That is a very likely story behind the use of the word "knot" as a measure of speed. How a "knot" became defined as a minute of latitude per hour is another matter.
I suspect the use of knots in a rope to measure speed was one thing, and the measure of speed by minutes of latitude per hour was another thing, which converged in meaning over time. I don't know the answer and it's possible no one does.
While sometimes that can work against you it can also work for you. When it comes to things like efficiency in heat engines then making them larger can mean the area of losses grows by N^2 but volume of power production grows by N^3.
Might we someday end up with batteries that are as energy dense (volume and weight) -- certainly that is the hope, just not necessarily reality as yet.
I'm pretty sure that will never happen. That is assuming one defines a battery as we understand it currently, a device that stores electric energy directly as a reversible chemical process. What some people call "batteries" are really just capacitors or fuel cells that have a form/fit/function similar to a battery, and even then I'm not sure we'd see anything better.
Jet-A is an incredibly dense energy source that is a liquid at temperatures and pressures that we will commonly run into. This means it can be stored in something as inexpensive, durable, and lightweight as a steel tub or plastic bottle. It has other nice properties such as it's ability to lubricate and preserve metal parts, and that it's relatively difficult to ignite in case of an open flame.
The batteries would be a wash if you removed one of the engines and less fuel might offset a heavier generator.
That does not seem likely to me. We design aircraft with multiple engines because it provides redundancy and convenience. Two engines are nice because they can derive power from a shared energy pool, the fuel tanks. With a single engine and a battery pack the loss of the engine means losing access to that pool of energy that is the fuel.
Then there is the issue of charging up that battery. Given proper infrastructure the battery could be charged from grid power. In the case of remote locations, or emergencies, the grid power cannot be relied upon. In which case the electricity would come from diesel generators and the like. In that case the batteries would be charged from a generator as part of the ground crew tools, have to be charged from the engine on board using fuel while idle on the ground, or whatever. The energy would still come from the fuel but with the additional losses of charging and discharging the battery.
If a battery-turbine "hybrid" plane did suffer a failure of either power plant, the turbine or battery, then parts for both would have to be kept on hand. With a two engine craft a power plant failure would typically mean replacing the engine with one that can fit in either spot. It's the low replacement part count that keeps aircraft like the A-10 in the air. The A-10 has very few parts that are unique to left or right. There is no "left wing" or "right wing" there's just "wing".
A friend of mine worked as ground crew servicing F-16 jets, which has one main engine. A twin engine craft can use power from one engine to restart the other, but a single engine craft does not have that option. There is a battery on board of the aircraft but that is only for navigation and communication. If the engine is in need of restart in the air, or with a lack of proper ground equipment while on the ground, there is a small powerful engine on the plane that can start the main engine. I recall that it runs on hydrazine but I'm not sure about that. Even so there is only enough fuel for the auxiliary engine to attempt two or three engine starts.
The point is that even with an electric drive system the poor energy density of batteries do not make sense to drive the engines. Electric passenger commuter cars can get away with using battery storage because ranges are short and charging stations are easy to find. Not having to get airborne, or stay afloat, helps considerably too.
I'm not a professional map reader by any means but I did some work on electronic navigation systems and I like to read about history, because of this I read up on how navigation is done now and how it was done before.
I suspect that measuring speed in knots came in common use once people understood astronavigation. Common trade routes were primarily along longitudinal lines, such as along the American coasts and from Europe to Africa. Knowing your speed in knots would have a lot of meaning in that case. By knowing your latitude at a given time in the past and comparing that to your current latitude then speed can be approximated. Knowing the time is also fairly trivial even before modern time pieces so long as one did not deviate far from a given longitude.
When it comes to radio navigation the units used there would lead one to use kph to indicate speed. Radio wavelengths are commonly measured in meters. Angular measurements would be in degrees and minutes still but that does not mean it translates well to the degrees and minutes used to indicate latitude and longitude on a map. Distances and directions still would though.
When it comes to critical navigation failures on land, sea, or air it is not uncommon to fall back to astronavigation. However this does not necessarily mean one would also fall back to using knots in measuring speed. Kilometers, minutes of arc, and such are still very useful and would translate well to a map laid out in kilometers.
Knots may fall out of common use in time but it's got a lot of inertia behind it. A lot of that inertia will come from trade routes still being largely oriented north-south.
A knot is defined as one minute of geographic latitude in one hour, or a close approximation of it.
My understanding is that this is an accepted means of indicating speed is because it makes for easy translation of speed and distance on common maps. Certainly tradition plays a part but this part it plays is because of how people kept time and measured distance. Since we still use minutes of latitude and hours in tracking distance and time we still use the knot to translate between them.
When traveling at greater heights and distances then other units become more convenient, like mach number and kph. Even then the conversion to knots is almost inevitable since the world is laid out in minutes of arc on most any map you'll find.
As this is a tilt rotor aircraft I would think that a more appropriate analogy would be with the V-22 and aircraft like it. Or even with other VTOL aircraft, such as the V-8 (Harrier derived craft) or F-35B (lift fan variant).
What we've had before were two classes of aircraft, helicopters and airplanes. Helicopters could take off and land on small areas but were slow and fuel hungry. Airplanes used much less fuel per mile traveled and/or mass carried but at the cost of needing a large take off and landing area.
Tilt rotor craft allowed one to create an aircraft that had speed, small take-off/landing area, and fuel efficiency, but at a cost of complexity and reliability. The V-22 is a very well liked aircraft but it has high maintenance costs from its complex gearboxes. If this experiment is successful then the cost penalty for VTOL airplanes can become very very small. It's not likely to make traditional helicopters and airplanes obsolete but it will replace many of them in many cases.
I'm guessing as you are but the way I understood it is that the electrical power would be provided by a turbine engine driving a generator. No batteries, or at least none that drive the propellers.
Batteries have very poor energy density compared to hydrocarbons, a difference of 2 or 3 orders of magnitude. I expect that the prototype used batteries because range is not an issue for testing but cost is.
When it comes to the losses of electric generation we've seen the advantages of an electric drive train for over a century now. Nearly every locomotive has an electric drive train. An increasing number of ships at sea do as well. As we come to demand better performance from our automobiles we've been switching to electric drive trains there as well.
2. Some handguns (though none I can think of made by Glock) are indeed used for hunting. This is what cartridges like.500S&W and.454Casull are for. I have friends who take deer or boar with them.
I thought I'd get into deer hunting after talking to some of my friends that hunt. Along with their exciting tales of deer hunting I heard horror stories of hunting during what we call "shotgun season". You see around here it is legal to hunt with a shotgun that fires "slugs", which is a shotgun shell loaded with a single projectile. In this case the "shotgun" is really just a rifle with a big slow bullet, or what I call a "slug gun". Anyway, since just about anyone can hit a deer with a $300 "slug gun" all the good hunting spots fill up real quick with inexperienced hunters on the few days when "slug gun" hunting is allowed. This can lead to a dangerous and unpleasant hunting experience. Fortunately there is a handgun and bow season that opens before the "slug gun" crazies come out.
To avoid this I thought I'd get a handgun to hunt deer. So I go to a local gun shop and look at guns suitable for hunting deer. I ask the guy behind the counter what would be a good gun to use. During that conversation I ask about using a semi-automatic handgun. He replies that while it is legal he said, "you'd look funny shooting deer with a Glock" and then brought me to the display case with the revolvers.
There is nothing "wrong" with hunting with a Glock, mechanically or legally speaking. They are light handguns which make them suitable for carrying often and shooting little, but being light can mean a loss in accuracy. When hunting one wants something durable and accurate. Things where a Glock shines over a revolver, such as ammunition capacity, mean little while hunting.
I also have not seen anyone use a Glock for hunting but that does not mean that no one does. A Glock chambered in.45ACP or.40S&W would be quite suited for hunting. The quite powerful 10mm is rare in Glocks, as I understand, but it is something used for bears, either hunting or protection from them. The.357SIG and.45GAP are good too, but not many cartridges in those calibers are suited for hunting.
The point is that handgun hunting is quite popular, and I suspect that is true even for those that own Glocks.
We don't have food stamps any more. We have SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly called EBT because payments are done by electronic banking transactions), which is a welfare system a lot like your Centrelink.
Remarkable....only in the US huh ?
Right, because poverty is a uniquely American problem.
She was in tears when she found out in Australia her father would have received excellent medical care without draining his whole fortune to nothing once the insurance ran out.
Tell me something, what are the taxes like in Australia? I can look it up. It appears that on the average Americans lose 25% of their income to taxes while Australians lose 45%. Interesting. You think this "excellent" health care doesn't come at a cost? That socialized health care you get is prepaid health care, you are paying for it whether you use it or not. You pay for it if you like it or not. It's not free, because nothing is free.
What you point out is one of the huge problems with what we call "Obamacare", it ties medical insurance with employment. The reason your friend had to see her father lose his fortune paying for medical care is because of a long series of events that created an incentive for employers to provide medical insurance. My dad was a farmer, worked his own land and therefore he was his employer. He set aside some of his income to buy top notch medical insurance. When he got cancer he had his choice of hospitals to go to for surgery. He could have gone to one of the best hospitals in the world, and had it all paid for. He chose to get his care at the local hospital, which was only a half hour drive from his home, because he didn't want to be far from family. He got a highly qualified surgeon, and the best medicines available. All in a small Midwestern town.
In America we have choices. We can choose our care, and that means one can choose poorly. That VP of Engineering took a gamble on the kind of insurance he got and lost. That's unfortunate. It does not erase things like the excellent cancer survival rates in the USA.
I have a similar story. I wouldn't say that the VA tried to kill me but they seemed to have little sympathy for my pain.
The VA isn't the only failure in government medicine. Look at the Indian Health Service, Medicare/Medicaid, and various state agencies. It's not just government but also the insurance agencies. I hear horror stories from people about not getting the medicine they need from hospitals because insurance won't pay what they charge, but they can go to a drug store and get the same stuff the shelf for pocket change.
Hospitals will charge $20 for a Tylenol because the insurance companies will pay it. That's not for a bottle of Tylenol, that's for a single pill. That's what happens when we create layers of bureaucracy between the patients and care providers.
I see later reports that 20 jets were destroyed. Assuming they were mid-level fighters costing $10,000,000 each then they lost $200,000,000 of gear in lost aircraft alone. If they were low end fighters, much like what rich guys buy as expensive toys, then at $250,000 each that's still $5,000,000 lost. If these were high end jets, just off the assembly line from Russia, then they'd be about $50,000,000 each, in which case hitting just two of them would make the losses "equal" on both sides.
But you see, there's plenty more where that came from.
Do you know who has the largest air force in the world? The United States Air Force. Who has the second largest air force in the world? The United States Navy. Third largest air force? The United States Marine Corp.
If there was a fail here it was that there is doubt over if the chemical weapons stored there survived the attack.
The point wasn't necessarily to send missiles, it was to send a message, and that's priceless.
It is coming to the rest of the world, one way or another.
I've been hearing about the nightmares of healthcare in Canada and the UK. One thing was a Canada court ruling that denying people the ability to seek medical care on the private market was a human rights violation. This opened the gates to what Canadians call "super hospitals" but we in the USA call "hospitals". Canada had made it illegal for people to buy private insurance or seek care from private care providers. This caused the government run system to become overwhelmed. Canadians were fleeing to the USA for care, including prominent government officials.
In the UK a large portion of the population have private medical insurance because of the poor care from the government. Britons are (or at least were) dying of thirst and hunger in their beds because the care providers were not properly trained and/or simply did not care.
I've been receiving government funded healthcare in the USA from the Veterans Administration for over a decade now. Until a year or so ago if I wanted to see a physician it could take weeks. Once in a time of excruciating pain I called a local hospital, I got an appointment within the hour, was treated well, and at a cost I could pay out of pocket. Maybe I could have called the VA and tried to get them to pay my bill since it was related to my injury from military service but I didn't, I felt better and that was what mattered. The VA hospitals have improved lately, because some high profile deaths and suicides forced some oversight. Now I can get to see a care provider in days, better but still not great, and not near what I got from a private provider.
Across the world the best indicator for the survival of a person afflicted with a life threatening condition is if one is living in the USA. You can claim that medical care in the USA is somehow "wrong" but it's the best in the world. I don't want to see that messed with. I want to see it improve and, out of compassion for others, I wish other nations would follow our lead.
Canada, UK, and other nations are starting to realize that their medical care sucks. I assume a lot of this has to do with people leaving for the USA for care, and the greater ease of communication and travel from modern technology enabling more people to do this. So, you will see more people getting American style health care, either by them coming here or the system of care spreading to other nations.
If there is no profit in saving lives then it cannot go on for long. If drug companies cannot profit making drugs then their won't be any drug companies. If a brain surgeon gets paid as much as a truck driver then you aren't going to have many brain surgeons, at least not many that's any better trained than a typical truck driver.
This is not a choice between lives and profit, we can have both.
What a lot of nations chose to do is, out of "compassion", put government in charge of providing medical care. This has been and will always become a disaster. The people that provide care may be the best people at the start but without competition, which requires a profit motive, the quality of care will fade. People need motivation to improve, provide quality care, and profit provides that.
It sucks that labor and materials cost money but that is the world we live in and that cannot be changed. Removing the profit motive to providing quality medical care and people WILL die needlessly.
Even the most compassionate person needs resources to provide medical care to those in need. The best, and perhaps only, means to make sure that the compassionate have those resources is with a free market. A free market means people will profit.
Then introduce competition. Bristol-Meyers can get away with paying for a helicopter ride very day because the FDA has created rules that makes getting into the drug business nearly impossible. Someone could bring this all to a screeching halt by bringing in a competitor that offers products for less because they aren't paying for aviation fuel and a helicopter pilot.
You claim that the current prices of drugs is a reflection of the free market failing to keep prices low. Here's a problem with your assessment, we don't have a free market with drugs.
One thing is that the FDA has declared that any drug sold in the USA must get their approval, and the approval process they have is long and expensive. If you want to see prices go down then we need to see reform in the approval process. What we are talking about here are people with extremely rare diseases that threaten their lives. If the FDA simply opened the floodgates on allowing the testing then we'd have all kinds of drugs getting tested and the cheapest ones would win. As it is now drug companies have to pick and choose which ones to submit for approval for testing placing very high costs on failure, so they will spend a lot of money on R&D. Once a drug is approved for a disease research stops because the profit motive is gone. The market is small, the costs are astronomical, so the ability to profit disappears. For prices to go down people need to be able to compete in these exceedingly small markets. Or, the market needs to grow by, as a possibility, treaties that allow testing in other countries to be recognized more universally.
Along that line of allowing drug tests to cross borders is that the FDA prevents importation of these cheap drugs without their prior approval. My sister has diabetes and was on vacation to India. She needed more insulin while there and she was able to walk into a pharmacy and buy a vial of insulin for something like 25 cents. Why does it cost something like $50 per vial here? I'm sure a lot of that has to do with FDA overhead.
Here's a few other things that drive up drug costs. Prescription rules, if you want even a common drug for a chronic condition you will need a permission slip from a physician. Why? Can't people figure this out on their own? My sister knows what kind of insulin she needs. Another thing about diabetes treatment, I remember when disposable syringes were sold by the hundred and were just sitting on the shelf at the drug store. You want to see medical costs go down? Then let people buy these things without a government permission slip. I'm not saying that we need to remove all regulation, only that they need to be rolled back to something more reasonable. If people can buy safe and effective insulin for less than a dollar in India but it costs 50 times that in the USA then we are doing something seriously wrong.
More laws will not fix this problem. The problem is too many laws. The drug companies would not be able to price gouge if the market wasn't so close. If you think that there is price fixing then I ask you to prove it. It takes only one drug company to step out of line to ruin the whole deal. If they are all in on the deal then the rules need to be changed to make it easier to start a drug company.
Greenpeace likes to talk about how they sail this "green" ship but it's got a 400 horsepower diesel engine in it. Sure, it's got sails, but sails won't produce electricity for their communication and navigation, or heat for the passengers and crew. If they were serious about being "green" they'd have had a ship made in the style of the old windjammers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Even a windjammer would have a steam or diesel engine for running the pulleys and powering lights but at least they could argue it's engine is far smaller, and therefore cannot consume as much fuel, than any ship of comparable size. I doubt any ship would be considered seaworthy if it didn't have the means to keep the crew warm, and that's going to mean they are burning something. Maybe they can burn wood. That's "green", right?
This nonsense of "electric" or "hybrid" this and that has been applied to things that we've long ago known as something else but, due to "green washing trends", are called by these new terms. A diesel train isn't a "diesel" any more. Now they are "diesel electric hybrids" even though they've been building them the same way for decades.
What really floored me was a TV commercial for an "electric hybrid" that made the fact that it had no way to plug it in as a feature. If it cannot be plugged in to charge the batteries then it's not "electric". It's a gasoline car that has an unusual transmission system. There's an electric component to the drive train but all cars have that, from their electric starters, alternators, and electronics.
Basically it's an "electric" jet because they said so.
"There is a wage gap, it comes up again and again, but the *reasons* are disputed."
Define "wage gap". If we take the wages of all women and average them and then take the wages of all men and average them then we can see a "wage gap". This alone is not a problem since women typically choose jobs that don't pay as much. For example, there's a lot of women working as school teachers and a lot of men working as lumberjacks. We don't fault the men for the higher pay because dealing with chainsaws that can rip off your arm is much more dangerous than a classroom of kindergarteners. Women usually choose the lower pay, and safer job, over the higher pay, and more dangerous, job. But that's not how the "wage gap" is typically defined, and it's not how this article defines it either.
The claim is that if we see women and men doing the exact same job, with the exact same experience and education, that somehow this "wage gap" still appears. But to anyone that has done an honest evaluation of this "wage gap" has seen is that in reality there is no "wage gap". It turns out that long ago we've made it illegal to pay people differently based on gender, age, race, and on and on. If there actually was a real and honest wage gap in America then a lot of employers would be in court over it right now.
There is no wage gap. People that claim there is one will try to shoehorn *reasons* to make the case. Once people see the supposed *reasons* for this gap it all goes away.
It doesn't seem that long ago when police having a camera on their person was something out of science fiction. We've see police with cameras for a long time now but they've been limited to cameras on cars, buildings, or on a person only in cases of an undercover police going after high value targets. I'm amazed at the speed in which they are being adopted.
I can see why police are wanting them, it keeps everyone honest. Before such audio and video recording devices were common we'd have to rely on witness testimony, which has been proven to be terrible at keeping things straight. Cameras have shown many accusations of police abuse to be false, as well as caught abuses that may have gone unseen before.
What is disturbing is how there is evidence that cameras have tended to encourage police shootings. Before cameras there was always doubt in a police officer's mind of having a use of force shown justifiable after the fact. Now with cameras much of this doubt is removed. I'm a bit torn on this. On the one hand we see people that assault police get shot, when they likely deserve it. On the other hand we see police get "lazy" and shoot at the first sign they might be in danger, when a less lethal means might have been effective.
As with all things this comes with its ups and downs.
Another thing, there's this quote, "Eighty percent are going out with a gun and no camera. " I saw a video yesterday of three female officers getting beat up by a single enraged man. He was picking up rocks and tossing them at the officers and their car, with enough force to crack the windshield. The officers would try to tackle the guy but he'd throw them off and swing his fists at them. Why didn't they shoot the guy? Because in the country they were in the officers are not armed with guns. They get batons, pepper spray, and handcuffs. Did he deserve to get shot? Probably not. I do think though that if he knew the officers had the ability to use lethal force that he'd sober up real quick and either submit to arrest or be free to go on his way.
To anyone that thinks that swinging a fist is insufficient reason to shoot someone then I have a problem with that. A 200 pound man throwing a punch at a 150 pound woman is lethal force in my mind.
They got this one maniac on camera beating up three female police officers, but none of the officers were effectively armed. Cameras are nice, guns are better, having both is great.
You think I lifted these 300 pound printers on my back and hiked up a staircase with it? Of course I used a hand cart. I still had to have the strength to push or pull the cart up a ramp, the weight to counter balance the printer, and so forth.
The average American adult male is 5 foot 10 inches tall and 195 pounds. The average American adult female is 5 foot 4 inches tall and 165 pounds. Think about how much these prototypical people can lift or carry. Think about the weight of what even a small PC might be. Now image having an average female and an average male having to take dozens of these computers and install them at people's desks. Now imagine that both of these prototypical people have hand carts. Both have to get a dozen computers up a flight of stairs. The male is likely to grab six at a time and walk up the stairs. The female is going to have to put them all on a cart, or carry them by hand three or four at a time.
Now imagine these two prototypical tech workers having to bring printer paper to the printers in the office. I think the man would likely grab the entire box of paper and carry it around to all the printers, dropping off paper as he goes. The woman will have to take some reams out of the box before she removes it from the store room (meaning having to take two trips), or use a cart.
When it comes time for promotions, or lay-offs, or whatever, which computer tech do you think is going to see their career advance?
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That is a very likely story behind the use of the word "knot" as a measure of speed. How a "knot" became defined as a minute of latitude per hour is another matter.
I suspect the use of knots in a rope to measure speed was one thing, and the measure of speed by minutes of latitude per hour was another thing, which converged in meaning over time. I don't know the answer and it's possible no one does.
While sometimes that can work against you it can also work for you. When it comes to things like efficiency in heat engines then making them larger can mean the area of losses grows by N^2 but volume of power production grows by N^3.
Sometimes bigger is better.
Might we someday end up with batteries that are as energy dense (volume and weight) -- certainly that is the hope, just not necessarily reality as yet.
I'm pretty sure that will never happen. That is assuming one defines a battery as we understand it currently, a device that stores electric energy directly as a reversible chemical process. What some people call "batteries" are really just capacitors or fuel cells that have a form/fit/function similar to a battery, and even then I'm not sure we'd see anything better.
Jet-A is an incredibly dense energy source that is a liquid at temperatures and pressures that we will commonly run into. This means it can be stored in something as inexpensive, durable, and lightweight as a steel tub or plastic bottle. It has other nice properties such as it's ability to lubricate and preserve metal parts, and that it's relatively difficult to ignite in case of an open flame.
Jet-A is really hard to beat as a fuel.
The batteries would be a wash if you removed one of the engines and less fuel might offset a heavier generator.
That does not seem likely to me. We design aircraft with multiple engines because it provides redundancy and convenience. Two engines are nice because they can derive power from a shared energy pool, the fuel tanks. With a single engine and a battery pack the loss of the engine means losing access to that pool of energy that is the fuel.
Then there is the issue of charging up that battery. Given proper infrastructure the battery could be charged from grid power. In the case of remote locations, or emergencies, the grid power cannot be relied upon. In which case the electricity would come from diesel generators and the like. In that case the batteries would be charged from a generator as part of the ground crew tools, have to be charged from the engine on board using fuel while idle on the ground, or whatever. The energy would still come from the fuel but with the additional losses of charging and discharging the battery.
If a battery-turbine "hybrid" plane did suffer a failure of either power plant, the turbine or battery, then parts for both would have to be kept on hand. With a two engine craft a power plant failure would typically mean replacing the engine with one that can fit in either spot. It's the low replacement part count that keeps aircraft like the A-10 in the air. The A-10 has very few parts that are unique to left or right. There is no "left wing" or "right wing" there's just "wing".
A friend of mine worked as ground crew servicing F-16 jets, which has one main engine. A twin engine craft can use power from one engine to restart the other, but a single engine craft does not have that option. There is a battery on board of the aircraft but that is only for navigation and communication. If the engine is in need of restart in the air, or with a lack of proper ground equipment while on the ground, there is a small powerful engine on the plane that can start the main engine. I recall that it runs on hydrazine but I'm not sure about that. Even so there is only enough fuel for the auxiliary engine to attempt two or three engine starts.
The point is that even with an electric drive system the poor energy density of batteries do not make sense to drive the engines. Electric passenger commuter cars can get away with using battery storage because ranges are short and charging stations are easy to find. Not having to get airborne, or stay afloat, helps considerably too.
I'm not a professional map reader by any means but I did some work on electronic navigation systems and I like to read about history, because of this I read up on how navigation is done now and how it was done before.
I suspect that measuring speed in knots came in common use once people understood astronavigation. Common trade routes were primarily along longitudinal lines, such as along the American coasts and from Europe to Africa. Knowing your speed in knots would have a lot of meaning in that case. By knowing your latitude at a given time in the past and comparing that to your current latitude then speed can be approximated. Knowing the time is also fairly trivial even before modern time pieces so long as one did not deviate far from a given longitude.
When it comes to radio navigation the units used there would lead one to use kph to indicate speed. Radio wavelengths are commonly measured in meters. Angular measurements would be in degrees and minutes still but that does not mean it translates well to the degrees and minutes used to indicate latitude and longitude on a map. Distances and directions still would though.
When it comes to critical navigation failures on land, sea, or air it is not uncommon to fall back to astronavigation. However this does not necessarily mean one would also fall back to using knots in measuring speed. Kilometers, minutes of arc, and such are still very useful and would translate well to a map laid out in kilometers.
Knots may fall out of common use in time but it's got a lot of inertia behind it. A lot of that inertia will come from trade routes still being largely oriented north-south.
A knot is defined as one minute of geographic latitude in one hour, or a close approximation of it.
My understanding is that this is an accepted means of indicating speed is because it makes for easy translation of speed and distance on common maps. Certainly tradition plays a part but this part it plays is because of how people kept time and measured distance. Since we still use minutes of latitude and hours in tracking distance and time we still use the knot to translate between them.
When traveling at greater heights and distances then other units become more convenient, like mach number and kph. Even then the conversion to knots is almost inevitable since the world is laid out in minutes of arc on most any map you'll find.
As this is a tilt rotor aircraft I would think that a more appropriate analogy would be with the V-22 and aircraft like it. Or even with other VTOL aircraft, such as the V-8 (Harrier derived craft) or F-35B (lift fan variant).
What we've had before were two classes of aircraft, helicopters and airplanes. Helicopters could take off and land on small areas but were slow and fuel hungry. Airplanes used much less fuel per mile traveled and/or mass carried but at the cost of needing a large take off and landing area.
Tilt rotor craft allowed one to create an aircraft that had speed, small take-off/landing area, and fuel efficiency, but at a cost of complexity and reliability. The V-22 is a very well liked aircraft but it has high maintenance costs from its complex gearboxes. If this experiment is successful then the cost penalty for VTOL airplanes can become very very small. It's not likely to make traditional helicopters and airplanes obsolete but it will replace many of them in many cases.
I'm guessing as you are but the way I understood it is that the electrical power would be provided by a turbine engine driving a generator. No batteries, or at least none that drive the propellers.
Batteries have very poor energy density compared to hydrocarbons, a difference of 2 or 3 orders of magnitude. I expect that the prototype used batteries because range is not an issue for testing but cost is.
When it comes to the losses of electric generation we've seen the advantages of an electric drive train for over a century now. Nearly every locomotive has an electric drive train. An increasing number of ships at sea do as well. As we come to demand better performance from our automobiles we've been switching to electric drive trains there as well.
2. Some handguns (though none I can think of made by Glock) are indeed used for hunting. This is what cartridges like .500S&W and .454Casull are for. I have friends who take deer or boar with them.
I thought I'd get into deer hunting after talking to some of my friends that hunt. Along with their exciting tales of deer hunting I heard horror stories of hunting during what we call "shotgun season". You see around here it is legal to hunt with a shotgun that fires "slugs", which is a shotgun shell loaded with a single projectile. In this case the "shotgun" is really just a rifle with a big slow bullet, or what I call a "slug gun". Anyway, since just about anyone can hit a deer with a $300 "slug gun" all the good hunting spots fill up real quick with inexperienced hunters on the few days when "slug gun" hunting is allowed. This can lead to a dangerous and unpleasant hunting experience. Fortunately there is a handgun and bow season that opens before the "slug gun" crazies come out.
To avoid this I thought I'd get a handgun to hunt deer. So I go to a local gun shop and look at guns suitable for hunting deer. I ask the guy behind the counter what would be a good gun to use. During that conversation I ask about using a semi-automatic handgun. He replies that while it is legal he said, "you'd look funny shooting deer with a Glock" and then brought me to the display case with the revolvers.
There is nothing "wrong" with hunting with a Glock, mechanically or legally speaking. They are light handguns which make them suitable for carrying often and shooting little, but being light can mean a loss in accuracy. When hunting one wants something durable and accurate. Things where a Glock shines over a revolver, such as ammunition capacity, mean little while hunting.
I also have not seen anyone use a Glock for hunting but that does not mean that no one does. A Glock chambered in .45ACP or .40S&W would be quite suited for hunting. The quite powerful 10mm is rare in Glocks, as I understand, but it is something used for bears, either hunting or protection from them. The .357SIG and .45GAP are good too, but not many cartridges in those calibers are suited for hunting.
The point is that handgun hunting is quite popular, and I suspect that is true even for those that own Glocks.
Tell me....what exactly is a "food stamp"?
We don't have food stamps any more. We have SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly called EBT because payments are done by electronic banking transactions), which is a welfare system a lot like your Centrelink.
Remarkable....only in the US huh ?
Right, because poverty is a uniquely American problem.
She was in tears when she found out in Australia her father would have received excellent medical care without draining his whole fortune to nothing once the insurance ran out.
Tell me something, what are the taxes like in Australia? I can look it up. It appears that on the average Americans lose 25% of their income to taxes while Australians lose 45%. Interesting. You think this "excellent" health care doesn't come at a cost? That socialized health care you get is prepaid health care, you are paying for it whether you use it or not. You pay for it if you like it or not. It's not free, because nothing is free.
What you point out is one of the huge problems with what we call "Obamacare", it ties medical insurance with employment. The reason your friend had to see her father lose his fortune paying for medical care is because of a long series of events that created an incentive for employers to provide medical insurance. My dad was a farmer, worked his own land and therefore he was his employer. He set aside some of his income to buy top notch medical insurance. When he got cancer he had his choice of hospitals to go to for surgery. He could have gone to one of the best hospitals in the world, and had it all paid for. He chose to get his care at the local hospital, which was only a half hour drive from his home, because he didn't want to be far from family. He got a highly qualified surgeon, and the best medicines available. All in a small Midwestern town.
In America we have choices. We can choose our care, and that means one can choose poorly. That VP of Engineering took a gamble on the kind of insurance he got and lost. That's unfortunate. It does not erase things like the excellent cancer survival rates in the USA.
I have a similar story. I wouldn't say that the VA tried to kill me but they seemed to have little sympathy for my pain.
The VA isn't the only failure in government medicine. Look at the Indian Health Service, Medicare/Medicaid, and various state agencies. It's not just government but also the insurance agencies. I hear horror stories from people about not getting the medicine they need from hospitals because insurance won't pay what they charge, but they can go to a drug store and get the same stuff the shelf for pocket change.
Hospitals will charge $20 for a Tylenol because the insurance companies will pay it. That's not for a bottle of Tylenol, that's for a single pill. That's what happens when we create layers of bureaucracy between the patients and care providers.
I see later reports that 20 jets were destroyed. Assuming they were mid-level fighters costing $10,000,000 each then they lost $200,000,000 of gear in lost aircraft alone. If they were low end fighters, much like what rich guys buy as expensive toys, then at $250,000 each that's still $5,000,000 lost. If these were high end jets, just off the assembly line from Russia, then they'd be about $50,000,000 each, in which case hitting just two of them would make the losses "equal" on both sides.
But you see, there's plenty more where that came from.
Do you know who has the largest air force in the world? The United States Air Force.
Who has the second largest air force in the world? The United States Navy.
Third largest air force? The United States Marine Corp.
If there was a fail here it was that there is doubt over if the chemical weapons stored there survived the attack.
The point wasn't necessarily to send missiles, it was to send a message, and that's priceless.
It is coming to the rest of the world, one way or another.
I've been hearing about the nightmares of healthcare in Canada and the UK. One thing was a Canada court ruling that denying people the ability to seek medical care on the private market was a human rights violation. This opened the gates to what Canadians call "super hospitals" but we in the USA call "hospitals". Canada had made it illegal for people to buy private insurance or seek care from private care providers. This caused the government run system to become overwhelmed. Canadians were fleeing to the USA for care, including prominent government officials.
In the UK a large portion of the population have private medical insurance because of the poor care from the government. Britons are (or at least were) dying of thirst and hunger in their beds because the care providers were not properly trained and/or simply did not care.
I've been receiving government funded healthcare in the USA from the Veterans Administration for over a decade now. Until a year or so ago if I wanted to see a physician it could take weeks. Once in a time of excruciating pain I called a local hospital, I got an appointment within the hour, was treated well, and at a cost I could pay out of pocket. Maybe I could have called the VA and tried to get them to pay my bill since it was related to my injury from military service but I didn't, I felt better and that was what mattered. The VA hospitals have improved lately, because some high profile deaths and suicides forced some oversight. Now I can get to see a care provider in days, better but still not great, and not near what I got from a private provider.
Across the world the best indicator for the survival of a person afflicted with a life threatening condition is if one is living in the USA. You can claim that medical care in the USA is somehow "wrong" but it's the best in the world. I don't want to see that messed with. I want to see it improve and, out of compassion for others, I wish other nations would follow our lead.
Canada, UK, and other nations are starting to realize that their medical care sucks. I assume a lot of this has to do with people leaving for the USA for care, and the greater ease of communication and travel from modern technology enabling more people to do this. So, you will see more people getting American style health care, either by them coming here or the system of care spreading to other nations.
Of course, because properly testing medications means the facility manager must arrive on a helicopter daily.
Abso-fucking-lutely.
If there is no profit in saving lives then it cannot go on for long. If drug companies cannot profit making drugs then their won't be any drug companies. If a brain surgeon gets paid as much as a truck driver then you aren't going to have many brain surgeons, at least not many that's any better trained than a typical truck driver.
This is not a choice between lives and profit, we can have both.
What a lot of nations chose to do is, out of "compassion", put government in charge of providing medical care. This has been and will always become a disaster. The people that provide care may be the best people at the start but without competition, which requires a profit motive, the quality of care will fade. People need motivation to improve, provide quality care, and profit provides that.
It sucks that labor and materials cost money but that is the world we live in and that cannot be changed. Removing the profit motive to providing quality medical care and people WILL die needlessly.
Even the most compassionate person needs resources to provide medical care to those in need. The best, and perhaps only, means to make sure that the compassionate have those resources is with a free market. A free market means people will profit.
Then introduce competition. Bristol-Meyers can get away with paying for a helicopter ride very day because the FDA has created rules that makes getting into the drug business nearly impossible. Someone could bring this all to a screeching halt by bringing in a competitor that offers products for less because they aren't paying for aviation fuel and a helicopter pilot.
You claim that the current prices of drugs is a reflection of the free market failing to keep prices low. Here's a problem with your assessment, we don't have a free market with drugs.
One thing is that the FDA has declared that any drug sold in the USA must get their approval, and the approval process they have is long and expensive. If you want to see prices go down then we need to see reform in the approval process. What we are talking about here are people with extremely rare diseases that threaten their lives. If the FDA simply opened the floodgates on allowing the testing then we'd have all kinds of drugs getting tested and the cheapest ones would win. As it is now drug companies have to pick and choose which ones to submit for approval for testing placing very high costs on failure, so they will spend a lot of money on R&D. Once a drug is approved for a disease research stops because the profit motive is gone. The market is small, the costs are astronomical, so the ability to profit disappears. For prices to go down people need to be able to compete in these exceedingly small markets. Or, the market needs to grow by, as a possibility, treaties that allow testing in other countries to be recognized more universally.
Along that line of allowing drug tests to cross borders is that the FDA prevents importation of these cheap drugs without their prior approval. My sister has diabetes and was on vacation to India. She needed more insulin while there and she was able to walk into a pharmacy and buy a vial of insulin for something like 25 cents. Why does it cost something like $50 per vial here? I'm sure a lot of that has to do with FDA overhead.
Here's a few other things that drive up drug costs. Prescription rules, if you want even a common drug for a chronic condition you will need a permission slip from a physician. Why? Can't people figure this out on their own? My sister knows what kind of insulin she needs. Another thing about diabetes treatment, I remember when disposable syringes were sold by the hundred and were just sitting on the shelf at the drug store. You want to see medical costs go down? Then let people buy these things without a government permission slip. I'm not saying that we need to remove all regulation, only that they need to be rolled back to something more reasonable. If people can buy safe and effective insulin for less than a dollar in India but it costs 50 times that in the USA then we are doing something seriously wrong.
More laws will not fix this problem. The problem is too many laws. The drug companies would not be able to price gouge if the market wasn't so close. If you think that there is price fixing then I ask you to prove it. It takes only one drug company to step out of line to ruin the whole deal. If they are all in on the deal then the rules need to be changed to make it easier to start a drug company.
So, who's on first?
Watt's on first, Who's on second
And third base?
I Don't Know
What?
I just told you, second base.
How can a jet be electric? The same way Greenpeace sails an "electric" ship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Greenpeace likes to talk about how they sail this "green" ship but it's got a 400 horsepower diesel engine in it. Sure, it's got sails, but sails won't produce electricity for their communication and navigation, or heat for the passengers and crew. If they were serious about being "green" they'd have had a ship made in the style of the old windjammers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Even a windjammer would have a steam or diesel engine for running the pulleys and powering lights but at least they could argue it's engine is far smaller, and therefore cannot consume as much fuel, than any ship of comparable size. I doubt any ship would be considered seaworthy if it didn't have the means to keep the crew warm, and that's going to mean they are burning something. Maybe they can burn wood. That's "green", right?
This nonsense of "electric" or "hybrid" this and that has been applied to things that we've long ago known as something else but, due to "green washing trends", are called by these new terms. A diesel train isn't a "diesel" any more. Now they are "diesel electric hybrids" even though they've been building them the same way for decades.
What really floored me was a TV commercial for an "electric hybrid" that made the fact that it had no way to plug it in as a feature. If it cannot be plugged in to charge the batteries then it's not "electric". It's a gasoline car that has an unusual transmission system. There's an electric component to the drive train but all cars have that, from their electric starters, alternators, and electronics.
Basically it's an "electric" jet because they said so.
"men, women and transexuals."
You forgot to mention the other 48 genders. Racist!!
"There is a wage gap, it comes up again and again, but the *reasons* are disputed."
Define "wage gap". If we take the wages of all women and average them and then take the wages of all men and average them then we can see a "wage gap". This alone is not a problem since women typically choose jobs that don't pay as much. For example, there's a lot of women working as school teachers and a lot of men working as lumberjacks. We don't fault the men for the higher pay because dealing with chainsaws that can rip off your arm is much more dangerous than a classroom of kindergarteners. Women usually choose the lower pay, and safer job, over the higher pay, and more dangerous, job. But that's not how the "wage gap" is typically defined, and it's not how this article defines it either.
The claim is that if we see women and men doing the exact same job, with the exact same experience and education, that somehow this "wage gap" still appears. But to anyone that has done an honest evaluation of this "wage gap" has seen is that in reality there is no "wage gap". It turns out that long ago we've made it illegal to pay people differently based on gender, age, race, and on and on. If there actually was a real and honest wage gap in America then a lot of employers would be in court over it right now.
There is no wage gap. People that claim there is one will try to shoehorn *reasons* to make the case. Once people see the supposed *reasons* for this gap it all goes away.
It doesn't seem that long ago when police having a camera on their person was something out of science fiction. We've see police with cameras for a long time now but they've been limited to cameras on cars, buildings, or on a person only in cases of an undercover police going after high value targets. I'm amazed at the speed in which they are being adopted.
I can see why police are wanting them, it keeps everyone honest. Before such audio and video recording devices were common we'd have to rely on witness testimony, which has been proven to be terrible at keeping things straight. Cameras have shown many accusations of police abuse to be false, as well as caught abuses that may have gone unseen before.
What is disturbing is how there is evidence that cameras have tended to encourage police shootings. Before cameras there was always doubt in a police officer's mind of having a use of force shown justifiable after the fact. Now with cameras much of this doubt is removed. I'm a bit torn on this. On the one hand we see people that assault police get shot, when they likely deserve it. On the other hand we see police get "lazy" and shoot at the first sign they might be in danger, when a less lethal means might have been effective.
As with all things this comes with its ups and downs.
Another thing, there's this quote, "Eighty percent are going out with a gun and no camera. " I saw a video yesterday of three female officers getting beat up by a single enraged man. He was picking up rocks and tossing them at the officers and their car, with enough force to crack the windshield. The officers would try to tackle the guy but he'd throw them off and swing his fists at them. Why didn't they shoot the guy? Because in the country they were in the officers are not armed with guns. They get batons, pepper spray, and handcuffs. Did he deserve to get shot? Probably not. I do think though that if he knew the officers had the ability to use lethal force that he'd sober up real quick and either submit to arrest or be free to go on his way.
To anyone that thinks that swinging a fist is insufficient reason to shoot someone then I have a problem with that. A 200 pound man throwing a punch at a 150 pound woman is lethal force in my mind.
They got this one maniac on camera beating up three female police officers, but none of the officers were effectively armed. Cameras are nice, guns are better, having both is great.
"I'd use a hand cart."
You think I lifted these 300 pound printers on my back and hiked up a staircase with it? Of course I used a hand cart. I still had to have the strength to push or pull the cart up a ramp, the weight to counter balance the printer, and so forth.
The average American adult male is 5 foot 10 inches tall and 195 pounds. The average American adult female is 5 foot 4 inches tall and 165 pounds. Think about how much these prototypical people can lift or carry. Think about the weight of what even a small PC might be. Now image having an average female and an average male having to take dozens of these computers and install them at people's desks. Now imagine that both of these prototypical people have hand carts. Both have to get a dozen computers up a flight of stairs. The male is likely to grab six at a time and walk up the stairs. The female is going to have to put them all on a cart, or carry them by hand three or four at a time.
Now imagine these two prototypical tech workers having to bring printer paper to the printers in the office. I think the man would likely grab the entire box of paper and carry it around to all the printers, dropping off paper as he goes. The woman will have to take some reams out of the box before she removes it from the store room (meaning having to take two trips), or use a cart.
When it comes time for promotions, or lay-offs, or whatever, which computer tech do you think is going to see their career advance?
Of course, because gender is just a social construct. It must be true because my college professors told me so.