I read some about cave paintings/drawings because I do a lot of cave exploration and I'm just interested in cave stuff. Anyway, one of the things I find interesting about paintings is that some of the most commonly-appearing paintings were incredibly specific detail-wise, over unbelievably long periods of time. One sequence of paintings, where they'd draw (as I recall) a deer in brown, and over that draw a horse in tan, and over that draw a bison in black, occurs in that exact sequence, in those colors, in paintings across 20,000 years. Twenty *thousand* years. In written history, we haven't had anything remain even vaguely constant for even 1000 years. Latin came close. Anyway. Point being: it might've been teaching rather than religious, but whatever it was, it was very tightly conserved, as were the technical details in how to use locally available resources to make the colors of paints needed, so whatever it was, it was very important to them.
This was one of the main points (in my opinion) in Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" -- that a huge pile of pure gold that can't be economically brought to market, is worthless. In his case, it was in the middle of a battlefield in the southern Phillipines, as I recall, but it might as well have been on the moon. Likewise, gallium and indium distributed at very low levels amidst tens of thousands of tons of landfill waste might not be economically feasible to recover. The price of LED's or solar panels using those elements then goes through the roof, and technology -- optical networking gear, solar energy -- based on those components makes no progress.
We were building electric cars 100 years ago. Oil was cheaper and easier, so we've put 100 years and trillions of dollars and manhours of work into optimizing transportation based on oil. Now we can't figure out how to make electricity-based transportation compete with oil-based transportation. If we'd spent that kind of time and money on electricity-based transport along with oil-based transport the transition would be rapid and smooth. Instead, we're getting yanked around by the hysteresis of market economics. The same thing could hold with other stuff that we're driving into scarcity: by the time the market starts adjusting, the whiplash can be brutal.
I agree with the general thesis you're proposing here.
Thing is: there are (at least) two different demographics when it comes to media. 1. People like you (and me) who want to watch nude archery and people's feet in JC Penney. In other words, people who watch things because they find those topics interesting.
2. People who like Britney/American Idol/whatever because that's what their friends like, and they're trying to keep themselves educated (for lack of a better word) in what's become a microcultural niche that's important to them.
The latter group clump, and they're the ones the advertisers are primarily after, because they are large, easy markets. They're also more easily served by television, and they self-amplify the buzz about whatever the carefully marketed Next Big Thing is.
If the TV niche -- the combination of advertising, marketing, and show -- can keep that latter demographic, it'll keep making large amounts of money and stay alive indefinitely.
Around here, Denver, if a house is slated to be torn down it is immediately gutted and "NO COPPER" spray-painted all over the outside because people *will* break in and try and rip out the copper. People have come back from vacations to find their houses with drywall torn out and the copper plumbing removed. Likewise, anywhere you look, the copper wiring running from the tops of phone poles down to the ground as grounding lines have been ripped off, leaving just the staples.
PEX is approved for water supply: I've used it. It can stand mild freezing much better than copper. The main problem I have with PEX is that rodents can/will chew on it, so make sure your PEX is in a well-sealed space.
Problem: we're all assuming that solar cells are going to increase in efficiency and decrease in cost. That assumption rests on continued production and use of these -iums, as semiconductor dopants. LED's and laser diodes, the active elements in optical communications, often use gallium and indium as well.
>landfills would be more concentrated and easier to mine than natural ores are!
Depends on the mineral in question. Molybdenum is rarely (to my knowledge) found in highly concentrated veins: it occurs as a sulfide or lead ore fairly widely dispersed through rock, so removal means ripping down whole mountains. A landfill would be an excellent source for reclaiming this, as it would certainly be more concentrated. But for many elements, like gold and silver, the ore in nature is generally extremely highly concentrated, into veins that have a million times the amount of the element per weight of rock than the rock even a meter away. I've found gold like this, where there's a big chunk of white/orange quartz that goes off into the distance, and right in the middle there's a big fat line, maybe a mm to a cm wide, coated in visible gold. When you're trying to recover stuff like that, there's no way that circuit boards in with newspapers and old clothes in a landfill could come even *close* to the natural concentrations we can find, so it's going to take a long time before landfills are a viable recovery option. Basically what it comes down to, afaik, is that the mineral concentration in nature is usually a function of the mineral's solubility in high-temperature, high-pressure water, which in turn is often loosely coupled to its melting point. Lead, tin, zinc, gold, and silver concentrate in veins. Molybdenum, indium, osmium, don't. So, if it doesn't occur in veins, landfills will be a good way to reclaim it, since they'll be much like the stuff is recovered in the first place (except extracted from a mess of fiberglass and steel, rather than from tons of rock.)
My girlfriend recently took a class called "Ethics In Computer Science" and another called "Philosophy of Mediation" and realized that she could write *one* paper to satisfy a homework assignment from each class.
So which is worse: writing it for the Ethics class, then reusing it for Philosophy after you've taken the Ethics class, or writing it for the Philosophy class and then reusing it for the Ethics class?
We decided the latter was more acceptable after arguing about it for a while, on the basis that, hey, she hadn't learned about ethics yet, right?
>It's really surprising just how much we disconnect ourselves from our many social inhibitions when communicating over the internet versus when we're actually interacting with others in public, even when we're fully aware that the internet is far less private than physically going outside to any real-world, public location. On a sub-conscious level, mere text on a screen is somehow far less threatening to us than seeing another person or hearing their voice, even though the opposite is probably more true.
It's more complicated than that. I was just reading about this in -- I believe it's Mary Roach's book "Bonk", but it could've been in New Scientist. Anyway, it was a summary of some Masters & Johnson research on human sexuality, and one of the things they did was they put complete strangers in rooms for three hours and watched what happened. If they put them in nice, brightly-lit rooms, they'd sit there and talk and become friends. If they put them in dark rooms they'd end up at least making out, basically every time. Total strangers, playing tonsil-hockey, in under three hours. The Internet is closer to a darkened room. There's no way to tell what the other person is thinking, and it's much harder for other people to watch. So you can do whatever you want, and people are much more apt to throw societal conventions and polite expectations out the window and act purely on desire. Hence internet romance and flamewars.
I haven't read *extensively* about this but I have read some stuff, including articles about this research in other places. The goal is to be able to integrate other amino acids -- or just other stuff -- to the standard rna->protein translation so you can put heavier tools in your proteins. One way to do this is to hijack a current codon. This is being done by a group who are trying to use one of the three 'stop' codons. The problem with this approach is that, while there is redundancy, that redundancy is *used*. There isn't an unused codon. So if you take something that exists, you have to go through that thing's entire DNA and swap all instances of the codon you want to reconfigure, with one of the other synonymous codons. If you don't, you can't use it because all the proteins currently relying on that will break. So THIS guy has decided to add new codons, rather than hijacking the ones that are already there, because he thinks it's less work. A team has spent several years trying to get one 'stop' codon freed up, and they think they have an E coli that has all the 'stop' codons replaced... but they're not sure and they're still trying to characterize it. Coz, you basically have to sequence the genome *and* know what everything does, every time you think you've managed to get your new bug built. Building a whole new set of codons means you don't have to worry about that. Because, in the end, either way you have to build your own new tRNA's with your new weird amino acids or whatever ready to be linked into your protein, but this guy's approach might mean that's *all* you have to do (plus use his patented system) rather than also having to proofread the whole genome repeatedly.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but that's my best understanding of the research.
It isn't a difficult trick. All it requires is feedback. We have to *continuously* monitor the results and change the inputs, since it's a feedback system. The problem is: that takes ongoing effort, and when the system is first going out of control, it's hard to notice and not very interesting, so a volunteer organization (us, the public) finds it hard to be interested in. By the time it gets bad enough that it's noticeable, it's extremely hard to get back to where it was. To use control theory terminology, we need a proportional feedback system, and what we have is a threshold (bang-bang) control system. The deeper problem is one of human attention span when working with a system where the benefits aren't immediately apparent. People either have to *need* the system to work, or be paid to make the system work. Otherwise they will ignore it until disaster strikes. So, the framers of the Constitution built a system where people were paid to watch each other: judiciary, executive, legislative. Unfortunately, over the last 200 years, they've gotten used to cooperatively grabbing power from the people as a whole, rather than fighting each other. Cooperation beats competition every time, if it's an iterative process.
Hey, those are some really cool pictures! Some thoughts I had when reading it: Since you already have the welder, this is probably not useful advice, but TIG is far easier than MIG for doing welds in thin-section material. I'm self-taught, and I can do gastight welds in 0,2mm aluminum. When you're welding mild steel that's galvanized, the zinc galvanization boiling off is a serious health risk. Instead of scraping/sanding it off you can use hydrochloric acid. Dip the steel in until it stops foaming and just lightly bubbles. (Tense, because you form a big foamy head of hydrochloric acid bubbles filled with hydrogen.) Toilet bowl cleaner is often hydrochloric/muriatic acid, for a cheap local source. It's wasteful of steel to cut conic sections. It's only a bit more effort to use a strip of steel 1 cm wider than your cone width, and cut it in four pieces with diagonal cuts, then weld up an approximation of the cone, bend it, weld the last line, and form it over an anvil into the cone you wanted.
I'm really impressed at what you've built. That rocks. I hope mine work as well.
He lost his shirt because he's a great inventor but a lousy businessman, and his attempts to monetize his invention bankrupted him. He's still active sometimes on pulsejet discussion boards, but every time he posts a hundred people reply with "WHERE ARE MY {plans, parts, whatever} THAT I PAID YOU FOR THREE YEARS AGO AND YOU NEVER SENT?" replies, which is sad, because he designed and built some great stuff. His website is here.
Huh. Interesting. I saw something very similar in the summer of 1992. I was just north of Fort Collins, CO, and whatever it was was lined up with the runway up at the air force base in Cheyenne. Weird, weird looking contrail. You sound like you saw this during the day, which I haven't heard about before: all the other sightings I've heard of were late at night. (Mine was at 2 AM.)
I was driving in the middle of the night, just south of the air force base in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Something went overhead, and whatever it was, it didn't sound like a jet. There was a full moon, and in its light we could see that the plane was leaving a lumpy exhaust -- puffs, basically -- and it was so weird that I pulled off and got out to look, and so did two other people driving. We were all three "what the HECK is THAT?" This was in 1992 or thereabouts so I didn't have a digital camera, alas. It was dark enough we couldn't see the plane, but we could hear it. Weirdest thing I've seen in a long time.
There are still *lots* of people making pulsejets of various sorts. A lot of them are valveless because they're easy to make (no, y'know, valves.) But they don't really have a lot of thrust. There's a crazy guy in New Zealand who has been making them for a while: his webpages have directions for how to make your own. He's made small jets that are somewhere between a classic pulsejet and a pulse detonation engine. (In the former, the burn is subsonic, in the latter supersonic. He's doing weird things with multiple small interlinked combustion chambers, as best I can tell, to make very high-frequency pulsejets with better efficiency.) You can buy plans for making pulsejets. I've seen some as small as a car's sparkplug, and others that are basically recreations of a german argus, several meters long and half a meter in diameter, built by some crazy Burning Man-associated artists in San Francisco. (There's an amazing youtube video of one of these things running. You can see stuff 50 meters away getting blown over by the exhaust wash.) The thing about pulsejets is that they're an efficient way to convert fuel into noise, with a slight side-effect of thrust. The ones I've built, which are really small compared to an Argus, are mind-numbingly loud. Even with earplugs and earmuffs, they're still loud. But if that's the whole idea, well, then they're fun to play with.
Hers is a vanity plate that says WTFWJD I'm honestly not sure how to react to that. I *think* it's funny... but she doesn't seem like the hip, ironic type so at some point I'll just have to ask her about it.
If their demographic is twenty- and thirty-something people who want to read about movie stars and their lives, which is what Entertainment Weekly publishes (they gave me a free subscription, which now clogs my recycle bin, unread) they're pretty unlikely to enjoy books that aren't about movie stars.
Bill Bryson's "A Short History Of Nearly Everything" is a fabulous read. One or two chapters each on astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, you name it. There's a reason it was a bestseller: it is accessible to people who don't know an integral from an interval.
There are scads of excelent science books out there: Sagan, Asimov, Zukav, Hofstatder. But if you want to read about Mel B's nose job, you're probably not going to rate them highly.
I worked for a company that ran overlapping 8/5, 10/4, and 12/3 shifts. They did productivity measurements per hour, which they could do very accurately since we were largely manufacturing, some design. Their claim was that they saw almost no drop in productivity at 10/4 compared to 8/5 (and, in fact, saw better productivity on the last scheduled workday) and saw very slight drops in productivity in the 12/3 shift compared to the 8/5. However, what they *did* see was significantly more mistakes after about 7 hours for all three workschedules, increasing with the time spent. They ended up cutting the 12/3 because they said it wasn't cost-effective, but the 10/4 was still a winning proposition for them. It's probably much more of an issue for high-value production (engineering, for instance.)
I think that's what they were *supposed* to be, yeah, and I had a set of those. The set I'm remembering had large (42 tooth?) red gears, one mid-large blue gear, a bunch of smallish yellow gears (24 teeth?) and some quite small white ones (12 teeth?) The teeth themselves were essentially a peg sticking straight out of the gear with a slightly convex surface on each side, where they meshed: more or less exactly the opposite of what you'd want for involute gear teeth. However, they could transmit power gear-to-gear across a more-than-90-degree angle, from coplanar to perpendicular-axis. I built a primitive differential using them, but it was really painful: the largest gear was at least 10cm in diameter.
When I was a kid, LEGO decided to license out their manufacture to a Samsonite factory in Loveland, Colorado (right next door to the Hewlett Packard facility that was the first place HP had outsourced from its birth in Silicon Valley, as it happens.) The factory also made luggage and kids' bikes. It was cool because up until 2006 it still looked like it had been made of LEGO bricks: the windows were 2x4 clear bricks on-end, 12 feet high. They made all sorts of weird LEGO stuff, and I wonder sometimes if it was all official -- the injection molding dies came straight from Denmark, and were very, very carefully accounted for, but the plant also built other unusual LEGO sets like big crude-looking gears that only sort of meshed with the standard LEGO bricks. My childhood was filled with disappointment because no matter how many LEGO kits I managed to get, some of my friends, whose parents worked at the plant, had trash-bags full of floor sweepings and could make playhouses we could crawl into with their bricks. (Including a lot of weird off-colors and bricks that weren't shaped quite right.) The local library had, and probably still has, several LEGO buildings the size of cars, beautifully designed and put together. I was upset that they were glued together, making all those parts worthless. Okay, I'm still upset by that. Anyway. I've just always wondered if the rumors were true and the little Colorado plant did create some graymarket LEGO kits that Billund doesn't have. LEGO yanked their license after only a few years because they were doing a poor job, but maybe, just maybe, I have a couple LEGO pieces that aren't represented in that vault in Billund.
People -- most notably Edmund Burke -- have theorized that the Golden Fleece was sheepskin used in sluicing operations to catch gold dust, and the story is about a raid on a neighboring civilization to capture their mineral recovery technology.
Maybe I misunderstand how this works -- I'm a hardware person, after all -- but I thought TLD's had IP addresses? How do you get a root server to tell you where to go to a TLD if it doesn't have a number: is there some way to redirect that? Within a domain, you can have your servers do all your aliasing. But can/do root servers do this for other people's domains?
Coz we'd go through all the IP addresses we currently have remaining in about 30 milliseconds once this was opened up.
I sure wish I had a job where I could print money, like the ICANN does. Can you *imagine* the kind of money they'll get if this goes through? Ferraris for everyone.
>Too bad there isn't a fiscal conservative, socially liberal person to vote for.
So I'm honestly curious about this. We've had piles of fiscally liberal -- or crazy -- socially conservative politicians. We've had a small number of fiscally liberal, socially liberal politicians, and a fair number of fiscally and socially conservative politicians. But there seems to be a huge vacuum in the fiscally conservative, socially liberal space. Why? Maybe it's just that people have been conditioned to vote against the person they hate, rather than for the person they want, and there are just too many people who feel financial entitlement or hate the (gays|foreigners|poor). Anyone have any guesses or ideas?
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I read some about cave paintings/drawings because I do a lot of cave exploration and I'm just interested in cave stuff. Anyway, one of the things I find interesting about paintings is that some of the most commonly-appearing paintings were incredibly specific detail-wise, over unbelievably long periods of time. One sequence of paintings, where they'd draw (as I recall) a deer in brown, and over that draw a horse in tan, and over that draw a bison in black, occurs in that exact sequence, in those colors, in paintings across 20,000 years.
Twenty *thousand* years.
In written history, we haven't had anything remain even vaguely constant for even 1000 years. Latin came close.
Anyway. Point being: it might've been teaching rather than religious, but whatever it was, it was very tightly conserved, as were the technical details in how to use locally available resources to make the colors of paints needed, so whatever it was, it was very important to them.
This was one of the main points (in my opinion) in Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" -- that a huge pile of pure gold that can't be economically brought to market, is worthless. In his case, it was in the middle of a battlefield in the southern Phillipines, as I recall, but it might as well have been on the moon.
Likewise, gallium and indium distributed at very low levels amidst tens of thousands of tons of landfill waste might not be economically feasible to recover. The price of LED's or solar panels using those elements then goes through the roof, and technology -- optical networking gear, solar energy -- based on those components makes no progress.
We were building electric cars 100 years ago. Oil was cheaper and easier, so we've put 100 years and trillions of dollars and manhours of work into optimizing transportation based on oil. Now we can't figure out how to make electricity-based transportation compete with oil-based transportation. If we'd spent that kind of time and money on electricity-based transport along with oil-based transport the transition would be rapid and smooth. Instead, we're getting yanked around by the hysteresis of market economics. The same thing could hold with other stuff that we're driving into scarcity: by the time the market starts adjusting, the whiplash can be brutal.
How many Libertarians does it take to stop a Soviet tank battalion?
None: the free market will sort it out.
I agree with the general thesis you're proposing here.
Thing is: there are (at least) two different demographics when it comes to media.
1. People like you (and me) who want to watch nude archery and people's feet in JC Penney. In other words, people who watch things because they find those topics interesting.
2. People who like Britney/American Idol/whatever because that's what their friends like, and they're trying to keep themselves educated (for lack of a better word) in what's become a microcultural niche that's important to them.
The latter group clump, and they're the ones the advertisers are primarily after, because they are large, easy markets. They're also more easily served by television, and they self-amplify the buzz about whatever the carefully marketed Next Big Thing is.
If the TV niche -- the combination of advertising, marketing, and show -- can keep that latter demographic, it'll keep making large amounts of money and stay alive indefinitely.
Around here, Denver, if a house is slated to be torn down it is immediately gutted and "NO COPPER" spray-painted all over the outside because people *will* break in and try and rip out the copper. People have come back from vacations to find their houses with drywall torn out and the copper plumbing removed. Likewise, anywhere you look, the copper wiring running from the tops of phone poles down to the ground as grounding lines have been ripped off, leaving just the staples.
PEX is approved for water supply: I've used it. It can stand mild freezing much better than copper. The main problem I have with PEX is that rodents can/will chew on it, so make sure your PEX is in a well-sealed space.
Problem: we're all assuming that solar cells are going to increase in efficiency and decrease in cost. That assumption rests on continued production and use of these -iums, as semiconductor dopants. LED's and laser diodes, the active elements in optical communications, often use gallium and indium as well.
>landfills would be more concentrated and easier to mine than natural ores are!
Depends on the mineral in question.
Molybdenum is rarely (to my knowledge) found in highly concentrated veins: it occurs as a sulfide or lead ore fairly widely dispersed through rock, so removal means ripping down whole mountains. A landfill would be an excellent source for reclaiming this, as it would certainly be more concentrated.
But for many elements, like gold and silver, the ore in nature is generally extremely highly concentrated, into veins that have a million times the amount of the element per weight of rock than the rock even a meter away. I've found gold like this, where there's a big chunk of white/orange quartz that goes off into the distance, and right in the middle there's a big fat line, maybe a mm to a cm wide, coated in visible gold. When you're trying to recover stuff like that, there's no way that circuit boards in with newspapers and old clothes in a landfill could come even *close* to the natural concentrations we can find, so it's going to take a long time before landfills are a viable recovery option.
Basically what it comes down to, afaik, is that the mineral concentration in nature is usually a function of the mineral's solubility in high-temperature, high-pressure water, which in turn is often loosely coupled to its melting point. Lead, tin, zinc, gold, and silver concentrate in veins. Molybdenum, indium, osmium, don't. So, if it doesn't occur in veins, landfills will be a good way to reclaim it, since they'll be much like the stuff is recovered in the first place (except extracted from a mess of fiberglass and steel, rather than from tons of rock.)
My girlfriend recently took a class called "Ethics In Computer Science" and another called "Philosophy of Mediation" and realized that she could write *one* paper to satisfy a homework assignment from each class.
So which is worse: writing it for the Ethics class, then reusing it for Philosophy after you've taken the Ethics class, or writing it for the Philosophy class and then reusing it for the Ethics class?
We decided the latter was more acceptable after arguing about it for a while, on the basis that, hey, she hadn't learned about ethics yet, right?
>It's really surprising just how much we disconnect ourselves from our many social inhibitions when communicating over the internet versus when we're actually interacting with others in public, even when we're fully aware that the internet is far less private than physically going outside to any real-world, public location. On a sub-conscious level, mere text on a screen is somehow far less threatening to us than seeing another person or hearing their voice, even though the opposite is probably more true.
It's more complicated than that. I was just reading about this in -- I believe it's Mary Roach's book "Bonk", but it could've been in New Scientist. Anyway, it was a summary of some Masters & Johnson research on human sexuality, and one of the things they did was they put complete strangers in rooms for three hours and watched what happened. If they put them in nice, brightly-lit rooms, they'd sit there and talk and become friends. If they put them in dark rooms they'd end up at least making out, basically every time. Total strangers, playing tonsil-hockey, in under three hours.
The Internet is closer to a darkened room. There's no way to tell what the other person is thinking, and it's much harder for other people to watch. So you can do whatever you want, and people are much more apt to throw societal conventions and polite expectations out the window and act purely on desire. Hence internet romance and flamewars.
I haven't read *extensively* about this but I have read some stuff, including articles about this research in other places.
The goal is to be able to integrate other amino acids -- or just other stuff -- to the standard rna->protein translation so you can put heavier tools in your proteins.
One way to do this is to hijack a current codon. This is being done by a group who are trying to use one of the three 'stop' codons. The problem with this approach is that, while there is redundancy, that redundancy is *used*. There isn't an unused codon. So if you take something that exists, you have to go through that thing's entire DNA and swap all instances of the codon you want to reconfigure, with one of the other synonymous codons. If you don't, you can't use it because all the proteins currently relying on that will break.
So THIS guy has decided to add new codons, rather than hijacking the ones that are already there, because he thinks it's less work. A team has spent several years trying to get one 'stop' codon freed up, and they think they have an E coli that has all the 'stop' codons replaced... but they're not sure and they're still trying to characterize it. Coz, you basically have to sequence the genome *and* know what everything does, every time you think you've managed to get your new bug built.
Building a whole new set of codons means you don't have to worry about that.
Because, in the end, either way you have to build your own new tRNA's with your new weird amino acids or whatever ready to be linked into your protein, but this guy's approach might mean that's *all* you have to do (plus use his patented system) rather than also having to proofread the whole genome repeatedly.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but that's my best understanding of the research.
It isn't a difficult trick. All it requires is feedback. We have to *continuously* monitor the results and change the inputs, since it's a feedback system.
The problem is: that takes ongoing effort, and when the system is first going out of control, it's hard to notice and not very interesting, so a volunteer organization (us, the public) finds it hard to be interested in. By the time it gets bad enough that it's noticeable, it's extremely hard to get back to where it was. To use control theory terminology, we need a proportional feedback system, and what we have is a threshold (bang-bang) control system.
The deeper problem is one of human attention span when working with a system where the benefits aren't immediately apparent. People either have to *need* the system to work, or be paid to make the system work. Otherwise they will ignore it until disaster strikes. So, the framers of the Constitution built a system where people were paid to watch each other: judiciary, executive, legislative. Unfortunately, over the last 200 years, they've gotten used to cooperatively grabbing power from the people as a whole, rather than fighting each other. Cooperation beats competition every time, if it's an iterative process.
Hey, those are some really cool pictures!
Some thoughts I had when reading it:
Since you already have the welder, this is probably not useful advice, but TIG is far easier than MIG for doing welds in thin-section material. I'm self-taught, and I can do gastight welds in 0,2mm aluminum.
When you're welding mild steel that's galvanized, the zinc galvanization boiling off is a serious health risk. Instead of scraping/sanding it off you can use hydrochloric acid. Dip the steel in until it stops foaming and just lightly bubbles. (Tense, because you form a big foamy head of hydrochloric acid bubbles filled with hydrogen.) Toilet bowl cleaner is often hydrochloric/muriatic acid, for a cheap local source.
It's wasteful of steel to cut conic sections. It's only a bit more effort to use a strip of steel 1 cm wider than your cone width, and cut it in four pieces with diagonal cuts, then weld up an approximation of the cone, bend it, weld the last line, and form it over an anvil into the cone you wanted.
I'm really impressed at what you've built. That rocks. I hope mine work as well.
He lost his shirt because he's a great inventor but a lousy businessman, and his attempts to monetize his invention bankrupted him. He's still active sometimes on pulsejet discussion boards, but every time he posts a hundred people reply with "WHERE ARE MY {plans, parts, whatever} THAT I PAID YOU FOR THREE YEARS AGO AND YOU NEVER SENT?" replies, which is sad, because he designed and built some great stuff.
His website is here.
Huh. Interesting. I saw something very similar in the summer of 1992. I was just north of Fort Collins, CO, and whatever it was was lined up with the runway up at the air force base in Cheyenne. Weird, weird looking contrail. You sound like you saw this during the day, which I haven't heard about before: all the other sightings I've heard of were late at night. (Mine was at 2 AM.)
I was driving in the middle of the night, just south of the air force base in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Something went overhead, and whatever it was, it didn't sound like a jet. There was a full moon, and in its light we could see that the plane was leaving a lumpy exhaust -- puffs, basically -- and it was so weird that I pulled off and got out to look, and so did two other people driving. We were all three "what the HECK is THAT?" This was in 1992 or thereabouts so I didn't have a digital camera, alas. It was dark enough we couldn't see the plane, but we could hear it. Weirdest thing I've seen in a long time.
There are still *lots* of people making pulsejets of various sorts.
A lot of them are valveless because they're easy to make (no, y'know, valves.) But they don't really have a lot of thrust.
There's a crazy guy in New Zealand who has been making them for a while: his webpages have directions for how to make your own. He's made small jets that are somewhere between a classic pulsejet and a pulse detonation engine. (In the former, the burn is subsonic, in the latter supersonic. He's doing weird things with multiple small interlinked combustion chambers, as best I can tell, to make very high-frequency pulsejets with better efficiency.)
You can buy plans for making pulsejets. I've seen some as small as a car's sparkplug, and others that are basically recreations of a german argus, several meters long and half a meter in diameter, built by some crazy Burning Man-associated artists in San Francisco. (There's an amazing youtube video of one of these things running. You can see stuff 50 meters away getting blown over by the exhaust wash.)
The thing about pulsejets is that they're an efficient way to convert fuel into noise, with a slight side-effect of thrust. The ones I've built, which are really small compared to an Argus, are mind-numbingly loud. Even with earplugs and earmuffs, they're still loud.
But if that's the whole idea, well, then they're fun to play with.
Hers is a vanity plate that says WTFWJD
I'm honestly not sure how to react to that. I *think* it's funny... but she doesn't seem like the hip, ironic type so at some point I'll just have to ask her about it.
If their demographic is twenty- and thirty-something people who want to read about movie stars and their lives, which is what Entertainment Weekly publishes (they gave me a free subscription, which now clogs my recycle bin, unread) they're pretty unlikely to enjoy books that aren't about movie stars.
Bill Bryson's "A Short History Of Nearly Everything" is a fabulous read. One or two chapters each on astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, you name it. There's a reason it was a bestseller: it is accessible to people who don't know an integral from an interval.
There are scads of excelent science books out there: Sagan, Asimov, Zukav, Hofstatder. But if you want to read about Mel B's nose job, you're probably not going to rate them highly.
I worked for a company that ran overlapping 8/5, 10/4, and 12/3 shifts. They did productivity measurements per hour, which they could do very accurately since we were largely manufacturing, some design. Their claim was that they saw almost no drop in productivity at 10/4 compared to 8/5 (and, in fact, saw better productivity on the last scheduled workday) and saw very slight drops in productivity in the 12/3 shift compared to the 8/5. However, what they *did* see was significantly more mistakes after about 7 hours for all three workschedules, increasing with the time spent. They ended up cutting the 12/3 because they said it wasn't cost-effective, but the 10/4 was still a winning proposition for them. It's probably much more of an issue for high-value production (engineering, for instance.)
I think that's what they were *supposed* to be, yeah, and I had a set of those.
The set I'm remembering had large (42 tooth?) red gears, one mid-large blue gear, a bunch of smallish yellow gears (24 teeth?) and some quite small white ones (12 teeth?) The teeth themselves were essentially a peg sticking straight out of the gear with a slightly convex surface on each side, where they meshed: more or less exactly the opposite of what you'd want for involute gear teeth. However, they could transmit power gear-to-gear across a more-than-90-degree angle, from coplanar to perpendicular-axis. I built a primitive differential using them, but it was really painful: the largest gear was at least 10cm in diameter.
When I was a kid, LEGO decided to license out their manufacture to a Samsonite factory in Loveland, Colorado (right next door to the Hewlett Packard facility that was the first place HP had outsourced from its birth in Silicon Valley, as it happens.) The factory also made luggage and kids' bikes. It was cool because up until 2006 it still looked like it had been made of LEGO bricks: the windows were 2x4 clear bricks on-end, 12 feet high. They made all sorts of weird LEGO stuff, and I wonder sometimes if it was all official -- the injection molding dies came straight from Denmark, and were very, very carefully accounted for, but the plant also built other unusual LEGO sets like big crude-looking gears that only sort of meshed with the standard LEGO bricks.
My childhood was filled with disappointment because no matter how many LEGO kits I managed to get, some of my friends, whose parents worked at the plant, had trash-bags full of floor sweepings and could make playhouses we could crawl into with their bricks. (Including a lot of weird off-colors and bricks that weren't shaped quite right.) The local library had, and probably still has, several LEGO buildings the size of cars, beautifully designed and put together. I was upset that they were glued together, making all those parts worthless. Okay, I'm still upset by that.
Anyway. I've just always wondered if the rumors were true and the little Colorado plant did create some graymarket LEGO kits that Billund doesn't have. LEGO yanked their license after only a few years because they were doing a poor job, but maybe, just maybe, I have a couple LEGO pieces that aren't represented in that vault in Billund.
People -- most notably Edmund Burke -- have theorized that the Golden Fleece was sheepskin used in sluicing operations to catch gold dust, and the story is about a raid on a neighboring civilization to capture their mineral recovery technology.
Maybe I misunderstand how this works -- I'm a hardware person, after all -- but I thought TLD's had IP addresses? How do you get a root server to tell you where to go to a TLD if it doesn't have a number: is there some way to redirect that? Within a domain, you can have your servers do all your aliasing. But can/do root servers do this for other people's domains?
Coz we'd go through all the IP addresses we currently have remaining in about 30 milliseconds once this was opened up.
I sure wish I had a job where I could print money, like the ICANN does. Can you *imagine* the kind of money they'll get if this goes through? Ferraris for everyone.
>Too bad there isn't a fiscal conservative, socially liberal person to vote for.
So I'm honestly curious about this. We've had piles of fiscally liberal -- or crazy -- socially conservative politicians. We've had a small number of fiscally liberal, socially liberal politicians, and a fair number of fiscally and socially conservative politicians. But there seems to be a huge vacuum in the fiscally conservative, socially liberal space. Why?
Maybe it's just that people have been conditioned to vote against the person they hate, rather than for the person they want, and there are just too many people who feel financial entitlement or hate the (gays|foreigners|poor). Anyone have any guesses or ideas?