Yeah, I am as well. The problem is: the adiabatic lapse rate is about 4 degrees F per thousand feet, so you go up in altitude and the air cools down, but there's less of it. Take this to an extreme and you're in outer space, where it's *very* cold (if temperature means anything at all when there's no air) but it's *incredibly* difficult to get rid of heat because there's no air. Ideally you'd be at sea level or below, somewhere that it's just cold.
I recommend Iceland. They have nearly free electricity because of all their hydroelectric plants, their average temperature is pretty low, they have a good tech population, and they could really, really use the infusion of some nice Google-scented cash right about now.
Or people could just figure out how to build cheap water-cooling and immerse the data centers. That'd solve all the problems except for the SCUBA certification you'd need to work on the equipment.
An American or Imperial passle? A troy or avoirdupois -- or *fluid* -- shitload? (If the latter, I want this conversion conversation to be over *now*.)
When my grandmother was in the early stages of Alzheimer's, when she could still dial a phone, she'd come to the most completely insane conclusions about why people weren't answering their phones: that they'd been struck by lightning and their houses had burnt down, that they'd been assaulted and killed by thugs.
Yes, she did need professional help for her disorder, but it didn't do any good whatsoever.
A message like "this person cannot take your call because he's driving a car" would've prevented her calling multiple relatives to find out what they were hiding from her about how I'd died.
If you read about it on the news, you don't have to worry about it. That's why it's news, because it's unusual. It's the ways people die that the newspaper doesn't bother reporting that are going to get you.
This is not as cheap an experience, but a cautionary tale for any other pilots out there: Don't put your dog in the back seat, like you do in your car. DO put your dog in a pet carrier and then *belt* that carrier to the seat.
Because there are very few things worse than hitting *actual* severe turbulence. Not that wussy stuff the airliners call severe turbulence: I'm talking the FAA definition. "Occupants are forced violently against seat belts or shoulder straps. Unsecured objects are tossed about. Food Service and walking are impossible." That part about 'unsecured objects'? That's the dog. Being tossed about. While airsick. While violently unhappy about the experience.
I fully anticipate the rise of a completely schizophrenic society, when sexbots and online AI therapists are both fully implemented. Most men and women would have their respective relationship desires fulfilled by machines.
So the big question, then, is: which path has a greater profit margin? Company A doesn't provide replacement parts or any way of getting them: when your stuff breaks you have to buy brand new stuff. Company B provides replacement parts. Company C provides the manufacturing specifications for people to build their own replacement parts.
If you did some combination of B & C -- you sell parts or just give away the instructions for making your own parts -- suddenly you're looking a lot like a Free/Open Source Software company making money on support and convenience.
But, in any case, the ability to fix equipment in a piecewise manner does have a big advantage to the end user, which implies that companies who offer it will be more competitive.
You say po-tay-to, I say po-tah-to... Literally, there isn't *one* -- goal, that is. The goal is to do whatever it is you enjoy doing online: building, talking, deriving whatever sexual gratification people can get from a computer game, whatever. I haven't found a goal worth pursuing in SL, which is why I've mostly stopped playing. That's nothing against SL, though: it just doesn't work in the ways I want. But it *certainly* doesn't work in the ways that non-self-directed people want. People who want a defined set of rules to follow so they can win? just *hate* SL because it makes no sense. It makes lots of sense to me, thankfully.
I don't think it's precisely inability to get along with the client interface. As a (not exactly veteran) SL player who hangs out where the new players first show up, I can tell you why so many people quit:
1. The client interface just doesn't even work. It's not that they can't get along with it, it's that they sign up for a character and the SL client program tells them that it doesn't work on their hardware. They consider buying a new computer just to play a stupid game, and think "that's really lame" and shrug and go do something else. I know a half-dozen people who have gone down that route.
2. They get online, jazz up their avatar, look around, and say "uh, now what?" They're coming from a television or WoW background and expect that someone has written a plot and lined up a bunch of things for them to do, and when they realize that there isn't a goal, that there isn't a dedicated newscaster to stand there and entertain them, they say "what's the point?" and leave. (I see that literally every time I get on SL: a new person gets on, says "so what's the goal of the game?" and when people say "there isn't one" the person says "that's dumb." and logs off, most likely forever.)
My guess is that the active population of SL is less than 1/100 of what Linden claims, possibly much less.
But, for what it's worth, I fairly rarely hear of/see people who are having consistent problems with the (stupid) interface. I think people get used to it.
I know it's a receiver, but most of the receivers I've worked with had either a superhet or PLL running, and that does have some emissions. As I said, it doesn't affect anything in a 152 equipped with IFR (yeah, I dunno why you'd do that, either) but in hundreds of hours of airline flying, the only two times I've ever heard a commercial pilot get on the intercom and ask people to turn off their unauthorized electronic equipment were both within 5 seconds of me turning on my Garmin. It's possible it's just a coincidence.
(and wrt your other comment, I had to hold it against the window to get a good enough signal to lock.)
>As a electronical engineer, I think that it is the hospital equipment that is clearly faulty.
Dude. I have an amp that whines when I put a banana cable on the input and put the other end beside a power line. I have an oscilloscope that shows jaggedy edges all over the place when I put the probe in the midst of a switching power supply. Neither one of those mean the equipment is faulty -- they mean it's *working*. That's what amplifiers *do*, is, y'know, amplify.
ECG's are amplifiers. They don't have magic elves in the chips who can tell if the incoming signal is from the patient's heart or cellphone. Machines should be able to reject some interference, which is why amps are rated for common mode rejection ratio, but the higher the amp's sensitivity, the harder it is to get really good interference rejection, and if you have to make the design decision between picking up more data from a patient and telling people in the room that they can't use their cellphones, which are you going to do?
I agree with everything you're saying. The FAA certification tests are insanely detailed and specific.
With that said, I've taken my handheld GPS on a commercial flight and turned it on three times, and two of those, within five seconds of it booting, the pilot fired up the intercom and asked people to turn off any unapproved electronic devices. So it was pretty likely doing *something* that at least was significantly annoying to the pilots. (It doesn't mess with anything in a Cessna 152, though. Of course, there's nothing *in* a 152, so that's not saying much. And I've stopped trying to use it on commercial flights because I don't need to get in trouble just to mark a new and interesting waypoint over eg Greenland.)
>I, for one, believe kids (and adults) should play outdoors and get dirty to help boost their immune systems and reduce the likelihood of allergies.
It's called the Hygiene Hypothesis, and there's some evidence it's correct, but there are a lot of other child-rearing behaviors that correlate with allergies/asthma as well, so it's not clear that it's the only reason.
In all seriousness, a friend and I have discussed doing something similar to this to his car. He's Type 1 diabetic and has had his blood sugar go haywire. The scary thing is: he's not conscious insofar as responsible for his actions, but he's still able to drive. He had an old proto-SUV and managed to run into about 20 cars before the cops wrestled him out of the car, once. So they took away his driver's license, but when he's having a blood sugar episode he doesn't remember that. His girlfriend tries to keep the cars all locked and the keys hidden, but that's only marginally effective when it's only happened maybe three times in four years: she relaxes her guard. So building a testing system into all the cars he has access to, seems like a good idea. Apparently they already exist using breathalyzers that look for alcohol, but he needs one for acetone.
Thing is: solar cells are nonlinear. If you give them twice as many photons, they return *more* than twice as much power. So you get a leveraged advantage by doing this. That's why NREL and others have been doing so much research into solar concentrators -- most of the recent ultra-high-efficiency announcements have been from solar concentrators. The advantage is, as I said, that you have a small amount of high-expense material and a lot of cheap mirror. The disadvantage is that hot solar cells do poorly, so oftentimes you have to cool them. (hence cogeneration systems, that cool the back of the cell with some fluid and then use the heat for something useful.)
If you use horizontal collectors, they won't have to move very much. They'd track the sun as it moves across the sky, naturally: they'd only have to adjust for its altitude. That means the highest they'd have to aim is just the latitude you're at, and for all but one day of the year, they'd be even lower than that. (And as for reflection, the focus of a parabolic mirror is always going to be within the mirror, even when it's off-axis, so at most you'll get a single line of reflection if the thing's stuck at the wrong angle.)
How big a parabolic mirror do you want? Have a big printer? It's easy to make an x=y^2 graph in Excel and print it out. Take a bunch of sheets of plywood, bolt them all together, glue the excel printout on the top, cut with a saber saw. You now have a clamp system. Put a reasonably shiny sheet of thin aluminum -- the 0.006" stuff they use for gutter sheathing is very easy to work with and fairly shiny -- clamped between all those and you have a great linear parabolic that's perfect for eg this solar cell or heating water in a black-painted copper tube running down the focal point. If you want a spherical parabolic, that's harder. For that you need a lathe and you have to learn metalspinning. That's still not *too* hard, though: I spun up some toroid shapes for a tesla coil the other night, out of thin aluminum. It's quick and easy once you get the hang of it. Hopefully I'll be doing a 40 cm parabolic for the hot side of a Stirling some time soon.
Since mirrors are cheap compared to solar cells, wouldn't it make more sense to mount these tubes at the focal point of a linear/parabolic mirror? That really seems exactly what these were designed for, not just harvesting off-axis light. What am I missing here? Doesn't it seem like this is the perfect answer to a question they don't seem to have asked?
I enjoy driving, too, and am building a car from parts just because I like it so much. But 90% of my driving is a chore, and I'm increasingly coming to feel that it's like gourmet cooking: fun on the weekends but I sure do enjoy having a professional do it for me as often as possible, especially when the results are both better and faster than what I can do on my own.
>before you know it fully autonomous vehicles are mandatory.
You say that as if it's a bad thing. For me it's a vision of Paradise -- having my own car but not having to spend time driving it. (Plus, presumably, under automatic control the commute would go faster.)
And no I can't take a bus because there isn't any public transportation between home and work, and while I do ride my bike I don't do it often because it's a 110 km ride round-trip and I'm not tough enough to do that every day.
>Tire chains are illegal in most states because they destroy the pavement very quickly.
Well... I can't answer for the American southeast or northeast. But I know in the American southwest and northwest, there are many places where snow chains (or studded snow tires) are *required* when conditions are bad -- Snowqualmie Pass in Washington, I80 outside of Pendleton in Oregon, Loveland and Vail Passes on I70 in Colorado. In all three of those states it's illegal to use chains or studded snow tires during the summer because they both trash the roads. So if I'm required to use chains to cross some passes during bad weather, and prohibited from using snow tires for 2/3 of the year, it makes a lot more sense for me to carry a set of chains in the back of the car and drive my all-season tires, and when the lights are flashing and the police are out checking cars' tires, and yes I have been stopped and turned around for not having adequate tires/chains, I can throw on the chains, cross the pass, pull them off, and keep going for another two years without having to worry about which tires I'm using.
I haven't found any references online but I've read stuff about people getting projectiles -- not self-powered -- travelling faster than the speed of sound in water for short distances. I wish I could find stuff online. But you're right: *enormous* amounts of power needed. However, if it could move faster than a ship could detect it, that'd be a *big* deal, so the question is probably one of when, not how.
Supercavitation would allow submarines to move at supersonic (with reference to water) speeds while submerged, and dogfight underwater like WWI aircraft did in the air. If they can come to a complete stop they'd be silent and invisible, just floating there, then fire up the engines and go back to moving faster than ship-based sonar would be able to detect them. There's already a supercavitating torpedo. People who design targets -- I mean aircraft carriers and destroyers -- must be worrying about this.
Would the nuclear B-36 count? It wasn't nuclear-powered but it did have an operational power-producing nuke running in it when it was flying, with the intent to develop it into a fully nuclear-powered aircraft using a General Electric HTRE nuclear aircraft engine. It was as heavy as many subs and you had to crawl around through it, using a rope-pulled trolley to get from the front to the back.
For the record, 'penultimate' means one step away from ultimate. Your first sentence, as read, means that autos are seen as the second-best solution, which I don't think is what you meant. (For extra credit you can refer to antepenultimate, which means third-best.) I don't really think this is a grammar Nazi issue: it's more like talking about C when you mean to be talking about C++.
As for: >Stuck on the freeway with no gas while the train goes by on its way to NYC? My own personal motto is that of a bikepirate: "When the oil is gone we'll roll past your SUV-turned-luxury apartment and smile the satisfied smile of the self-righteous. "
It's possible it was medical, or it's possible he was scud-running, went through a cloud, got iced up, and knew that he couldn't make sharp turns for fear of stalling. A friend of mine overloaded his SuperCub (with moose) and tried to take off, realized he wasn't going to clear the trees, and said later that it was really hard to just fly right into them because he knew a turn would be worse yet.
A lot of stalls happen in overshooting on base-final: low airspeed, lots of rudder to try and get back on the runway centerline. In fact, now that I've read more, the FAA decision to cut the spin training was specifically because they decided that most pilots who were dying in spins were doing so at an altitude where they couldn't recover, so recovery training was pointless. That's even *more* interesting, and a little less gruesome.
My uncle was a T38 instructor at the AFA. He didn't lose any students, but he had some hair-raising stories about the trouble you could get into at 1400 knots. (He has a Mach 2 pin because he got nav time in a B-58. I'm envious.)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I am as well.
The problem is: the adiabatic lapse rate is about 4 degrees F per thousand feet, so you go up in altitude and the air cools down, but there's less of it. Take this to an extreme and you're in outer space, where it's *very* cold (if temperature means anything at all when there's no air) but it's *incredibly* difficult to get rid of heat because there's no air.
Ideally you'd be at sea level or below, somewhere that it's just cold.
I recommend Iceland. They have nearly free electricity because of all their hydroelectric plants, their average temperature is pretty low, they have a good tech population, and they could really, really use the infusion of some nice Google-scented cash right about now.
Or people could just figure out how to build cheap water-cooling and immerse the data centers. That'd solve all the problems except for the SCUBA certification you'd need to work on the equipment.
>how many passles in a shitload?
An American or Imperial passle?
A troy or avoirdupois -- or *fluid* -- shitload? (If the latter, I want this conversion conversation to be over *now*.)
When my grandmother was in the early stages of Alzheimer's, when she could still dial a phone, she'd come to the most completely insane conclusions about why people weren't answering their phones: that they'd been struck by lightning and their houses had burnt down, that they'd been assaulted and killed by thugs.
Yes, she did need professional help for her disorder, but it didn't do any good whatsoever.
A message like "this person cannot take your call because he's driving a car" would've prevented her calling multiple relatives to find out what they were hiding from her about how I'd died.
If you read about it on the news, you don't have to worry about it. That's why it's news, because it's unusual.
It's the ways people die that the newspaper doesn't bother reporting that are going to get you.
This is not as cheap an experience, but a cautionary tale for any other pilots out there:
Don't put your dog in the back seat, like you do in your car. DO put your dog in a pet carrier and then *belt* that carrier to the seat.
Because there are very few things worse than hitting *actual* severe turbulence. Not that wussy stuff the airliners call severe turbulence: I'm talking the FAA definition. "Occupants are forced violently against seat belts or shoulder straps. Unsecured objects are tossed about. Food Service and walking are impossible." That part about 'unsecured objects'? That's the dog. Being tossed about. While airsick. While violently unhappy about the experience.
I fully anticipate the rise of a completely schizophrenic society, when sexbots and online AI therapists are both fully implemented. Most men and women would have their respective relationship desires fulfilled by machines.
What would such a world look like?
There'd be a lot less domestic violence.
So the big question, then, is: which path has a greater profit margin?
Company A doesn't provide replacement parts or any way of getting them: when your stuff breaks you have to buy brand new stuff.
Company B provides replacement parts.
Company C provides the manufacturing specifications for people to build their own replacement parts.
If you did some combination of B & C -- you sell parts or just give away the instructions for making your own parts -- suddenly you're looking a lot like a Free/Open Source Software company making money on support and convenience.
But, in any case, the ability to fix equipment in a piecewise manner does have a big advantage to the end user, which implies that companies who offer it will be more competitive.
You say po-tay-to, I say po-tah-to...
Literally, there isn't *one* -- goal, that is. The goal is to do whatever it is you enjoy doing online: building, talking, deriving whatever sexual gratification people can get from a computer game, whatever.
I haven't found a goal worth pursuing in SL, which is why I've mostly stopped playing. That's nothing against SL, though: it just doesn't work in the ways I want.
But it *certainly* doesn't work in the ways that non-self-directed people want. People who want a defined set of rules to follow so they can win? just *hate* SL because it makes no sense. It makes lots of sense to me, thankfully.
Read the biblical book of Jeremiah (from whence 'jeremiad') and you'll learn the *actual* definition of 'jeremiad'. Hint: it's not a critique.
May the Definition Nazis have mercy on you.
I don't think it's precisely inability to get along with the client interface. As a (not exactly veteran) SL player who hangs out where the new players first show up, I can tell you why so many people quit:
1. The client interface just doesn't even work. It's not that they can't get along with it, it's that they sign up for a character and the SL client program tells them that it doesn't work on their hardware. They consider buying a new computer just to play a stupid game, and think "that's really lame" and shrug and go do something else. I know a half-dozen people who have gone down that route.
2. They get online, jazz up their avatar, look around, and say "uh, now what?" They're coming from a television or WoW background and expect that someone has written a plot and lined up a bunch of things for them to do, and when they realize that there isn't a goal, that there isn't a dedicated newscaster to stand there and entertain them, they say "what's the point?" and leave. (I see that literally every time I get on SL: a new person gets on, says "so what's the goal of the game?" and when people say "there isn't one" the person says "that's dumb." and logs off, most likely forever.)
My guess is that the active population of SL is less than 1/100 of what Linden claims, possibly much less.
But, for what it's worth, I fairly rarely hear of/see people who are having consistent problems with the (stupid) interface. I think people get used to it.
I know it's a receiver, but most of the receivers I've worked with had either a superhet or PLL running, and that does have some emissions.
As I said, it doesn't affect anything in a 152 equipped with IFR (yeah, I dunno why you'd do that, either) but in hundreds of hours of airline flying, the only two times I've ever heard a commercial pilot get on the intercom and ask people to turn off their unauthorized electronic equipment were both within 5 seconds of me turning on my Garmin. It's possible it's just a coincidence.
(and wrt your other comment, I had to hold it against the window to get a good enough signal to lock.)
>As a electronical engineer, I think that it is the hospital equipment that is clearly faulty.
Dude. I have an amp that whines when I put a banana cable on the input and put the other end beside a power line. I have an oscilloscope that shows jaggedy edges all over the place when I put the probe in the midst of a switching power supply. Neither one of those mean the equipment is faulty -- they mean it's *working*. That's what amplifiers *do*, is, y'know, amplify.
ECG's are amplifiers. They don't have magic elves in the chips who can tell if the incoming signal is from the patient's heart or cellphone. Machines should be able to reject some interference, which is why amps are rated for common mode rejection ratio, but the higher the amp's sensitivity, the harder it is to get really good interference rejection, and if you have to make the design decision between picking up more data from a patient and telling people in the room that they can't use their cellphones, which are you going to do?
I agree with everything you're saying. The FAA certification tests are insanely detailed and specific.
With that said, I've taken my handheld GPS on a commercial flight and turned it on three times, and two of those, within five seconds of it booting, the pilot fired up the intercom and asked people to turn off any unapproved electronic devices. So it was pretty likely doing *something* that at least was significantly annoying to the pilots.
(It doesn't mess with anything in a Cessna 152, though. Of course, there's nothing *in* a 152, so that's not saying much. And I've stopped trying to use it on commercial flights because I don't need to get in trouble just to mark a new and interesting waypoint over eg Greenland.)
>I, for one, believe kids (and adults) should play outdoors and get dirty to help boost their immune systems and reduce the likelihood of allergies.
It's called the Hygiene Hypothesis, and there's some evidence it's correct, but there are a lot of other child-rearing behaviors that correlate with allergies/asthma as well, so it's not clear that it's the only reason.
In all seriousness, a friend and I have discussed doing something similar to this to his car.
He's Type 1 diabetic and has had his blood sugar go haywire. The scary thing is: he's not conscious insofar as responsible for his actions, but he's still able to drive. He had an old proto-SUV and managed to run into about 20 cars before the cops wrestled him out of the car, once. So they took away his driver's license, but when he's having a blood sugar episode he doesn't remember that.
His girlfriend tries to keep the cars all locked and the keys hidden, but that's only marginally effective when it's only happened maybe three times in four years: she relaxes her guard.
So building a testing system into all the cars he has access to, seems like a good idea. Apparently they already exist using breathalyzers that look for alcohol, but he needs one for acetone.
Thing is: solar cells are nonlinear. If you give them twice as many photons, they return *more* than twice as much power. So you get a leveraged advantage by doing this. That's why NREL and others have been doing so much research into solar concentrators -- most of the recent ultra-high-efficiency announcements have been from solar concentrators.
The advantage is, as I said, that you have a small amount of high-expense material and a lot of cheap mirror. The disadvantage is that hot solar cells do poorly, so oftentimes you have to cool them. (hence cogeneration systems, that cool the back of the cell with some fluid and then use the heat for something useful.)
If you use horizontal collectors, they won't have to move very much. They'd track the sun as it moves across the sky, naturally: they'd only have to adjust for its altitude. That means the highest they'd have to aim is just the latitude you're at, and for all but one day of the year, they'd be even lower than that. (And as for reflection, the focus of a parabolic mirror is always going to be within the mirror, even when it's off-axis, so at most you'll get a single line of reflection if the thing's stuck at the wrong angle.)
How big a parabolic mirror do you want? Have a big printer? It's easy to make an x=y^2 graph in Excel and print it out. Take a bunch of sheets of plywood, bolt them all together, glue the excel printout on the top, cut with a saber saw. You now have a clamp system. Put a reasonably shiny sheet of thin aluminum -- the 0.006" stuff they use for gutter sheathing is very easy to work with and fairly shiny -- clamped between all those and you have a great linear parabolic that's perfect for eg this solar cell or heating water in a black-painted copper tube running down the focal point.
If you want a spherical parabolic, that's harder. For that you need a lathe and you have to learn metalspinning. That's still not *too* hard, though: I spun up some toroid shapes for a tesla coil the other night, out of thin aluminum. It's quick and easy once you get the hang of it. Hopefully I'll be doing a 40 cm parabolic for the hot side of a Stirling some time soon.
Since mirrors are cheap compared to solar cells, wouldn't it make more sense to mount these tubes at the focal point of a linear/parabolic mirror? That really seems exactly what these were designed for, not just harvesting off-axis light.
What am I missing here? Doesn't it seem like this is the perfect answer to a question they don't seem to have asked?
I enjoy driving, too, and am building a car from parts just because I like it so much.
But 90% of my driving is a chore, and I'm increasingly coming to feel that it's like gourmet cooking: fun on the weekends but I sure do enjoy having a professional do it for me as often as possible, especially when the results are both better and faster than what I can do on my own.
>before you know it fully autonomous vehicles are mandatory.
You say that as if it's a bad thing.
For me it's a vision of Paradise -- having my own car but not having to spend time driving it. (Plus, presumably, under automatic control the commute would go faster.)
And no I can't take a bus because there isn't any public transportation between home and work, and while I do ride my bike I don't do it often because it's a 110 km ride round-trip and I'm not tough enough to do that every day.
>Tire chains are illegal in most states because they destroy the pavement very quickly.
Well...
I can't answer for the American southeast or northeast. But I know in the American southwest and northwest, there are many places where snow chains (or studded snow tires) are *required* when conditions are bad -- Snowqualmie Pass in Washington, I80 outside of Pendleton in Oregon, Loveland and Vail Passes on I70 in Colorado. In all three of those states it's illegal to use chains or studded snow tires during the summer because they both trash the roads.
So if I'm required to use chains to cross some passes during bad weather, and prohibited from using snow tires for 2/3 of the year, it makes a lot more sense for me to carry a set of chains in the back of the car and drive my all-season tires, and when the lights are flashing and the police are out checking cars' tires, and yes I have been stopped and turned around for not having adequate tires/chains, I can throw on the chains, cross the pass, pull them off, and keep going for another two years without having to worry about which tires I'm using.
I haven't found any references online but I've read stuff about people getting projectiles -- not self-powered -- travelling faster than the speed of sound in water for short distances. I wish I could find stuff online.
But you're right: *enormous* amounts of power needed. However, if it could move faster than a ship could detect it, that'd be a *big* deal, so the question is probably one of when, not how.
Supercavitation would allow submarines to move at supersonic (with reference to water) speeds while submerged, and dogfight underwater like WWI aircraft did in the air. If they can come to a complete stop they'd be silent and invisible, just floating there, then fire up the engines and go back to moving faster than ship-based sonar would be able to detect them. There's already a supercavitating torpedo. People who design targets -- I mean aircraft carriers and destroyers -- must be worrying about this.
Would the nuclear B-36 count? It wasn't nuclear-powered but it did have an operational power-producing nuke running in it when it was flying, with the intent to develop it into a fully nuclear-powered aircraft using a General Electric HTRE nuclear aircraft engine. It was as heavy as many subs and you had to crawl around through it, using a rope-pulled trolley to get from the front to the back.
For the record, 'penultimate' means one step away from ultimate. Your first sentence, as read, means that autos are seen as the second-best solution, which I don't think is what you meant. (For extra credit you can refer to antepenultimate, which means third-best.) I don't really think this is a grammar Nazi issue: it's more like talking about C when you mean to be talking about C++.
As for:
>Stuck on the freeway with no gas while the train goes by on its way to NYC?
My own personal motto is that of a bikepirate:
"When the oil is gone we'll roll past your SUV-turned-luxury apartment and smile the satisfied smile of the self-righteous. "
It's possible it was medical, or it's possible he was scud-running, went through a cloud, got iced up, and knew that he couldn't make sharp turns for fear of stalling. A friend of mine overloaded his SuperCub (with moose) and tried to take off, realized he wasn't going to clear the trees, and said later that it was really hard to just fly right into them because he knew a turn would be worse yet.
A lot of stalls happen in overshooting on base-final: low airspeed, lots of rudder to try and get back on the runway centerline. In fact, now that I've read more, the FAA decision to cut the spin training was specifically because they decided that most pilots who were dying in spins were doing so at an altitude where they couldn't recover, so recovery training was pointless. That's even *more* interesting, and a little less gruesome.
My uncle was a T38 instructor at the AFA. He didn't lose any students, but he had some hair-raising stories about the trouble you could get into at 1400 knots. (He has a Mach 2 pin because he got nav time in a B-58. I'm envious.)