulate, and much more. But better just mention String Theory to the commitee, it was on the cover of Popular Science last month.
> 1. Few people actually saw the Challenger tragedy unfold live on television.
So? What difference does a minute or three make?
2. The shuttle did not explode in the common definition of that word.
No, it *did* explode in the common definition, as in boom, major disassembly. It did not explode in one specific, technical way. There was no bag of TNT on board. There was the equivalent of many tons of TNT just a few feet away. Big diff? I don't think so.
3. The flight, and the astronauts' lives, did not end at that point, 73 seconds after launch.
Well, effectively, they did. There was nothing that could be done at that point to save them. Also IIRC the only clue that a few were concious was that two of the emergency airpacks were found turned on. Not exactly uncontrovertible evidence.
4. The design of the booster, while possessing flaws subject to improvement, was neither especially dangerous if operated properly, nor the result of political interference.
Totally wrong. There were several previous documented cases of the O-rings burning part way through. Feynman's report clarifies the severe nature of this problem. If you manage to walk across the freeway blindfolded 66 times, does that certify the action as safe? Nope.
The political angle is not documentable either way. But one might guess if the president is scheduled to talk to the astronauts during the state of the union address, there's some pressure there to launch.
5. Replacement of the original asbestos-bearing putty in the booster seals was unrelated to the failure.
Well, true in the sense that the whole basic design was foobar. But "unrelated" is a value judgement, one unlikely to be categorically false.
6. There were pressures on the flight schedule, but none of any recognizable political origin.
Yep, we went over that already. You expect to find a written memo on this?
7. Claims that the disaster was the unavoidable price to be paid for pioneering a new frontier were self-serving rationalizations on the part of those responsible for incompetent engineering management -- the disaster should have been avoidable.
Wishful thinking, and doesnt correspond with history. There's no way any engineer could get the shuttle grounded and a major subsystem completely redesigned just on a hunch. In the real world flaws often go unresolved until somebody dies. See: Pinto gas tank, Ford ABS switch, Dodge ball joints, Vioxx, thalidomide, radium drinks, smoking, children's air bags, and probably many more.
>the chance of finding life on this planet is essentially zero.
Well, if you mean life, as in Jessica Alba, you're correct.
But that's a tad provincial, limited, humdrum, some might say.
We know very little about chemistry at 50 degrees Kelvin.
Maybe there are some chemical reactions that don't go at all at our room temperature, but run just fine at 50K.
Might be a tad slow, but who says life has to run at our speed?
Ah yes, super-duper speech recognition is right around the corner!
I've been hearing this every 6 months for about the last, oh, thiry years.
Given that the state of the art in something much simpler, like automatic language translation, is pitifully inadequate, how likely is it IBM has conquered speech recognition AND translation?
It matters not one whit whether a patent has a "mistake" in it. Think of the two possibilities:
(#1)Nobody notices the mistake. Nothing happens.
(#2)Somebody notices the mistake. Three possibilities:
The person is the patent holder, he can do nothing, or file a correction. Big whoop.
It's somebody else, a disinterested party-- they'll get a mild chuckle out of it.
It's somebody else, someone interested in breakng the patent. This gives them one more arrow in their quiver.
In any case, the mistake of and by itself is of little consequence. There are few patents so rock-solid that they can't be attacked by finding other chinks in their armor: appeals to "obviousness", prior art, prior disclosure, or jsut the threat of a lawsuit are often enough.
There's a very good reason the bacteria in the soil are resistant to antibiotics, and you don't need a fancy new study to figure this out.
If you research where antibiotics come from, where drug companies have for 50 years or more looked for new antibiotics, it's in the dang soil!
yes, scientists figured out long ago to not just set out pertri dishes and hope for new varieties of spores to come to them-- they've gone out into the world collecting soil and the concomitant spores. IIRC the majority of antibiotics in use were found in the soil of various places, all over the world.
In the flying plywood experiment it looked like they were using 3/4" plywood, which is insanely heavy. You just need enough thickness to not fold under your weight. 1/4" woul dhave been plenty thick, and may have actually been able to soar.\
I don't see any science in the blow up the concrete "experiment". Especially since they didnt show the truck AFTER the explosion. This is backwoods hee-haw stuff, not science.
The electric coil "experiment" was even more bogus:
There are separate electric and magnetic fields around the high voltage cables.
If they would have raised a flat sheet of metal they could have captured some of the electric field.
If they'd put a coil in the correct orientation,( which they did exactly wrong), and with an iron core, they could have captured a heck of a lot more magnetic field.
ANd oh, their measuring method ws bogus too. You want to capture power, which is voltage times current. It shows nothing to just measure the voltage.
Yes, they got the right answer, you can't get any useful amount of power this way, but they totally flubbed the methodology.
My point is that it's kind of a metaphysical statement to call it a "runway" today if it maybe WAS a usable runway for a year or three, 50 years ago.
Regards,
A_H
Re:Here is a good example of how this works
on
RFID Cookware
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· Score: 1
Thanks for the correction in frequency.
The difference between this and a microwave oven is the microwaves are confined (99.98% of them) to inside the oven cavity.
In a stove, the RF energy isnt confined by anything tangible. The confinement depends on magnetic fields dropping off as the third power of the distance.
I just thought it was funny how companies can spin this as a super new feature, when others might see it as a kludge to overcome some inherent probs.
yes, there are peaks, but they are several hour long plateus, not peaks per se. During which you can't tolerate any lulls.
By steady I meant RELIABLE, DEPENDABLE power. The kind you never get from windmills.
If you add windmills and want to keep the same level of dependability, you have to add more peaking plants. No alternative.
Here's what's really going on:
on
RFID Cookware
·
· Score: 1, Informative
For those of you puzzled by this story, you should be, as it's basically bogus.
They're talking about inductive heating, which is a bit worrisome: It involves having a kilowatt or so of 13.56 MHz radio frequency energy beamin up at the cooking implement.
The pot can't be just any pot-- it has to hit a certain electromagnetic sweet spot, as to absorb the radio waves, and not reflect them all over the place.
this usually implies it has to be made of somewhat resistive and lossy material-- iron is a good choice.
Unfortunately materials that are resistive electrically are usually resistive, thermally too. So instead of getting a nice even heat, the pan is likely to have hot spots.
Ergo the pans really could use some sort of sensor to feed back to the stove some info about how the pan is heating. As to not have some cool spots while nearby the pan is melting through.
So this isnt so much a wonderful added feature, as a partial kludge to compensate for the basic foibles of the whole scheme.
I'm going to be patient here, because we haev an obvious miscommunication in part. I repeatedly mentioned the www.fas.org web site, with its 2 and 1 meter resolution images as my source of information. Where you got google earth as my reference is beyond me.
Now about those cracks. Let me refresh your memory:
High-performance airplanes need to have thin wings.
Thin wings and tricycle landing gear imply landing gear and tires in the wings.
That implies thin, flat, smallish tires.
The thinner and smaller the tire, the more internal pressure the tire must have to support the weight of the plane.
So we're talking rock-hard tires, inflated to HUNDREDS of PSI. With little flex distance in the sidewalls.
That setup requires a VERY SMOOTH runway, with like, no irregularities larger than about 1 centimeter.
If you can see a crack from an aerial photo-it's likely to be a whole lot more than 1 cm.
Remember the Concorde tire that ran over a relatively small piece of metal? Boom. Your car tire would have no problem deforming and flowing over that kind of obstacle. High-pressure tires don't have the same ability. KabBoom!
A few more refreshers:
Every see a runway or highway being built? What;'s the first thing they do?
Build a base.
That means several feet of gravel.
But out in the boondocks, in an area that has never been scoured by glaciers, and has no flowing rivers, and instead has been subject to eons of slow erosion, resulting in a surface coverd by hundreds of feet of fine sediment, gravel just isnt available, like not for hundreds of miles.
And at a secret installation, it would not be prudent to have hundreds of 18-wheel dumptrucks going hundreds of miles down the interstate and turning off down a cowpath for another 30 miles.
And the govt and military moves people around every few years, so nobody cares much about building things that last.
So it's quite likely they didnt lay down ANY base below the runway.
After a few years of spring rains, which turn the lakebed to cream-of-mushroom soup for a few months, funny, the concrete starts to crack.
Ergo, it's no longer a runway. At least not for anything delicate, or untested at high gross weights, or often having to land unexpectedly with high fuel loads.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but : If you can see cracks from the air, it isn't a runway for experimental aircraft.
It might be passable for aircraft designed for rough landings, like a C-130, C-5A, Twin Otter. Not for a B-58, U-2, XB-70.
NYC needs a constant, predictable supply of power.
Big buildings and commercial nerve centers can't cut back on air conditioning, elevators, and subways.
The city needs LOTS of STEADY power.
Windmills provide just the opposite.
If you add windmills and want to keep the same level of service, you have
to add EVEN MORE gas-fired generators to make up for time of little or no wind.
Think August.
The problem is not just flaky folks up north, it's all the people that use wishful thinking and think some greenish energy source will solve all the problems.
A quick scan of the patent database shows about 11,500 patents with "planetary transmission" in them. About 22,000 with "electric braking".
Even if 99% of those are false hits, that still leaves about 300+ patents that just might have prior art or patent rights that this alleged patent infringes on.
All Toyota has to do is set 1% of its lawyers to work to overturn the patent. The patent office will let you patent most anything-- they do very little search for no-nos like prior art, prior disclosure, or the many other details that can invalidate a patent.
Electric braking and planetary transmissions have bveen around for about a century-- there's probably 1,000 prior patents and prior art in that genre.
With just a preliminary survey like that, Toyota can have a mighty strong negotiating position with the new patent holders. Like "here's $23,000, take it or have to spend about $5 million defending your patent."
It's down in black ink, for many years, in several books, about Apple's many attempts to merge with, oh, IIRC, IBM, Sun, Motorola, ATT, Olivetti, Dairy Queen, and Dunkin Donuts.
You got me. I didnt look CLOSELY at the pictures because:
The pics are specified as having 1 and 2 meter resolution.
Cracks, expansion joints, runway lights, bots dots, are all much smaller than 1 or two meters wide.
The size of the blocks means NOTHING re it being a runway:
There are several methods of laying runways.
Perhaps the block areas were done by one "secret" qualified contractor. Or that area was too small to justify bringing in the continuous laying machine. Or it could be anything.
Secret planes tend to not be of the B-36, or 747 categories whick might require special runways.
In fact, it's in Ben Rich's book-- to land a C-135 at "the Ranch" they had to let some air out of the tires in order to spread out the load.
Thick concrete is often laid down in several layers, as to not require water-cooling during the curing process. So the need for thickness in no way implies a smallblock size.
You're going to put the thickest concrete at the END of a runway?
Now I could be completely wrong on this, but using "common sense" I don't see proof of concrete. Not that it matters in any way in the slightest!
There's a well-known phenomenon that all scientists should watch out for-- unintentional self-fooling. In any experiment that requires many runs, it's all too easy to disqualify certain runs on dodgy criteria. For example:
"Oh, I sneezed during that run, maybe that shook the neutron detector"
"There was a cosmic ray burst there near the end, throw out the whole run".
"There couldnt have been zero neutrons during that run, that's implausible, the neutron detector must gotten saturated by a super cosmic ray burst".
All it takes is a little of this to really fudge the results.
I've seen scientists doing this!
They have the BEST of intentions, but human nature gets in the mix and who knows if the results have any significance at all.
A while back I read some report suggesting something quite obvious:
None of the safety features make a tiny bit of difference, other than steeply driving up car prices.
Whoa, you say. But consider this:
Human beings have a vested interest in safety.
They also, especially the male ones, have an inbuilt instinct to push the limits.
So guess what might happen when a new safety feature is added? Let's say the feature, say an air-bag, makes you feel 20% safer. You choose:
(1) Nobody changes their habits and air-bags reduce casualties 20%.
(2)Guys drive just a bit faster, enough to raise their apparent risk level back to about where it was. Cars are $400 more expensive.
Similarly for ABS, 4-wheel drive, traction control. The only ones that really benefit are the car parts makers and the car companies.
Kinda fits in with one's feelings about your own driving style, eh?
}It quite clearly has a concrete runway extending across that dried lake bed. There are even lines painted on it, and there are X's painted on it at 1000 foot intervals.
You can tell the difference between concrete and graded lake bed from 100 miles up? Wow.
As to painted lines and such, dry lake bed takes paint very nicely.
>Interesting Area 51 facts:
"facts" is more like it.
Area 51 has the longest runways in the world.
Well, perhaps, if you count a dry lake bed as a runway. Many other places have longer concrete runways:
Vostochny (Russia) 16404 ft
Gavia (Bravil) 16295 ft
Upington (South Africa) 16076 ft
Harare (Zimbabwae) 15502 ft
Kinshasha Ndjili (Congo) 15420 ft
Mafikeng (South Africa) 15158 ft
Hawange National Park (Zimbabwe) 15091 ft
Edwards AFB (USA) 15013 ft
Denver 16,000 ft (proposed)
>Area 51 is heavily guarded, and can only be seen from a mountaintop 24 miles away with a >high-powered telescope.
Nope, you can go to many a web site that has 1 and 2 meter resolution photos of the place.
>You can scavenge aircraft wreckage from around its perimeter with a metal detector and sometimes are able to see the craft name and manufacturer on some of the pieces.
Let's do the math: Area 51 has a perimiter of about 32 miles, an area of about 60 square miles. Let's assume if you can still scavenge aircraft parts, given reasonable patience, there has to be a part every 1000 feet. Also let's assume a crashed plane throws parts as far as 500 feet. That means ther have been about SIX THOUSAND airplane crashes in and around the place. That sounds kinda high, by a factor of at least 100 times.
>Area 51 employees bury most of the wreckage of crashed aircraft on its site in order for them >not to end up in public scrap yards.
There are no other alternatives? The only two are: bury or take to a public scrap yard?
What about those little pickup-truck sized smelters they use at airplane scrap yards?
>Area 51 has captured Russian Mig and other Russian aircraft which they flew and tested.
"Captured" is hardly correct. We've been given some by the Israelis, and at least three from Russian and North Korean pilots. I don't think the US has actually "captured" any planes in the last five decades or so.
>Area 51 was first officially acknowledged to exist in 1995 due to lawsuit from some of its >employees against the US government.
I guess it depends onwhat you mean by "acknowledged" and by whom. Several books mentioned the place long before then.
>Area 51 has the largest collection of fully-functional extra-terrestrial spacecraft in our >Solar System
Well, that part *is* correct. Zero is the largest number in the set { 0 }.
Slashdot Mirror
Peon: We've counted 12 possible events out of 789,567,345,754,234,567,876 (est) neutrinos passing thru the detector.
TS: Hmm, that's as expected, totally useless number of events to draw any inferences from. Keep at it.
(Next day) South Pole Grant Administrator: Hey, TS, got any news I can tell Washington? Your grant approval comittee meeting for the Big Project is next week!
TS: Oh, yes, Er, Um, hte data we got from their previous infusion of cash indicates Big Things, the possible proff of String Theory, SuperGravity, The AntiMacassar Postulate, and much more. But better just mention String Theory to the commitee, it was on the cover of Popular Science last month.
SPGA: Will do!
So? What difference does a minute or three make?
2. The shuttle did not explode in the common definition of that word.
No, it *did* explode in the common definition, as in boom, major disassembly. It did not explode in one specific, technical way. There was no bag of TNT on board. There was the equivalent of many tons of TNT just a few feet away. Big diff? I don't think so.
3. The flight, and the astronauts' lives, did not end at that point, 73 seconds after launch.
Well, effectively, they did. There was nothing that could be done at that point to save them. Also IIRC the only clue that a few were concious was that two of the emergency airpacks were found turned on. Not exactly uncontrovertible evidence.
4. The design of the booster, while possessing flaws subject to improvement, was neither especially dangerous if operated properly, nor the result of political interference.
Totally wrong. There were several previous documented cases of the O-rings burning part way through. Feynman's report clarifies the severe nature of this problem. If you manage to walk across the freeway blindfolded 66 times, does that certify the action as safe? Nope. The political angle is not documentable either way. But one might guess if the president is scheduled to talk to the astronauts during the state of the union address, there's some pressure there to launch.
5. Replacement of the original asbestos-bearing putty in the booster seals was unrelated to the failure.
Well, true in the sense that the whole basic design was foobar. But "unrelated" is a value judgement, one unlikely to be categorically false.
6. There were pressures on the flight schedule, but none of any recognizable political origin.
Yep, we went over that already. You expect to find a written memo on this?
7. Claims that the disaster was the unavoidable price to be paid for pioneering a new frontier were self-serving rationalizations on the part of those responsible for incompetent engineering management -- the disaster should have been avoidable.
Wishful thinking, and doesnt correspond with history. There's no way any engineer could get the shuttle grounded and a major subsystem completely redesigned just on a hunch. In the real world flaws often go unresolved until somebody dies. See: Pinto gas tank, Ford ABS switch, Dodge ball joints, Vioxx, thalidomide, radium drinks, smoking, children's air bags, and probably many more.
About ten yrs ago I was poking through a dumpster of a minor disk drive OEM'er company. Lots of nice external SCSI cases in there!
Among the junk was a 2 inch thick printout-- of all their products, cost of production, markups, dealer names, discounts, volumes, etc.
They went belly-up three months later. Coincidence?
Well, if you mean life, as in Jessica Alba, you're correct.
But that's a tad provincial, limited, humdrum, some might say. We know very little about chemistry at 50 degrees Kelvin. Maybe there are some chemical reactions that don't go at all at our room temperature, but run just fine at 50K.
Might be a tad slow, but who says life has to run at our speed?
I've been hearing this every 6 months for about the last, oh, thiry years.
Given that the state of the art in something much simpler, like automatic language translation, is pitifully inadequate, how likely is it IBM has conquered speech recognition AND translation?
Har har har.
It takes about 3 seconds to squirt enough airplane glue into a USB port to permanently disable it. End of problem.
In any case, the mistake of and by itself is of little consequence. There are few patents so rock-solid that they can't be attacked by finding other chinks in their armor: appeals to "obviousness", prior art, prior disclosure, or jsut the threat of a lawsuit are often enough.
If you research where antibiotics come from, where drug companies have for 50 years or more looked for new antibiotics, it's in the dang soil!
yes, scientists figured out long ago to not just set out pertri dishes and hope for new varieties of spores to come to them-- they've gone out into the world collecting soil and the concomitant spores. IIRC the majority of antibiotics in use were found in the soil of various places, all over the world.
Nothing new here.
Somewhat amusing, yes. Real science, hardly ever.
My point is that it's kind of a metaphysical statement to call it a "runway" today if it maybe WAS a usable runway for a year or three, 50 years ago. Regards, A_H
The difference between this and a microwave oven is the microwaves are confined (99.98% of them) to inside the oven cavity.
In a stove, the RF energy isnt confined by anything tangible. The confinement depends on magnetic fields dropping off as the third power of the distance.
I just thought it was funny how companies can spin this as a super new feature, when others might see it as a kludge to overcome some inherent probs.
By steady I meant RELIABLE, DEPENDABLE power. The kind you never get from windmills.
If you add windmills and want to keep the same level of dependability, you have to add more peaking plants. No alternative.
They're talking about inductive heating, which is a bit worrisome: It involves having a kilowatt or so of 13.56 MHz radio frequency energy beamin up at the cooking implement.
The pot can't be just any pot-- it has to hit a certain electromagnetic sweet spot, as to absorb the radio waves, and not reflect them all over the place.
this usually implies it has to be made of somewhat resistive and lossy material-- iron is a good choice.
Unfortunately materials that are resistive electrically are usually resistive, thermally too. So instead of getting a nice even heat, the pan is likely to have hot spots.
Ergo the pans really could use some sort of sensor to feed back to the stove some info about how the pan is heating. As to not have some cool spots while nearby the pan is melting through.
So this isnt so much a wonderful added feature, as a partial kludge to compensate for the basic foibles of the whole scheme.
Now about those cracks. Let me refresh your memory:
A few more refreshers:
Not to put too fine a point on it, but : If you can see cracks from the air, it isn't a runway for experimental aircraft.
It might be passable for aircraft designed for rough landings, like a C-130, C-5A, Twin Otter. Not for a B-58, U-2, XB-70.
NYC needs a constant, predictable supply of power.
Big buildings and commercial nerve centers can't cut back on air conditioning, elevators, and subways.
The city needs LOTS of STEADY power.
Windmills provide just the opposite.
If you add windmills and want to keep the same level of service, you have to add EVEN MORE gas-fired generators to make up for time of little or no wind.
Think August.
The problem is not just flaky folks up north, it's all the people that use wishful thinking and think some greenish energy source will solve all the problems.
You're right. I did a more focused search. "planetary braking" yields 3,800+ hits. It would be mighty hard for all of those to be inappropriate.
Even if 99% of those are false hits, that still leaves about 300+ patents that just might have prior art or patent rights that this alleged patent infringes on.
Doesnt look too good for these noobies.
Electric braking and planetary transmissions have bveen around for about a century-- there's probably 1,000 prior patents and prior art in that genre.
With just a preliminary survey like that, Toyota can have a mighty strong negotiating position with the new patent holders. Like "here's $23,000, take it or have to spend about $5 million defending your patent."
Okay, I added the last three.
Anyway, this ain't new and it aint news.
The size of the blocks means NOTHING re it being a runway:
Now I could be completely wrong on this, but using "common sense" I don't see proof of concrete. Not that it matters in any way in the slightest!
All it takes is a little of this to really fudge the results.
I've seen scientists doing this! They have the BEST of intentions, but human nature gets in the mix and who knows if the results have any significance at all.
Whoa, you say. But consider this:
- Human beings have a vested interest in safety.
- They also, especially the male ones, have an inbuilt instinct to push the limits.
- So guess what might happen when a new safety feature is added? Let's say the feature, say an air-bag, makes you feel 20% safer. You choose:
- (1) Nobody changes their habits and air-bags reduce casualties 20%.
- (2)Guys drive just a bit faster, enough to raise their apparent risk level back to about where it was. Cars are $400 more expensive.
- Similarly for ABS, 4-wheel drive, traction control. The only ones that really benefit are the car parts makers and the car companies.
Kinda fits in with one's feelings about your own driving style, eh?You can tell the difference between concrete and graded lake bed from 100 miles up? Wow.
As to painted lines and such, dry lake bed takes paint very nicely.
My source? The 6-million-$ man opening credits.
There's this thing called "google": www.fas.org/irp/overhead/groom.htm
Area 51 has the longest runways in the world. Well, perhaps, if you count a dry lake bed as a runway. Many other places have longer concrete runways:
>Area 51 is heavily guarded, and can only be seen from a mountaintop 24 miles away with a >high-powered telescope.
Nope, you can go to many a web site that has 1 and 2 meter resolution photos of the place.
>You can scavenge aircraft wreckage from around its perimeter with a metal detector and sometimes are able to see the craft name and manufacturer on some of the pieces. Let's do the math: Area 51 has a perimiter of about 32 miles, an area of about 60 square miles. Let's assume if you can still scavenge aircraft parts, given reasonable patience, there has to be a part every 1000 feet. Also let's assume a crashed plane throws parts as far as 500 feet. That means ther have been about SIX THOUSAND airplane crashes in and around the place. That sounds kinda high, by a factor of at least 100 times.
>Area 51 employees bury most of the wreckage of crashed aircraft on its site in order for them >not to end up in public scrap yards.
There are no other alternatives? The only two are: bury or take to a public scrap yard? What about those little pickup-truck sized smelters they use at airplane scrap yards?
>Area 51 has captured Russian Mig and other Russian aircraft which they flew and tested.
"Captured" is hardly correct. We've been given some by the Israelis, and at least three from Russian and North Korean pilots. I don't think the US has actually "captured" any planes in the last five decades or so.
>Area 51 was first officially acknowledged to exist in 1995 due to lawsuit from some of its >employees against the US government.
I guess it depends onwhat you mean by "acknowledged" and by whom. Several books mentioned the place long before then.
>Area 51 has the largest collection of fully-functional extra-terrestrial spacecraft in our >Solar System
Well, that part *is* correct. Zero is the largest number in the set { 0 }.
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