NASA just finished building their new supercomputer, and it's already been slashdotted. Actually, the second try worked, but the first one gave me a server busy message.
The NASA TV feed is pretty interesting. They just went through a series of photos from one of the cameras taking shots at different wavelengths which very dramatically displayed the effect of wavelength "windows." They also mentioned that they sampled the upper atmosphere on the way through, so maybe there will be something interesting to tell as a result of that.
I think in the early 60's, NASA and the Air Force were considering building or built a nuclear powered variant of the B-36. If anyone has any links with information about this project, post away, I'm interested, just as a comparison. My guess was that it simply used a PWR with the steam driving turbines in the engine pods to provide power to the propellers. I'm sure the greatest challenges were cooling and weight, but the benefit would be practically unlimited range.
You sure it's not coming from viruses? If your campus is anything like ours, probably 1/3 of the students will still not have patched the LSASS vulnerability that's been known about for over 4 months. Computers then infected with Sasser or Korgo will happily spew out packets to random IP's whenever they have a connection. We've been trying to educate and entice students to run windows update, but they play dumb (Some, on being told have actually said "We shouldn't have to be computer wizzes to use the internet"). I'm almost ready to lobby for requiring all students to have comp services set windows update to automatic for them unless they can pass a test showing they can use a computer safely and responsibly before we let the DHCP server hand them a real IP.
You'd have to be pretty dedicated to simply give up over a year of your life to live in a cramped environment with bad food, no privacy and not even get you cosmonaut wings at the end.
According to the arictle, Valery Polyakov (Russian, of course) holds the current record for the longest continuous time in space with 438 days aboard the Mir. That's pretty darn close.
There seems to be a little confusion among those who didn't actually read the article, so I might as well waste a few seconds:
There is no lava actually coming out visibly. When they say there is magma at the surface, the geologists really mean it's just below the surface. I guess the point of the article is that this is new growth inside the lava dome, as opposed to lava deep down pushing up the whole dome from beneath. Microsoft is still safe baring any truly cool explosions and there's really no danger of forest fires. Any lava would have a lot of crater filling to do before it spilled over the north face. Plus I read somewhere that the lava tends to come out of Mt. St. Helens pretty viscous (thick crust?) so it doesn't flow well anyways.
Trees are not only easier, but probably cheaper, too. To produce paper in a lab, you need a way of controlling the cellulose chain growth so you get reasonably uniform fibers, something that happens naturally in trees. You need energy to drive and and regulate the process, which trees acquire at a pretty good price per KW thanks to chloroplasts. You also need the complex equipment that handles the materials in bulk, mixes it, and handles the product, which the tree provides, as well. The tree even handles the acquisition of the raw material from the environment. Additionally, trees are reasonably environmentally friendly, having few side-effects other than a small contribution to the heat death of the universe, which is unavoidable for any use of energy.
On the downside, trees require a significant amount of land and time. The hybrid cottonwood-poplars that the James River Co farms here in Washington are remarkably fast growing, but still take about 15 years to reach harvest size. I'm afraid I have no idea how difficult it is to acquire a large amount of "feedstock" for making your cellulose and other ingredients.
Regarding hemp, I'm not at all surprised that it makes good paper, so then I am surprised it's not more widely used. I've been told there is a hemp farm somewhere around my area that grows it for rope and thread and there's a big paper mill in Camas, WA. I guess they just haven't gotten together.
It was bound to happen before too much longer. Does this make Spirit the typical lazy, fat American or has it simply decided it's time to retire?
I suppose since everything else is still working on Spirit, if they don't figure out how to work around this then we'll being seeing lots and lots of postcards from the top of that same hill.
Congratulations on confusing both the Americans and Europeans.
P.S. Were you on the Mars Climate Orbiter team?
Touche! Sorry, I took the 25 km figure from another post, which gave it in km...15 miles if it bothers you. Also, although I didn't take it from a published source, it fits with what I've seen while camping and hiking near the volcano.
First of all...the Trojan nuclear reactor was not built on a volcano, it was built near one. In fact, it's about 75 miles away (an estimate, I don't have a map in front of me). As someone else noted, the shockwave was only significant for a radius of about 25 km. The pyroclastic flow went north (the wrong way) for about 20 km, following the low ground. Trojan is on the other side of the Columbia River in the middle of a big plain. Debris from the eruption is simply not a threat. Additionally, the containment building is designed to take a direct hit from a commercial airliner without threatening the integrity of the core or the heat exchanger. That probably really means something like a 1% chance of breach, but it still shows you that it's well built.
Additionally, the Trojan reactor was not shut down due to the proximity of a fault and fear of earthquake damage, but due to an aging coolant system that would have cost $billions to rebuild. Admittedly it is an older design and there are safer options now, but my point is Mt. St. Helens does not threaten us with a nuclear disaster.
The spent fuel rods are still there because some crazy people are convinced that they are safer sitting in a pool a couple hundred yards from the Columbia River than converted into a ceramic, encased in steel and concrete, and buried under Yucca mountain.
I wish I could go hike up there, but other people tell me that would be stupid and now illegal, so I guess I'll have to settle for looking out the window.
Either the camera is down again or it's moving at warp 9. I just got grey fuzz.
From my house there wasn't anything to see. It's about 60 miles east of me. I suppose if I got closer it might be possible to see some steam rising from the crater, but a small amount of that is really quite common. Don't hold your breath folks...similar activity was recorded in 2002 and 1998, if I remember correctly, and quite a few more times since 1980. It'll probably pass quietly
Our university campus has a huge problem with viruses and this is another exciting addition to our collection. I'm sure I'll start seeing on plenty of guy's asking for help getting this removed, after finding out pornstars aren't virus free after all.
Thankfully, though, this shouldn't cause as much trouble as our current crop of worms. I'm shocked at how dumb our users are, as a whole. We're still having people infected with blaster, over a year after Microsoft patched that vulnerability! Sasser is absolutely rampant. The school even purchased a blanket liscence of Norton, but I would bet less than half of the students have installed it. We have a T3 line providing our outside connection, and it's currently averaging about 7 Mbps combined up/down, because the internal network, which is mostly linked from buidling to building by gigabit fiber, is saturated by virus crap. Although this virus may have a really effective way of spreading, it scares me very little.
It's not fully scalable. I don't remember the specifics, but for whatever reasons, their hybrid engine begins to experience a rapidly diminishing thrust-to-weight ratio as it's scaled up. Also, the rocket is designed for sub-orbital flight at about 4000 mph (if I remember correctly), not the 16000 mph re-entry an orbital vehicle would undergo. A new design will be necessary to advance this program into orbital space flight.
The mothership concept is definitely scalable. In fact, Scaled Composites just won a contract to use the White Knight as the lift vehicle for the X-43 drop tests. They showed that they could perform the task at a lower cost than the Air Force B-52 that is normally used.
Environmentalists say it presents a major terrorist target.
So let's protest to be sure it makes international news and everyone with an internet connection will know about it.
Both have a squad of armed police on board from the UK Atomic Energy Agency Constabulary. The ships carry naval cannons, have satellite monitoring, twin engines and hull protection.
"Ok Abdullah, here's the plan: we'll sneak in really quiet so they don't kill us with their 30mm cannons. We then kill a dozen armed guards, disable the automatic satellite tracking, then avoid all of the spy satellites, AWACS, aircraft carriers, and submarines from every infidel country that will be looking for us, and book it 5000 miles for home in this giant freighter. Are you done sharpening your boxcutter?"
But critics say the shipment would be safer if carried on a naval frigate.
I hope it's not the environmentalists making that criticism. The ships are owned by British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL). They were designed to safely and securely transport the stuff. It's not like you just want to toss the stuff in the dry storage on a frigate.
Captain Malcolm Miller, head of international transport at BNFL, said they were the "safest sea transports" he had ever seen. A naval escort had not been requested and was not necessary, he added.
He ain't worried, and he's in the middle of it.
Irish Environment Minister Martin Cullen told the BBC that "any accident could have catastrophic effects." He wants assurances that they will not pass near Irish waters.
An understandable concern, I suppose. I would expect that the fuel is sealed up in a pretty durable container that would contain any leaks long enough for recovery if the ships sank.
Ireland, with New Zealand, Peru and Chile, is co-sponsoring a proposal at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) seeking detailed information for coastal states on all movements of nuclear material in international waters.
Seems like a good idea. It sounded, however, like BNFL was being pretty generous with relevant information on this trip, even though they don't have to.
Greenpeace says the plutonium should be disposed of as nuclear waste to avoid the transport and proliferation risks.
Ok, so it's unacceptable to burn it, move it, or leave it sitting in storage. Let's take Greenpeace's advice, then, and dispose of it as nuclear waste in a way that will keep it safe for 10000+ years in a chemically stable, glass form, in concrete and steel casks, a couple thousand feet underground in Yucca Moun...oh wait, they're protesting that also.
On a visit home, one of my younger siblings was watching it. I remember thinking there is no way an arcade game could render in 3D that well back then (but maybe I underestimate Atari). Even Strong Bad hasn't reached that level of detail yet..."Your head a-splode."
I doubt you would get the same effect if you continued to increase the viscosity. The human body has relatively high "form drag" which is resistance due to the shape. At lower viscosities, this would be the significant force. At higher viscosities, the effect of "skin drag" begins to win over. This is caused by shear stress in the boundary layer. In an attempt at English, that means that the fluid immediately in contact with your skin as you swim is moving the same speed as you are. As you move further out, there is a gradient where the layers of the fluid are moving at slower speeds until the edge of the boundary, where the fluid is moving at the ambient velocity (0). The effect of these layers moving at different speeds is a resistance to movement due the viscosity of the liquid. It's easier to explain with pictures.
And you can't swim in air because you sink to the bottom.
If the wire was severed, wouldnt the space module be flung out into space? I think the space module would have to have thrusters to make sure this doesnt happen.
It would fly into space. Running some quick calculations and not accounting for the mass of the ribbon (which would be significat but mostly balanced by the bottom half), to hold a platform the size of the space shuttle in the same orbit would take about 7000 pounds of continuous force. It's nothing compared to the 3.3 million pounds of thrust one of the shuttle's SRB's generates, but you could burn a lot of fuel waiting for the ribbon to unspool and the ground crew to snag and secure it.
The problem is that it will be held in place by tension. Without something to anchor to, it would drift off into space. That anchor actually could simply be another counterweight near enough to the surface to hang stuff on, but then any amount of drift could have bad consequences and your orbit would have to be nearly perfectly circular. This presents some nasty technical challenges, but is theoretically possible. However, once you put a load on your elevator to haul into space, you're no longer balanced and it starts falling. Anchoring to the earth allows you have the elevator slightly imbalanced in favor of the space anchor point.
Also, reeling the cable in would change the orbital altitude as the net force on the anchor/cable system would be zero. You finish out somewhere around the geosynchronous point but (I think) moving at the wrong speed.
Finally, consider a roll of paper towels 150 feet long. That's about 1/35th of a mile. Multiply your 35 rolls per mile by 60000 miles and roll all of those paper towels up on one roll. Not only is the roll really big, but it takes a long time to reel it in. And we haven't even discussed the angular momentum of the spool.
The idea really wasn't a bad one to consider, but it presents more problems than it solves.
Is it just me or does he sound better than either Bush or Kerry?
I think for the most part he sounds less concerned about being definitive. He's not saying
"My administration will reduce global tensions," but rather, "They don't want us there, we didn't authorize our involvement there through the proper internal channels, this is my solution."
I don't fully support him either, but I am definitely going to give him some serious consideration as an alternative to Bush and Kerry. The question I will be pondering is will his non-traditional ideas screw up the world more than the apparently corrupt, political and sometimes stupid plans of the other candidates?
I wonder if it wouldn't be better (certainly more efficient) if large ISP's gave bounties for identifying spammers on their lines. At least it would cut out a little good ol' government waste.
While it's true to a degree that space flight is inherently more difficult than atmospheric flight, that isn't the sole, or even the main factor contributing to the unreliability of space flight. It's also not really a problem of using old equipment. In fact, the problem can be considered using new equipment. Don't worry, I'm not crazy. Read on.
The Wright Brothers crashed several times before their first powered flight, and they crashed on their third flight, and they crashed several times more in the years following that. It was part of starting out. Compare that with now. Every part in an airplane is rigorously tested, at least in the prototype. Most parts are "off-the-shelf," which not only makes them cheaper, but means the engineers can become familiar with their failure history and plan ahead. Even the newest designs are based on one that worked well before.
In the space program, however, everything is new. The oxygen generator was built specifically for the space station. It was tested in the lab where it was built. At best, it was designed and built by applying lessons learned from a handful of similar devices before it.
Remember, NASA is about developing technology. In a way, the space program now is sort of like a software program in its alpha test stage. A lot of lessons will be learned and a lot of bugs will be identified. In the next few decades, companies like Scaled Composites will produce vehicles that better fit the description of Beta releases. Maybe it won't be too long before we're asking if interstellar travel is really that much more difficult than flying to Mars.
Most of what I have to say has been mentioned by various posters, but I wanted to put it all together.
That 3% of the farmland we would be using is unfortunately mostly located in North Dakota and surrounding states. The problem is transmitting the power from North Dakota to the rest of the country.
The power output of a windfarm is, of course, dependent on the wind. It varies throughout the day and by the season. For off-peaks, other sources are still needed, either in the form of more turbines, more sources of other kinds, or some temporary storage. All involve significant capital investment.
Offshore farms are also an option. The Danish produce a significant portion of their energy using turbines anchored offshore. Noise and safety concerns are reduced, and the turbines can be made bigger since the blades don't have to transported by road. The conditions aren't as favorable in the US as they are in Denmark, but a lot is still available. I for one think they would look a lot better off the coast by Long Beach than all those oil rigs.
A lot of people have asked about climate changes. No serious studies have been done, but I would expect the effect to be negligible. They only affect the air up to around 200m and they fall far short of exhausting all of the wind's energy in that zone.
As simple as they seem, wind turbines have advanced quite a bit since all those little mills were installed in California. People complained about noise. Blades fatigued and broke. Birds flew into them. GE's new turbines are far quieter, spin higher up than most birds fly, and extensive fatigue testing is required on all new designs. They are really quite fascinating...and huge
Visit NREL's site for information on current wind development.
Even if it did violate the letter of the copyright law, I would argue that it does not violate the intent of protecting the originator's interests regarding the program. I can't see any reason why programmers wouldn't want users to be able to run their software on any platform. You could compile and market one version, but sell it to Win+Mac+Linux+misc OS users.
Oh yeah, I cast a vote for vaporware...I would wager it would fail to make a perfect compilation a significant portion of the time.
You actually offer a pretty good solution, aside from a few, although serious, technical difficulties. Those first.
Problem 1: Active volcanoes aren't entirely reliable. It's pretty hard to find one like in Joe vs the Volcano that just sits there and bubbles. They tend to start and go, and it will take a while to get all the stuff disposed of.
Problem 2: The working conditions suck. We're talking about a lot of very heavy stuff that has to be handled relatively carefully and protected from theft. Then we throw in the boiling lava part.
Problem 3: The lack of "quick-lava." Stuff tends to come out of volcanoes, not go in. If we toss this radioactive material into the lava, it melts and gets deposited where the lava flows.
However, if you could overcome these problems and somehow make the radioactive stuff go down into the lava, it's probably just about taken care of. There's a lot of space down there in the mantle for it to "dilute" to natural levels, and it's definitely not a threat to the water supply nor is it very accessible to terrorists. Theoretically, it's possible for the stuff to stay sealed and in it's glass form under Yucca Mountain long enough for geological activity to bury it even deaper. Not to mention, if you consider how far we've come in our ability to work with nuclear materials in the last 100 years, it's very likely we'll be darn proficient at it in 10000 years.
As for labeling it as dangerous...I don't know for sure, but a skull and crossbones seems like a pretty universal indicator that someone doesn't want you messing with it.
Slashdot Mirror
NASA just finished building their new supercomputer, and it's already been slashdotted. Actually, the second try worked, but the first one gave me a server busy message.
The NASA TV feed is pretty interesting. They just went through a series of photos from one of the cameras taking shots at different wavelengths which very dramatically displayed the effect of wavelength "windows." They also mentioned that they sampled the upper atmosphere on the way through, so maybe there will be something interesting to tell as a result of that.
I think in the early 60's, NASA and the Air Force were considering building or built a nuclear powered variant of the B-36. If anyone has any links with information about this project, post away, I'm interested, just as a comparison. My guess was that it simply used a PWR with the steam driving turbines in the engine pods to provide power to the propellers. I'm sure the greatest challenges were cooling and weight, but the benefit would be practically unlimited range.
You sure it's not coming from viruses? If your campus is anything like ours, probably 1/3 of the students will still not have patched the LSASS vulnerability that's been known about for over 4 months. Computers then infected with Sasser or Korgo will happily spew out packets to random IP's whenever they have a connection. We've been trying to educate and entice students to run windows update, but they play dumb (Some, on being told have actually said "We shouldn't have to be computer wizzes to use the internet"). I'm almost ready to lobby for requiring all students to have comp services set windows update to automatic for them unless they can pass a test showing they can use a computer safely and responsibly before we let the DHCP server hand them a real IP.
You'd have to be pretty dedicated to simply give up over a year of your life to live in a cramped environment with bad food, no privacy and not even get you cosmonaut wings at the end.
According to the arictle, Valery Polyakov (Russian, of course) holds the current record for the longest continuous time in space with 438 days aboard the Mir. That's pretty darn close.
There seems to be a little confusion among those who didn't actually read the article, so I might as well waste a few seconds:
There is no lava actually coming out visibly. When they say there is magma at the surface, the geologists really mean it's just below the surface. I guess the point of the article is that this is new growth inside the lava dome, as opposed to lava deep down pushing up the whole dome from beneath. Microsoft is still safe baring any truly cool explosions and there's really no danger of forest fires. Any lava would have a lot of crater filling to do before it spilled over the north face. Plus I read somewhere that the lava tends to come out of Mt. St. Helens pretty viscous (thick crust?) so it doesn't flow well anyways.
Trees are not only easier, but probably cheaper, too. To produce paper in a lab, you need a way of controlling the cellulose chain growth so you get reasonably uniform fibers, something that happens naturally in trees. You need energy to drive and and regulate the process, which trees acquire at a pretty good price per KW thanks to chloroplasts. You also need the complex equipment that handles the materials in bulk, mixes it, and handles the product, which the tree provides, as well. The tree even handles the acquisition of the raw material from the environment. Additionally, trees are reasonably environmentally friendly, having few side-effects other than a small contribution to the heat death of the universe, which is unavoidable for any use of energy.
On the downside, trees require a significant amount of land and time. The hybrid cottonwood-poplars that the James River Co farms here in Washington are remarkably fast growing, but still take about 15 years to reach harvest size. I'm afraid I have no idea how difficult it is to acquire a large amount of "feedstock" for making your cellulose and other ingredients.
Regarding hemp, I'm not at all surprised that it makes good paper, so then I am surprised it's not more widely used. I've been told there is a hemp farm somewhere around my area that grows it for rope and thread and there's a big paper mill in Camas, WA. I guess they just haven't gotten together.
It was bound to happen before too much longer. Does this make Spirit the typical lazy, fat American or has it simply decided it's time to retire?
I suppose since everything else is still working on Spirit, if they don't figure out how to work around this then we'll being seeing lots and lots of postcards from the top of that same hill.
contrary to its title, the article is not in the traditional form of an FAQ.
Congratulations on confusing both the Americans and Europeans.
P.S.
Were you on the Mars Climate Orbiter team?
Touche! Sorry, I took the 25 km figure from another post, which gave it in km...15 miles if it bothers you. Also, although I didn't take it from a published source, it fits with what I've seen while camping and hiking near the volcano.
First of all...the Trojan nuclear reactor was not built on a volcano, it was built near one. In fact, it's about 75 miles away (an estimate, I don't have a map in front of me). As someone else noted, the shockwave was only significant for a radius of about 25 km. The pyroclastic flow went north (the wrong way) for about 20 km, following the low ground. Trojan is on the other side of the Columbia River in the middle of a big plain. Debris from the eruption is simply not a threat. Additionally, the containment building is designed to take a direct hit from a commercial airliner without threatening the integrity of the core or the heat exchanger. That probably really means something like a 1% chance of breach, but it still shows you that it's well built.
Additionally, the Trojan reactor was not shut down due to the proximity of a fault and fear of earthquake damage, but due to an aging coolant system that would have cost $billions to rebuild. Admittedly it is an older design and there are safer options now, but my point is Mt. St. Helens does not threaten us with a nuclear disaster.
The spent fuel rods are still there because some crazy people are convinced that they are safer sitting in a pool a couple hundred yards from the Columbia River than converted into a ceramic, encased in steel and concrete, and buried under Yucca mountain.
I wish I could go hike up there, but other people tell me that would be stupid and now illegal, so I guess I'll have to settle for looking out the window.
Either the camera is down again or it's moving at warp 9. I just got grey fuzz.
From my house there wasn't anything to see. It's about 60 miles east of me. I suppose if I got closer it might be possible to see some steam rising from the crater, but a small amount of that is really quite common. Don't hold your breath folks...similar activity was recorded in 2002 and 1998, if I remember correctly, and quite a few more times since 1980. It'll probably pass quietly
Our university campus has a huge problem with viruses and this is another exciting addition to our collection. I'm sure I'll start seeing on plenty of guy's asking for help getting this removed, after finding out pornstars aren't virus free after all.
Thankfully, though, this shouldn't cause as much trouble as our current crop of worms. I'm shocked at how dumb our users are, as a whole. We're still having people infected with blaster, over a year after Microsoft patched that vulnerability! Sasser is absolutely rampant. The school even purchased a blanket liscence of Norton, but I would bet less than half of the students have installed it. We have a T3 line providing our outside connection, and it's currently averaging about 7 Mbps combined up/down, because the internal network, which is mostly linked from buidling to building by gigabit fiber, is saturated by virus crap. Although this virus may have a really effective way of spreading, it scares me very little.
It's not fully scalable. I don't remember the specifics, but for whatever reasons, their hybrid engine begins to experience a rapidly diminishing thrust-to-weight ratio as it's scaled up. Also, the rocket is designed for sub-orbital flight at about 4000 mph (if I remember correctly), not the 16000 mph re-entry an orbital vehicle would undergo. A new design will be necessary to advance this program into orbital space flight.
The mothership concept is definitely scalable. In fact, Scaled Composites just won a contract to use the White Knight as the lift vehicle for the X-43 drop tests. They showed that they could perform the task at a lower cost than the Air Force B-52 that is normally used.
Environmentalists say it presents a major terrorist target.
So let's protest to be sure it makes international news and everyone with an internet connection will know about it.
Both have a squad of armed police on board from the UK Atomic Energy Agency Constabulary. The ships carry naval cannons, have satellite monitoring, twin engines and hull protection.
"Ok Abdullah, here's the plan: we'll sneak in really quiet so they don't kill us with their 30mm cannons. We then kill a dozen armed guards, disable the automatic satellite tracking, then avoid all of the spy satellites, AWACS, aircraft carriers, and submarines from every infidel country that will be looking for us, and book it 5000 miles for home in this giant freighter. Are you done sharpening your boxcutter?"
But critics say the shipment would be safer if carried on a naval frigate.
I hope it's not the environmentalists making that criticism. The ships are owned by British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL). They were designed to safely and securely transport the stuff. It's not like you just want to toss the stuff in the dry storage on a frigate.
Captain Malcolm Miller, head of international transport at BNFL, said they were the "safest sea transports" he had ever seen. A naval escort had not been requested and was not necessary, he added.
He ain't worried, and he's in the middle of it.
Irish Environment Minister Martin Cullen told the BBC that "any accident could have catastrophic effects." He wants assurances that they will not pass near Irish waters.
An understandable concern, I suppose. I would expect that the fuel is sealed up in a pretty durable container that would contain any leaks long enough for recovery if the ships sank.
Ireland, with New Zealand, Peru and Chile, is co-sponsoring a proposal at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) seeking detailed information for coastal states on all movements of nuclear material in international waters.
Seems like a good idea. It sounded, however, like BNFL was being pretty generous with relevant information on this trip, even though they don't have to.
Greenpeace says the plutonium should be disposed of as nuclear waste to avoid the transport and proliferation risks.
Ok, so it's unacceptable to burn it, move it, or leave it sitting in storage. Let's take Greenpeace's advice, then, and dispose of it as nuclear waste in a way that will keep it safe for 10000+ years in a chemically stable, glass form, in concrete and steel casks, a couple thousand feet underground in Yucca Moun...oh wait, they're protesting that also.
On a visit home, one of my younger siblings was watching it. I remember thinking there is no way an arcade game could render in 3D that well back then (but maybe I underestimate Atari). Even Strong Bad hasn't reached that level of detail yet..."Your head a-splode."
By the way, hilarious signature.
I wish we could've tried this in our fluid's lab!
I doubt you would get the same effect if you continued to increase the viscosity. The human body has relatively high "form drag" which is resistance due to the shape. At lower viscosities, this would be the significant force. At higher viscosities, the effect of "skin drag" begins to win over. This is caused by shear stress in the boundary layer. In an attempt at English, that means that the fluid immediately in contact with your skin as you swim is moving the same speed as you are. As you move further out, there is a gradient where the layers of the fluid are moving at slower speeds until the edge of the boundary, where the fluid is moving at the ambient velocity (0). The effect of these layers moving at different speeds is a resistance to movement due the viscosity of the liquid. It's easier to explain with pictures.
And you can't swim in air because you sink to the bottom.
If the wire was severed, wouldnt the space module be flung out into space? I think the space module would have to have thrusters to make sure this doesnt happen.
It would fly into space. Running some quick calculations and not accounting for the mass of the ribbon (which would be significat but mostly balanced by the bottom half), to hold a platform the size of the space shuttle in the same orbit would take about 7000 pounds of continuous force. It's nothing compared to the 3.3 million pounds of thrust one of the shuttle's SRB's generates, but you could burn a lot of fuel waiting for the ribbon to unspool and the ground crew to snag and secure it.
The problem is that it will be held in place by tension. Without something to anchor to, it would drift off into space. That anchor actually could simply be another counterweight near enough to the surface to hang stuff on, but then any amount of drift could have bad consequences and your orbit would have to be nearly perfectly circular. This presents some nasty technical challenges, but is theoretically possible. However, once you put a load on your elevator to haul into space, you're no longer balanced and it starts falling. Anchoring to the earth allows you have the elevator slightly imbalanced in favor of the space anchor point. Also, reeling the cable in would change the orbital altitude as the net force on the anchor/cable system would be zero. You finish out somewhere around the geosynchronous point but (I think) moving at the wrong speed. Finally, consider a roll of paper towels 150 feet long. That's about 1/35th of a mile. Multiply your 35 rolls per mile by 60000 miles and roll all of those paper towels up on one roll. Not only is the roll really big, but it takes a long time to reel it in. And we haven't even discussed the angular momentum of the spool. The idea really wasn't a bad one to consider, but it presents more problems than it solves.
Is it just me or does he sound better than either Bush or Kerry?
I think for the most part he sounds less concerned about being definitive. He's not saying "My administration will reduce global tensions," but rather, "They don't want us there, we didn't authorize our involvement there through the proper internal channels, this is my solution."
I don't fully support him either, but I am definitely going to give him some serious consideration as an alternative to Bush and Kerry. The question I will be pondering is will his non-traditional ideas screw up the world more than the apparently corrupt, political and sometimes stupid plans of the other candidates?
I wonder if it wouldn't be better (certainly more efficient) if large ISP's gave bounties for identifying spammers on their lines. At least it would cut out a little good ol' government waste.
While it's true to a degree that space flight is inherently more difficult than atmospheric flight, that isn't the sole, or even the main factor contributing to the unreliability of space flight. It's also not really a problem of using old equipment. In fact, the problem can be considered using new equipment. Don't worry, I'm not crazy. Read on.
The Wright Brothers crashed several times before their first powered flight, and they crashed on their third flight, and they crashed several times more in the years following that. It was part of starting out. Compare that with now. Every part in an airplane is rigorously tested, at least in the prototype. Most parts are "off-the-shelf," which not only makes them cheaper, but means the engineers can become familiar with their failure history and plan ahead. Even the newest designs are based on one that worked well before.
In the space program, however, everything is new. The oxygen generator was built specifically for the space station. It was tested in the lab where it was built. At best, it was designed and built by applying lessons learned from a handful of similar devices before it.
Remember, NASA is about developing technology. In a way, the space program now is sort of like a software program in its alpha test stage. A lot of lessons will be learned and a lot of bugs will be identified. In the next few decades, companies like Scaled Composites will produce vehicles that better fit the description of Beta releases. Maybe it won't be too long before we're asking if interstellar travel is really that much more difficult than flying to Mars.
Most of what I have to say has been mentioned by various posters, but I wanted to put it all together.
That 3% of the farmland we would be using is unfortunately mostly located in North Dakota and surrounding states. The problem is transmitting the power from North Dakota to the rest of the country.
The power output of a windfarm is, of course, dependent on the wind. It varies throughout the day and by the season. For off-peaks, other sources are still needed, either in the form of more turbines, more sources of other kinds, or some temporary storage. All involve significant capital investment.
Offshore farms are also an option. The Danish produce a significant portion of their energy using turbines anchored offshore. Noise and safety concerns are reduced, and the turbines can be made bigger since the blades don't have to transported by road. The conditions aren't as favorable in the US as they are in Denmark, but a lot is still available. I for one think they would look a lot better off the coast by Long Beach than all those oil rigs.
A lot of people have asked about climate changes. No serious studies have been done, but I would expect the effect to be negligible. They only affect the air up to around 200m and they fall far short of exhausting all of the wind's energy in that zone.
As simple as they seem, wind turbines have advanced quite a bit since all those little mills were installed in California. People complained about noise. Blades fatigued and broke. Birds flew into them. GE's new turbines are far quieter, spin higher up than most birds fly, and extensive fatigue testing is required on all new designs. They are really quite fascinating...and huge
Visit NREL's site for information on current wind development.
Even if it did violate the letter of the copyright law, I would argue that it does not violate the intent of protecting the originator's interests regarding the program. I can't see any reason why programmers wouldn't want users to be able to run their software on any platform. You could compile and market one version, but sell it to Win+Mac+Linux+misc OS users.
Oh yeah, I cast a vote for vaporware...I would wager it would fail to make a perfect compilation a significant portion of the time.
You actually offer a pretty good solution, aside from a few, although serious, technical difficulties. Those first.
Problem 1: Active volcanoes aren't entirely reliable. It's pretty hard to find one like in Joe vs the Volcano that just sits there and bubbles. They tend to start and go, and it will take a while to get all the stuff disposed of.
Problem 2: The working conditions suck. We're talking about a lot of very heavy stuff that has to be handled relatively carefully and protected from theft. Then we throw in the boiling lava part.
Problem 3: The lack of "quick-lava." Stuff tends to come out of volcanoes, not go in. If we toss this radioactive material into the lava, it melts and gets deposited where the lava flows.
However, if you could overcome these problems and somehow make the radioactive stuff go down into the lava, it's probably just about taken care of. There's a lot of space down there in the mantle for it to "dilute" to natural levels, and it's definitely not a threat to the water supply nor is it very accessible to terrorists. Theoretically, it's possible for the stuff to stay sealed and in it's glass form under Yucca Mountain long enough for geological activity to bury it even deaper. Not to mention, if you consider how far we've come in our ability to work with nuclear materials in the last 100 years, it's very likely we'll be darn proficient at it in 10000 years.
As for labeling it as dangerous...I don't know for sure, but a skull and crossbones seems like a pretty universal indicator that someone doesn't want you messing with it.