My point is that there's no point in putting a balloon in orbit in the sense of a satellite, which is why this entire thread is silly. Why even discuss it? Because we've nothing better to do.
Except that balloons have lift, so they don't need to orbit as fast as the lumps of metal that we call satellites. The typical orbital period of a balloon is weeks, not hours.
They already do that, although the latitude is rather high. I built a few pieces of a terahertz receiver for a balloon-borne radio telescope called the STO. It's designed to launch at McMurdo and circle Antarctica for a few weeks.
I work at a telescope that does similar work. a couple weeks ago, we were doing some tests with the antenna pointed to fixed azimuth/elevation angles, which results in the telescope scanning the sky due to the Earth's rotation. We were watching the spectrum display, and saw many instances of strong (1 Kelvin or bigger) CO lines appear in thoroughly random places, perhaps 5% of the observing time. That's a lot of CO!
I suspect the driving factor is saving the $3 that the redundant DVI connector and cable set costs, since they're all starting to put HDMI connectors on motherboards and video cards, and HDMI~=DVI.
They're getting rid of VGA because it's not digital. If you don't think that's important, you've never bought a $5 pair of "digital stereo headphones".
The telescope that they use is actually several radio telescopes capturing the same signal at the same time, in an observing mode called VLBI for Very Long Baaseline Interferometry. The data captured are correlated off-site (or in real time if they can build a trans-oceanic Gbyte/sec data link) to get a wave-by-wave signal match, producing interference fringes that permit the construction of a very high resolution image. These days, they store the GByte/sec data on a bank of hard disk drives and FedEx them to the correlator in Virginia.
I happen to work on one of these telescopes, the Heinrich Hertz Submillimeter Telescope on Mt. Graham in Arizona. We have a hydrogen maser on site to produce a clock accurate enough to collect the data synchronously with other telescopes in other parts of the world.
We have a place in Tucson called Sky Bar that operates a couple big (12-16") telescopes on the smoking patio every evening. There are also large screen displays inside showing various astronomical wonders. But it's also the world capital of astronomy, so there are plenty of poeple who work in the industry (including myself) to keep the bar stools occupied.
I grew up in a dome. It would be fun to live in a gingerbread dome, as the walls would taste better. It would also be just about as big as our dome was. Six people in a 26 foot diameter house? Crazy!
"it seems" is based on the fact that optical development has progressed downward in frequency from optical through infrared, while radio work has progressed upward from the megahertz region to millimeter waves and higher. These two approaches meet in the terahertz region. Thus, it's the last frequency region to be utilized for communications. That makes it the final frontier, so to speak.
This article is basically nonsense. I work with folks who actually make terahertz radio equipment for radio astronomy. It seems like the last place in the spectrum you'd go to for anything practical. The technology is very primitive, since there has been little application for it, since the signals are quickly absorbed by water vapor in the atmosphere. My coworkers are currently in Antarctica to do some astronomy, because there's very little water in the air there.
A stable local oscillator that puts out any useful amount of terahertz power is very difficult to make. You are lucky to get a few microwatts. The signals aren't quite as directional as a laser, but they're too directional to be of much use for the wireless networking that we are familiar with.
There are optical ways of making signals at terahertz frequencies, which may hold more promise, but they're being used in only a few exotic applications, such as the ALMA interferometer array in Chile.
Really. Amateur means that he does something else for a living, right? It's amateur, with no quotes. My coworker does amateur astronomy also, and he managed to shoot a *video* of the asteroid that passed close to us a couple weeks ago, something that seemed at the time to be considered the realm of the professional. But all he used was a typical 16 inch scope and a mid-priced non-cooled CCD camera. It's amazing what you can achieve in your hobby if you put a few $$$ and hours into a project.
It would be rather difficult to make any GHz computer board these days using parts that a person could solder by hand. That's the price we pay for having $100 GHz computers.
They deliver stuff that works. They also don't have Chinese competition (at least for US customers). Solyndra had a bit of an Iridium-style problem, where the market got undercut by other sources.
Document it thoroughly and submit a report to the authorities. If that doesn't work, go to their offices and switch off the main power panel a few times until they get the hint.
The percentage of high school graduates entering college has gone way up in the last few decades, as college is regarded as a right rather than a privilege. So it stands to reason that more would drop out, since college happens to be rather difficult. As a college dropout myself, I can attest to that: although I was at the top of my high school class in math, it was a math class that did me in.
But this thing DOES carry a human! Granted, it's not carrying him any distance, but it at least got off the ground. One order of magnitude in battery performance improvement would make this device workable for some applications. Of course, the last order of magnitude improvement took 50 years, so I'm not holding my breath.
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My point is that there's no point in putting a balloon in orbit in the sense of a satellite, which is why this entire thread is silly. Why even discuss it? Because we've nothing better to do.
Except that balloons have lift, so they don't need to orbit as fast as the lumps of metal that we call satellites. The typical orbital period of a balloon is weeks, not hours.
They already do that, although the latitude is rather high. I built a few pieces of a terahertz receiver for a balloon-borne radio telescope called the STO. It's designed to launch at McMurdo and circle Antarctica for a few weeks.
I work at a telescope that does similar work. a couple weeks ago, we were doing some tests with the antenna pointed to fixed azimuth/elevation angles, which results in the telescope scanning the sky due to the Earth's rotation. We were watching the spectrum display, and saw many instances of strong (1 Kelvin or bigger) CO lines appear in thoroughly random places, perhaps 5% of the observing time. That's a lot of CO!
Gods are rather powerful and knowing. Can't they just deal with this stuff without involving Google?
DVI is actually an HDMI port minus audio plus a VGA port. But that's not obvious to the casual observer.
I suspect the driving factor is saving the $3 that the redundant DVI connector and cable set costs, since they're all starting to put HDMI connectors on motherboards and video cards, and HDMI~=DVI.
They're getting rid of VGA because it's not digital. If you don't think that's important, you've never bought a $5 pair of "digital stereo headphones".
2012 - 1987 = 25.
The telescope that they use is actually several radio telescopes capturing the same signal at the same time, in an observing mode called VLBI for Very Long Baaseline Interferometry. The data captured are correlated off-site (or in real time if they can build a trans-oceanic Gbyte/sec data link) to get a wave-by-wave signal match, producing interference fringes that permit the construction of a very high resolution image. These days, they store the GByte/sec data on a bank of hard disk drives and FedEx them to the correlator in Virginia.
I happen to work on one of these telescopes, the Heinrich Hertz Submillimeter Telescope on Mt. Graham in Arizona. We have a hydrogen maser on site to produce a clock accurate enough to collect the data synchronously with other telescopes in other parts of the world.
I do CAD design of circuit boards and metal. Try running Altium DXP or Inventor on a tablet.
I require a real computer to do useful work, so I'm a living embodiment of his notion. I'm also in the 1% of computer users, so I disprove his point..
We have a place in Tucson called Sky Bar that operates a couple big (12-16") telescopes on the smoking patio every evening. There are also large screen displays inside showing various astronomical wonders. But it's also the world capital of astronomy, so there are plenty of poeple who work in the industry (including myself) to keep the bar stools occupied.
Patents are supposed to be granted only for non-obvious solutions. How is this not obvious to someone trained in the art?
But 32 bit XP computers are the most prevalent type, or nearly so, among the non-developer set. I have four of them at home and one at the office.
More like 640GB these days.
I grew up in a dome. It would be fun to live in a gingerbread dome, as the walls would taste better. It would also be just about as big as our dome was. Six people in a 26 foot diameter house? Crazy!
"it seems" is based on the fact that optical development has progressed downward in frequency from optical through infrared, while radio work has progressed upward from the megahertz region to millimeter waves and higher. These two approaches meet in the terahertz region. Thus, it's the last frequency region to be utilized for communications. That makes it the final frontier, so to speak.
This article is basically nonsense. I work with folks who actually make terahertz radio equipment for radio astronomy. It seems like the last place in the spectrum you'd go to for anything practical. The technology is very primitive, since there has been little application for it, since the signals are quickly absorbed by water vapor in the atmosphere. My coworkers are currently in Antarctica to do some astronomy, because there's very little water in the air there.
A stable local oscillator that puts out any useful amount of terahertz power is very difficult to make. You are lucky to get a few microwatts. The signals aren't quite as directional as a laser, but they're too directional to be of much use for the wireless networking that we are familiar with.
There are optical ways of making signals at terahertz frequencies, which may hold more promise, but they're being used in only a few exotic applications, such as the ALMA interferometer array in Chile.
Really. Amateur means that he does something else for a living, right? It's amateur, with no quotes. My coworker does amateur astronomy also, and he managed to shoot a *video* of the asteroid that passed close to us a couple weeks ago, something that seemed at the time to be considered the realm of the professional. But all he used was a typical 16 inch scope and a mid-priced non-cooled CCD camera. It's amazing what you can achieve in your hobby if you put a few $$$ and hours into a project.
That's what Arduino shields are for.
It would be rather difficult to make any GHz computer board these days using parts that a person could solder by hand. That's the price we pay for having $100 GHz computers.
They deliver stuff that works. They also don't have Chinese competition (at least for US customers). Solyndra had a bit of an Iridium-style problem, where the market got undercut by other sources.
The TV makers got so high from the CRT-to-LCD replacement revenue bump that they want another hit. It's like drugs to their accountants.
Document it thoroughly and submit a report to the authorities. If that doesn't work, go to their offices and switch off the main power panel a few times until they get the hint.
The percentage of high school graduates entering college has gone way up in the last few decades, as college is regarded as a right rather than a privilege. So it stands to reason that more would drop out, since college happens to be rather difficult. As a college dropout myself, I can attest to that: although I was at the top of my high school class in math, it was a math class that did me in.
But this thing DOES carry a human! Granted, it's not carrying him any distance, but it at least got off the ground.
One order of magnitude in battery performance improvement would make this device workable for some applications.
Of course, the last order of magnitude improvement took 50 years, so I'm not holding my breath.