But it reminds me of this gadget I saw on TV somewhere. Its like a bicycle for travelling on water. It has the same two submerged wings but the rider sits above the water and pounds the machine up and down to keep moving (and dry).
This is a beautiful device. Short cord wings are always better once the materials are up to the job.
Why do they need ice to cool the car? 350kW is not so different from some other high-performance cars and fuel cells should produce less waste heat than other engines. Certainly they could cool this car with an ordinary radiator.
I could speculate that the fuel cell power output degrades at high temperatures so when doing a standing start you have with zero cooling and lose performance until cooling becomes effective. IC engines may perform better as temperature rises.
The compressed oxygen is used so the fuel cells can absorb oxygen at a much faster rate than if they were burning regular air
I have often wondered if there is a benefit in this for internal combustion engines as well. You could do away with quite a bit of plumbing around the engine and get better performance by feeding pure oxygen into the engine. Maybe it would help with low-performing biofuels.
At high speeds, the effects of this rotational inertia dramatically affect the stability of the vehicle when it hits a bump.
No, thats the unsprung mass problem. It is caused by linear momentum up and down when the wheel has to negotiate a non-flat surface.
Wheel mass is a problem, but we haven't yet seen much development in integrated motor-wheel assemblies. It will be interesting to see what happens once some smart Japanese engineers have had a go at optimising it.
But as we've seen, the most recent disaster and this latest piece of news are both related to the re-entry of the Shuttle. Escape towers aren't going to help in this regard
Separating from a Shuttle during re-entry would be hairy but not totally impossible. Columbia almost certainly tumbled before breaking up and an escape capsule could have got away from it.
the Shuttle [..] uses very bleeding-edge technology (still) like throttled H2/LO2 engines
...which have proven to be extremely reliable. Of course, if the Shuttle was stacked vertically it wouldn't need to be throttled.
The heat shield is the bleeding edge failure in this design.
They should have stuck an Apollo Command Module on the front of the orbiter where the flight deck is and carried a launch escape tower for the first couple of minutes of flight. That way the crew would always have the option of ejecting if the orbiter fails.
it is well proven that morse code is a lot faster then texting
Dunno about that. I passed by radio exam at 10 words per minute but I reckon I can type SMS messages faster than that on my motorolla. And I had to spend six months at night school learning CW to get that far.
Remember Shoemaker-Levy?. By some standards Apophis will be inside our Roche limit on the 2029 close pass. A breakup inside a gravity well is a great way to transfer momentum. I don't think the numerical approximations are able to take that into account.
Apophis was lowered to 0 on the Torino scale sometime last fall. I'm not sure why it even warranted a mention in this particular context..
The wikipedia article says that Apophis would have to pass through a 400 metre keyhole in 2029 to be an impact risk in 2036, but I don't see how all possible "keyholes" can be identified once second order effects (such as incidental impacts on Apophis by small bodies) are taken into account.
A simple test of reaction time might stop some people from driving when they are way over the limit. To start the car make the driver watch for an LED to pulse on then press a button in the next (say) 400 milliseconds.
I agree totally with your argument. A drunk driver crashed on to the footpath close to my home just a couple of months ago. Luckily no pedestrians were hurt.
But once this type of system is implemented it will only be a matter or time before we hear the story of the drunk girl stranded half way home from a party because her car wouldn't start again who gets raped or murdered. Her fault, and that of her friends but it may not play that way in the media.
for drivers yakking away on their cell phone instead of watching the road.
That's easy to do. Mobile phones can be detected with devices which are trivial to build. The phone system can tell you when every phone was on a call.
It should be a standard part of accident investigation. Get a chart of time on calls and correlate it with the time of the crash.
Local Government here in Victoria must have an electronic system. All votes are by mail.
About 10 years ago in the City of Maroondah I received in the mail about five ballot papers addressed to names like "Jon Q Citizen, Jane C Jones", etc at my address. It looked like test data for training or testing purposes. Perhaps they forgot to delete the sample data before populating the database with a real electoral roll.
Needless to say, I didn't open the envelopes and use them to vote.
We just have to pay attention and maintain what we build. It's not THAT hard.
I used to work for the state highway authority, working on traffic signals. When I was there the entire bridge department were made redundant and replaced by contractors. No matter how much you document these things, you still need continuity from one generation to the next. The old guys have to be around to tell the young guys to look out for this and that, or it may cause problems.
It is interesting to me because we are getting a real look at the makeup of nearby solar systems. Even though planets like ours are still just below our limit of detection we have enough data to show that solar systems like ours (with a Jupiter, a Mars, etc) are not going to be the norm.
And when you think about it, the planetary systems we are seeing, with lots of big, hot gas giants and their presumed moons, is a far better situation than we might have expected. If we were unlucky, there would be hardly any planets at all, just disks of dust and the occasional asteroid.
The solar system consists of Jupiter plus debris - Asimov
We now know that there is a lot of debris out there.
I agree with all of that. One one thing I would like to see with ATM's is an attempt to behave a bit like a human teller in the sense that if I steal a woman's credit card and front up at the counter then they know they I (being male) must not be the owner of the card.
Some simple image matching process would be a good idea IMHO. It doesn't have to be fantastic and definitely not a replacement for a PIN.
In a city like LA where people often live pretty far out from where they work, it just isn't feasible.
How much of the driving in LA is at slow speed in heavy traffic? Under those conditions a petrol engine will be less efficient, and an electric drive line will be more efficient.
no-one has full blueprints of the Saturn V anymore
This issue has been discussed quite a bit on newsgroups and I think the consensus is that the blueprints do exist, but the tooling would have to be built again. The other issue is that the software and electronics would have to be done from scratch.
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But it reminds me of this gadget I saw on TV somewhere. Its like a bicycle for travelling on water. It has the same two submerged wings but the rider sits above the water and pounds the machine up and down to keep moving (and dry).
This is a beautiful device. Short cord wings are always better once the materials are up to the job.
Not if you suck air from under the car.
I could speculate that the fuel cell power output degrades at high temperatures so when doing a standing start you have with zero cooling and lose performance until cooling becomes effective. IC engines may perform better as temperature rises.
I have often wondered if there is a benefit in this for internal combustion engines as well. You could do away with quite a bit of plumbing around the engine and get better performance by feeding pure oxygen into the engine. Maybe it would help with low-performing biofuels.
No, thats the unsprung mass problem. It is caused by linear momentum up and down when the wheel has to negotiate a non-flat surface.
Wheel mass is a problem, but we haven't yet seen much development in integrated motor-wheel assemblies. It will be interesting to see what happens once some smart Japanese engineers have had a go at optimising it.
Separating from a Shuttle during re-entry would be hairy but not totally impossible. Columbia almost certainly tumbled before breaking up and an escape capsule could have got away from it.
I bet Chinese food will be quite economical by that time.
...which have proven to be extremely reliable. Of course, if the Shuttle was stacked vertically it wouldn't need to be throttled.
The heat shield is the bleeding edge failure in this design.
They should have stuck an Apollo Command Module on the front of the orbiter where the flight deck is and carried a launch escape tower for the first couple of minutes of flight. That way the crew would always have the option of ejecting if the orbiter fails.
Where is Hans Reiser when you need him? This is exactly the type of question he likes to argue about.
Dunno about that. I passed by radio exam at 10 words per minute but I reckon I can type SMS messages faster than that on my motorolla. And I had to spend six months at night school learning CW to get that far.
Remember Shoemaker-Levy?. By some standards Apophis will be inside our Roche limit on the 2029 close pass. A breakup inside a gravity well is a great way to transfer momentum. I don't think the numerical approximations are able to take that into account.
The wikipedia article says that Apophis would have to pass through a 400 metre keyhole in 2029 to be an impact risk in 2036, but I don't see how all possible "keyholes" can be identified once second order effects (such as incidental impacts on Apophis by small bodies) are taken into account.
I think you can combine IQ with ohms law.
We call them Brown Dwarfs.
A simple test of reaction time might stop some people from driving when they are way over the limit. To start the car make the driver watch for an LED to pulse on then press a button in the next (say) 400 milliseconds.
I agree totally with your argument. A drunk driver crashed on to the footpath close to my home just a couple of months ago. Luckily no pedestrians were hurt.
But once this type of system is implemented it will only be a matter or time before we hear the story of the drunk girl stranded half way home from a party because her car wouldn't start again who gets raped or murdered. Her fault, and that of her friends but it may not play that way in the media.
That's easy to do. Mobile phones can be detected with devices which are trivial to build. The phone system can tell you when every phone was on a call.
It should be a standard part of accident investigation. Get a chart of time on calls and correlate it with the time of the crash.
I suppose it depends on how deep you want to dig.
Local Government here in Victoria must have an electronic system. All votes are by mail.
About 10 years ago in the City of Maroondah I received in the mail about five ballot papers addressed to names like "Jon Q Citizen, Jane C Jones", etc at my address. It looked like test data for training or testing purposes. Perhaps they forgot to delete the sample data before populating the database with a real electoral roll.
Needless to say, I didn't open the envelopes and use them to vote.
LOL
I used to work for the state highway authority, working on traffic signals. When I was there the entire bridge department were made redundant and replaced by contractors. No matter how much you document these things, you still need continuity from one generation to the next. The old guys have to be around to tell the young guys to look out for this and that, or it may cause problems.
But it is cheaper to outsource.
It is interesting to me because we are getting a real look at the makeup of nearby solar systems. Even though planets like ours are still just below our limit of detection we have enough data to show that solar systems like ours (with a Jupiter, a Mars, etc) are not going to be the norm.
And when you think about it, the planetary systems we are seeing, with lots of big, hot gas giants and their presumed moons, is a far better situation than we might have expected. If we were unlucky, there would be hardly any planets at all, just disks of dust and the occasional asteroid.
The solar system consists of Jupiter plus debris - Asimov
We now know that there is a lot of debris out there.
I agree with all of that. One one thing I would like to see with ATM's is an attempt to behave a bit like a human teller in the sense that if I steal a woman's credit card and front up at the counter then they know they I (being male) must not be the owner of the card.
Some simple image matching process would be a good idea IMHO. It doesn't have to be fantastic and definitely not a replacement for a PIN.
Yes but it will have a longer range at lower speeds because less energy is lost to drag.
How much of the driving in LA is at slow speed in heavy traffic? Under those conditions a petrol engine will be less efficient, and an electric drive line will be more efficient.
This issue has been discussed quite a bit on newsgroups and I think the consensus is that the blueprints do exist, but the tooling would have to be built again. The other issue is that the software and electronics would have to be done from scratch.