I believe Mercury has an eccentric orbit, probably forced by resonance with Venus and Earth. So the sun goes around the sky at a rate with varies significantly and the rate caused by the orbit can cross over the rate caused by rotation, leading to a "retrograde summer".
Yeah but I don't think it was as recent as some people think. TV signals contain synchronisation pulses, like RS232. Maybe in the 1930s there were experimental systems where a frame was one cycle of a city power supply. But not more recently than that.
I think Mercury should be the first target for a manned mission to another planet. It is easy to get to with solar sails. A surface to orbit shuttle could make its own fuel on the surface. Not having an an atmosphere makes temperature regulation a lot easier.
No. Daytime atmospheric temperatures on Mars get to 20C or so, which is pretty warm. Still the cold ground would be freezing you.
Its worth emphasising: When talking about places other than Earth there is no "temperature". You can't say "how hot is is?". You can only say "how hot is the air?", "how hot is the ground?", "how hot is the solar wind?", etc
Transformers are effectively radio transceivers. The transmitter and receiver are so close together that energy is transmitted from one to the other with high efficiency. Every transformer is wound to work at a particular frequency so when talking about big power transformers you can't just change the frequency. Having said that a lot of consumer equipment would cope fairly well. Computers, light fittings, etc are pretty tolerant. Big electric motors in factories, not so.
I work as a software engineer in Aviation and I have done some user interface design work on air traffic control systems. One problem I see in many domains is a kind of cascading call for attention. Over time the people who specify the system look for new ways to attract the attention of the user. Usually this happens in the context of addressing a specific problem such as user X failed to recognise condition Y for Z seconds and the solution is to make the condition Z warning flash yellow for N seconds. Okay so thats that problem addressed (but not solved) but now condition Q s is being missed while the warning for condition Z is up so we had better make that warning red and so on.
I ride a bicycle to work. We get all sorts of patches to the environment which increase the cognitive load on bike riders, for example:
Left lane left turn only bicycles excepted
Bus lane, bicycles permitted where signed
Bicycle lanes colored in green at "attract attention"
Bicycle lanes delineated with tactile edging which by the way is deadly in the wet
Five or six types of bicycle lanes depending on where you are
..and so on
You see everybody has their own little local solution but tracking and learning about them takes a lot of cognition.
My wife bought a new car recently. I wanted her to get a Honda civic hybrid and we test drove it but we settled on a VW Jetta. The Honda has a mess of colored LEDs around the instrument panel. The VW has a little monochrome LCD screen. Thinking about it later I can see that a lot of thought about UI design has gone into the VW. It is a very cool car to drive in the sense that it keeps out of the drivers way as much as possible. It doesn't grab your attention. The lights and wipers are automatic. Thats two jobs you don't have to worry about for a start. The interior looks as dull as hotblack's stunt ship but it draws your attention to stuff you need to know about and little else. Its like a well designed ATC UI. The way they used to be.
my guess is that PV cells are not scalable to the dimensions needed to replace a significant part of our society's electric consumption.
Maybe but we were comparing PV with solar thermal. A thermal power system would have to be powered down and cooled every night. Components will expand and shrink. They will fatigue and fail. Pumps and heat exchangers would need ongoing maintenance. I suspect that faulty PV panels would just be replaced and their materials recycled. They are not 100% reliable, but still more reliable than most things with moving parts.
I am betting that if you look at the service life of both systems PV might still be cheaper. A lot of the energy cost of manufacturing PV cells is in heating up masses of silicon so maybe a plant could make its own cells and use solar thermal power for part of that process. A solar thermal system would need a lot of maintenance while PV cells just sit there and push electrons around. And mirrors aren't cheap either. I wonder what their manufacturing cost is vs PV cells?
Strange thing is that I created an address on my server just for slashdot, but it started getting spam shortly after I configured my account to use it. I might have made a mistake and sent it to somebody but I am pretty sure I didn't.
The twitter post identified the person removed by the police as a political opponent so the only mistake was made by the poster, not the reader of the post.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe Mercury has an eccentric orbit, probably forced by resonance with Venus and Earth. So the sun goes around the sky at a rate with varies significantly and the rate caused by the orbit can cross over the rate caused by rotation, leading to a "retrograde summer".
Yeah but I don't think it was as recent as some people think. TV signals contain synchronisation pulses, like RS232. Maybe in the 1930s there were experimental systems where a frame was one cycle of a city power supply. But not more recently than that.
Cripes, 25Hz? How big were their transformers?
Hydrogen and Water
Hydrogen and Oxygen.
I think Mercury should be the first target for a manned mission to another planet. It is easy to get to with solar sails. A surface to orbit shuttle could make its own fuel on the surface. Not having an an atmosphere makes temperature regulation a lot easier.
while all of Mars is below room temperature
No. Daytime atmospheric temperatures on Mars get to 20C or so, which is pretty warm. Still the cold ground would be freezing you.
Its worth emphasising: When talking about places other than Earth there is no "temperature". You can't say "how hot is is?". You can only say "how hot is the air?", "how hot is the ground?", "how hot is the solar wind?", etc
Transformers are effectively radio transceivers. The transmitter and receiver are so close together that energy is transmitted from one to the other with high efficiency. Every transformer is wound to work at a particular frequency so when talking about big power transformers you can't just change the frequency. Having said that a lot of consumer equipment would cope fairly well. Computers, light fittings, etc are pretty tolerant. Big electric motors in factories, not so.
I bet you guys will be first with superconducting transmission lines, given your close proximity to absolute zero...
Also Japan didn't have any roads where you could get to 88 miles per hour before the quake.
but it is well guarded.
Doesnt matter. The Libyans are otherwise occupied.
Doesn't sound right.
I work as a software engineer in Aviation and I have done some user interface design work on air traffic control systems. One problem I see in many domains is a kind of cascading call for attention. Over time the people who specify the system look for new ways to attract the attention of the user. Usually this happens in the context of addressing a specific problem such as user X failed to recognise condition Y for Z seconds and the solution is to make the condition Z warning flash yellow for N seconds. Okay so thats that problem addressed (but not solved) but now condition Q s is being missed while the warning for condition Z is up so we had better make that warning red and so on.
I ride a bicycle to work. We get all sorts of patches to the environment which increase the cognitive load on bike riders, for example:
You see everybody has their own little local solution but tracking and learning about them takes a lot of cognition.
My wife bought a new car recently. I wanted her to get a Honda civic hybrid and we test drove it but we settled on a VW Jetta. The Honda has a mess of colored LEDs around the instrument panel. The VW has a little monochrome LCD screen. Thinking about it later I can see that a lot of thought about UI design has gone into the VW. It is a very cool car to drive in the sense that it keeps out of the drivers way as much as possible. It doesn't grab your attention. The lights and wipers are automatic. Thats two jobs you don't have to worry about for a start. The interior looks as dull as hotblack's stunt ship but it draws your attention to stuff you need to know about and little else. Its like a well designed ATC UI. The way they used to be.
my guess is that PV cells are not scalable to the dimensions needed to replace a significant part of our society's electric consumption.
Maybe but we were comparing PV with solar thermal. A thermal power system would have to be powered down and cooled every night. Components will expand and shrink. They will fatigue and fail. Pumps and heat exchangers would need ongoing maintenance. I suspect that faulty PV panels would just be replaced and their materials recycled. They are not 100% reliable, but still more reliable than most things with moving parts.
I am betting that if you look at the service life of both systems PV might still be cheaper. A lot of the energy cost of manufacturing PV cells is in heating up masses of silicon so maybe a plant could make its own cells and use solar thermal power for part of that process. A solar thermal system would need a lot of maintenance while PV cells just sit there and push electrons around. And mirrors aren't cheap either. I wonder what their manufacturing cost is vs PV cells?
Strange thing is that I created an address on my server just for slashdot, but it started getting spam shortly after I configured my account to use it. I might have made a mistake and sent it to somebody but I am pretty sure I didn't.
I bet she knows all about how "Robby" gets his hands on stuff like this, and appreciates the flow of stolen goods.
The twitter post identified the person removed by the police as a political opponent so the only mistake was made by the poster, not the reader of the post.
Deleted pages can be found on DeletionPedia
You know, anybody can run mediawiki.
But as long as you can go root and copy the binaries it complies with the GPL. I can't go root on iOS or Android.
I upgraded iOS on my son's ipod and many of this apps stopped working. This problem is not unique to OSS.
I reckon there is money in typos. People who enter the wrong shortcut and hit a landing page with advertising instead.
Technically, electrons have zero flavor charge. So they are flavorless!
(sticks tongue on end of nine volt battery)
You're right!
Or who have died from the radiation emitted by coal fired power plants.
We won't get those until 2050! .
Its 2061 now. Fusion is always 50 years away.
Its probably not called the China Syndrome in that part of the world. The Brazilian Syndrome doesn't have quite the same ring to it.