In some cases, the military really gets shit done. This is in part because they have such a large budget, and are used to expensive, long term projects. They are ok with an outlay of large amounts of money for something that will take a long time to develop and deliver.
True, and I am grateful for their willingness to fund long-term research. Unfortunately, however, for all the same reasons you listed, the military sometimes does nothing but burn huge amounts of money for years and years on projects that are clearly wasteful and going nowhere. Worse, they allow defense contractors screw them over and over and over: going over budget and not meeting deadlines. Projects and spending decisions no longer get made on merit and priorities: they get made by career bureaucrats who never built anything in their life, or by bought-and-sold politicians who need to bring home the bacon.
A similar calculus exists for the logistics in Antarctica. Most of the coastal stations can be supplied from the sea - McMurdo gets nearly all its materiel by boat. The South Pole station is another matter. Currently 99% of what's at the South Pole gets brought in by air, at an enormous cost for fuel.
Because of the enormous costs, the US Army Corps of Engineers has been developing the logistics and technology to have supply convoys go overland from McMurdo to South Pole station. It's a lot slower: a few weeks on ice versus a half a day in the air, but the logistical cost is much much lower.
Unfortunately, while some renewables have been tested and deployed in Antarctica, by and large they haven't panned out. Wind turbines shred themselves in a -80 C gale, and solar panels are no good during the winter. Nuclear is banned by the Antarctic treaty.
Well, there are RTG designs out there that could be put onto a truck without much difficulty. A man-portable one doesn't seem very practical. The Soviets used some to power very remote lighthouses for years and years. Unfortunately, they are really heavy for the amount of power they can produce - much better suited for stationary operation. Even though the nuclear material in them cannot be weaponized, RTGs are still packed full of radioactive heavy metal, which would be a grave risk if it fell into enemy hands. It happens from time to time that a forward outpost needs to be abandoned, possibly leveled with demolition charges. You can't really abandon or demolish an RTG. I suspect a similar problem exists for just about any nuclear power option.
In addition, since the planet always has the same side facing the sun, the lack of tidal pumping means the crust of the planet is locked, which means no plate tectonics, which means no CO2 recycling, which means a Venus-like planet.
Plate Tectonics is the result of the Earth having a molten core. The tidal effects of the Sun and the Moon on the planet's crust are negligible, because the crust is very rigid and very heavy. The influence on the oceans, which are fluid and a lot less massive, is apparent.
You might be thinking of situations like that of Jupiter's moon IO, whose volcanic activity is driven largely by the tidal effect of Jupiter. This is largely the effect of Jupiter being really massive, which at the close distance of IO's orbit (and the difference in that distance between IO's near-side and far-side) creates a sizeable gradient: tides.
If the lunar tides were strong enough to produce plate tectonics here on Earth, we could expect the Earth to produce some pretty sizeable effects on the Moon, no? Everything we've discovered so far indicates that the Moon is geologically non-active - a rock.
While the measurement circuits for what this guy wants are fairly straightforward, interfacing these with LIVE power at the breaker panel is very serious and dangerous stuff. A qualified electrician might be able to do some work in the breaker panel itself, though it isn't exactly standard work, so finding someone willing to give it a go with home-spun electronics is dicey. To do it safely would require the power to be cut to the house at the utility pole - before it even reaches the breakers. That's something that, really, only the utility should be doing.
Even building a circuit to measure a single power outlet can be hazardous. Ordinary 110-V power can kill you easily, damage equipment if fucked with, or cause a house-destroying fire. Leave that kind of thing to the product manufacturer. Figure out what to do with the data downstream of the meter. Look for UL labeling to make sure it's been tested in any number of different fault conditions.
Why do you need to validate the weight in the first place? I've heard it billed as an anti-theft feature, but it's a pretty idiotic and easily circumvented one at that.
Even if you do the dance that the manufacturer clearly wants you to do, I've had a less than 50% success rate in getting out of one of those self-checkouts without some item not being properly recognized by the bag weight scale.
I was in the camp of "those disconnected luddite idiots!" until I considered this quote from the article:
In his experience, the dial phone "could not be more awkward than it is. One has to use both hands to dial; he must be in a position where there is good light, day or night, in order to see the number; and if he happens to turn the dial not quite far enough, then he gets a wrong connection.
Then I thought to myself: isn't Slashdot the same crowd that was always harping on the iPhone for not having voice dialing? The iPhone "could not be more awkward than it is. One has to use both hands to dial; he must be in a position where he can see the screen, only not in daylight, in order to see the number; and because he has no physical keys to press, he gets a wrong connection."
Ditto when its moaning at you to put the item in the bagging area, leaving it in your buggy/handbag/in another bag on the floor won't work.
Why should we lower our expectations or alter our behavior to accommodate seemingly advanced, but functionally mediocre technology? The grocery store, or super-mega-big-box-home-improvement-store, is in the service and retail industry, they should realize this. If I've scanned something in, why hell shouldn't I be able to put it in the canvas bag I brought with me?
That may sound nice, if you have a handful of nicely barcoded objects in your (hand-carried) basket. But nearly all my encounters with self-checkouts are at Big Box Mega Home Improvement Store. You can't get a self-checkout to recognize that your have a ten-foot length of conduit, whether it has a barcode or not (at least, not yet). I once had a model freak out while checking out a box of nails with a clear barcode. As soon as it encounters something out of the ordinary, it freaks out, locks up, and refusing to do anything without the hand-holding of an employee, who curiously isn't anywhere to be seen. Meanwhile, they've reduced to one or zero the number of human-staffed, traditional check-out aisles.
Hmmm... No staff in the usual checkouts, no staff at the self-checkouts. If there is no one there to object, perhaps we should all just walk out with our merchandise.
Rankine is simple: it's the absolute-zero referenced version of Fahrenheit. One degree Rankine is one degree Fahrenheit, by definition. Zero Rankine is absolute zero, or 459.67 F.
Or, put more compactly in word analogy form:
Rankine : Fahrenheit = Kelvin : Celcius
One could, without having to replicate all the work that this guy in TFA just did. It turns out to be possible to calculate the Nth digit of pi without calculating all the intervening digits:
Unfortunately, the expression is a summation that must be calculated from 0 to N, so it would take you a while if you went out to a quadrillion places.
All voting systems need to be certified by a controlling state authority and this certification has been withdrawn on several occasions.
Part of me to give deference to individual state voting commissions, truly. But the rest of me really wants to demand that we have one unifying certification process for the whole country. We have national standards for all manner of other important equipment (again, medical devices come first to mind, transportation is another), why not here? Sure, we have the Federal Election Commission, but their jurisdiction does not extend to the mechanics of voting, just campaigning.
I'm not saying that all elections across the country must be run exactly the same using the same equipment. But it seems to me that, since the outcome of federal elections is based on how elections are run at the local level, the federal government ought to have some jurisdiction, with teeth. The Help America Vote Act ought to have done that, but all they did was give states a lot of money, with voluntary guidelines and almost no restrictions, and told them to buy whatever whiz-bang technology from whichever company had the slickest salespitch.
technology that we're still not using on a daily basis
Are you kidding me? I use Nitinol (the main shape memory alloy) every time I put on my glasses. Many shape memory alloys exhibit a behavior other than the heat-activated shape memory effect: superelasticity. That is what allows me to bend my frames in all kinds of weird ways without having the metal permanently deform.
It seems to me that the organizers of such a system could look for precedent in the medical device industry. There is a central repository for medical device problems, the MAUDE database, that keeps track of adverse events, and is searchable by anyone. Any respectable medical device manufacturer will consult that database to make sure that their new wiz-bang product isn't susceptible to the same failings as existing products, and you can bet the FDA will do the same before approving a new device. Practitioners and users can search the database to see if there are issues with a particular device (or class of devices).
It doesn't mean that problems with medical devices don't still exist, but at least there is mandated uniform reporting.
Another key issue here is that the FDA is empowered to take devices off the market if enough serious problems come up. As far as I know, there is nothing like that in voting systems (but damn well should be).
Except it's not the FAA or JAA's job to design & contract for those black boxes. It's Boeing and Airbus that have to do that.
If you want the same black box technology, accessible by any accident investigator in any country, and you want it in every plane regardless of manufacturer, then you cannot rely on manufacturers to do that job. Being experts, they certainly should be utilized in the research, design, specifying, regulation, and manufacture of such systems. But it does ultimately have to come from some higher authority, whatever libertarians might want to say about it.
If it were true that manufacturers could be entrusted with the job, then why aren't there standardized black boxes in all automobiles? There are a whole lot more automobile accidents, causing many times more damage and loss of life, than there are airplane crashes. A few manufacturers can poll a very limited data set from their vehicles after a crash, but those are entirely proprietary systems that only the manufacturer has access to, and they are far from reliable. Even if there were rules and regulations mandating such data recorders on new automobiles, they would be of little use if they were not standardized and developed across the entire industry.
The simple fact is that you can't take ordinary hardware, put it in a box, and say that it's ready to be a flight data recorder. The simple example is storage: even though you can get a 2-TB harddrive into your computer, it'd never pass muster for flight data. Even once you find ultra-ruggedized hardware that you're happy with, you then need to subject it to a few years of excruciatingly brutal tests to make sure that, in the event of a crash, you have a reasonable chance of getting useful information back.
Because the pipeline is so long, the FAA ought to, years ago, have put a development program in place. They should model it along the lines of a DARPA program: one- or two-year commitments with substantial deliverables. Want to play again next year? Better deliver this year. When the contract's up, the money's done. They ought to pit competing factions against each other: have development teams one year become destructive testers of someone else's hardware the next year.
What's wrong with nuclear as an energy source? Nuclear could completely replace fixed sources of energy production that currently rely on carbon fuels. Hydrogen could be used for mobile applications where a nuclear reactor is not needed or feasible.
Unfortunately, I think you underestimate the scale of what you are suggesting. Nuclear supplies about 20% of the United States' electrical power. But electricity is itself only about 40% of our total energy consumption - the rest largely being transportation fuels, heat, and industrial. In total, the US consumes approximately 100 quads (quadrillion BTUs - a terribly arcane unit. It's also about 105 exajoules) of energy. Nuclear right now supplies about 8.3 quads, and that's all electricity. To replace all the rest with nuclear would require a twelve-fold increase in nuclear capacity - at least. To replace just our petroleum consumption would require enough nuclear to roughly double the entire US electrical grid.
Yes, 2nd degree face burns are "some surface burns", as are "flash burns". I used to work full time at a large NYC area hospital that is the region's burn center (downstate excluding NYC), and I know what burns look like. I know that people with gasoline burns have third degree burns, limbs charred off.
Electricity can do that, too, despite over a century of widespread use. I've worked with people that've lost arms and legs while working with electricity. I have not, as yet, worked with someone who died from electricity, but that's probably because I make a point of not working with zombies: they're so unreliable.
Seriously, though, I'd say that an earlier post was correct: when you pack energy into a very dense form, there's a good chance that, sooner or later, you'll get a catastrophic sudden release.
This is not a new problem. In the area I live, there are plenty of mountains that, while looking outwardly benign, kill a number of people (experienced or not) each year. Because of their proximity to a number of major cities, relatively short hikes to the summit (day trips), and extremely changeable weather (70 F and sunny to zero visibility, freezing temperatures, and gale-force winds in an hour), lots of inexperienced hikers get way in over their heads.
Their recourse? Not to plan carefully and accordingly. Not to travel with more experienced and better-equipped friends or guides. Not to heed the signs at treeline warning of the numerous weather-related dangers. Not to stick to less dangerous ascents in the region. Not to bag it when the weather turns sour. Nope, just whip out the cellphone and call in a rescue.
It's one thing if you take a fall due to dumb luck, it's another thing to get soaked, freezing, and lost due to, well, being dumb.
It did get bad enough that the state legislature passed a law a number of years back that, if you need rescue because you were stupid or inadequately prepared for the hike, you can get charged for the rescue costs. This is typically upwards of a few tens out thousands of dollars.
You do realize that Air is already 78% nitrogen, don't you? Oxygen makes up about nearly 21%, and argon is nearly 1%; the the rest are trace gasses that combined make up less than 1%. (source)
Diffusion of gasses through a permeable barrier (such as a tire wall) is largely a matter of how large the molecule is. Helium will leak out of an ordinary latex balloon quickly compared to air, because the helium atom is so small. In the atmosphere, nitrogen and oxygen are both diatomic molecules and, being right next to each other on the periodic table, are almost the same size.
So tell me, genius, what magical part of Air are you worried about leaking out, that replacing it with pure nitrogen is going to help?
Slashdot Mirror
True, and I am grateful for their willingness to fund long-term research. Unfortunately, however, for all the same reasons you listed, the military sometimes does nothing but burn huge amounts of money for years and years on projects that are clearly wasteful and going nowhere. Worse, they allow defense contractors screw them over and over and over: going over budget and not meeting deadlines. Projects and spending decisions no longer get made on merit and priorities: they get made by career bureaucrats who never built anything in their life, or by bought-and-sold politicians who need to bring home the bacon.
A similar calculus exists for the logistics in Antarctica. Most of the coastal stations can be supplied from the sea - McMurdo gets nearly all its materiel by boat. The South Pole station is another matter. Currently 99% of what's at the South Pole gets brought in by air, at an enormous cost for fuel.
Because of the enormous costs, the US Army Corps of Engineers has been developing the logistics and technology to have supply convoys go overland from McMurdo to South Pole station. It's a lot slower: a few weeks on ice versus a half a day in the air, but the logistical cost is much much lower.
Unfortunately, while some renewables have been tested and deployed in Antarctica, by and large they haven't panned out. Wind turbines shred themselves in a -80 C gale, and solar panels are no good during the winter. Nuclear is banned by the Antarctic treaty.
Well, there are RTG designs out there that could be put onto a truck without much difficulty. A man-portable one doesn't seem very practical. The Soviets used some to power very remote lighthouses for years and years. Unfortunately, they are really heavy for the amount of power they can produce - much better suited for stationary operation. Even though the nuclear material in them cannot be weaponized, RTGs are still packed full of radioactive heavy metal, which would be a grave risk if it fell into enemy hands. It happens from time to time that a forward outpost needs to be abandoned, possibly leveled with demolition charges. You can't really abandon or demolish an RTG. I suspect a similar problem exists for just about any nuclear power option.
Plate Tectonics is the result of the Earth having a molten core. The tidal effects of the Sun and the Moon on the planet's crust are negligible, because the crust is very rigid and very heavy. The influence on the oceans, which are fluid and a lot less massive, is apparent.
You might be thinking of situations like that of Jupiter's moon IO, whose volcanic activity is driven largely by the tidal effect of Jupiter. This is largely the effect of Jupiter being really massive, which at the close distance of IO's orbit (and the difference in that distance between IO's near-side and far-side) creates a sizeable gradient: tides.
If the lunar tides were strong enough to produce plate tectonics here on Earth, we could expect the Earth to produce some pretty sizeable effects on the Moon, no? Everything we've discovered so far indicates that the Moon is geologically non-active - a rock.
More info about the guy and the accident is available at the Daily Mail
While the measurement circuits for what this guy wants are fairly straightforward, interfacing these with LIVE power at the breaker panel is very serious and dangerous stuff. A qualified electrician might be able to do some work in the breaker panel itself, though it isn't exactly standard work, so finding someone willing to give it a go with home-spun electronics is dicey. To do it safely would require the power to be cut to the house at the utility pole - before it even reaches the breakers. That's something that, really, only the utility should be doing.
Even building a circuit to measure a single power outlet can be hazardous. Ordinary 110-V power can kill you easily, damage equipment if fucked with, or cause a house-destroying fire. Leave that kind of thing to the product manufacturer. Figure out what to do with the data downstream of the meter. Look for UL labeling to make sure it's been tested in any number of different fault conditions.
Why do you need to validate the weight in the first place? I've heard it billed as an anti-theft feature, but it's a pretty idiotic and easily circumvented one at that.
Even if you do the dance that the manufacturer clearly wants you to do, I've had a less than 50% success rate in getting out of one of those self-checkouts without some item not being properly recognized by the bag weight scale.
Then I thought to myself: isn't Slashdot the same crowd that was always harping on the iPhone for not having voice dialing? The iPhone "could not be more awkward than it is. One has to use both hands to dial; he must be in a position where he can see the screen, only not in daylight, in order to see the number; and because he has no physical keys to press, he gets a wrong connection."
Have we come full circle?
Why should we lower our expectations or alter our behavior to accommodate seemingly advanced, but functionally mediocre technology? The grocery store, or super-mega-big-box-home-improvement-store, is in the service and retail industry, they should realize this. If I've scanned something in, why hell shouldn't I be able to put it in the canvas bag I brought with me?
That may sound nice, if you have a handful of nicely barcoded objects in your (hand-carried) basket. But nearly all my encounters with self-checkouts are at Big Box Mega Home Improvement Store. You can't get a self-checkout to recognize that your have a ten-foot length of conduit, whether it has a barcode or not (at least, not yet). I once had a model freak out while checking out a box of nails with a clear barcode. As soon as it encounters something out of the ordinary, it freaks out, locks up, and refusing to do anything without the hand-holding of an employee, who curiously isn't anywhere to be seen. Meanwhile, they've reduced to one or zero the number of human-staffed, traditional check-out aisles.
Hmmm... No staff in the usual checkouts, no staff at the self-checkouts. If there is no one there to object, perhaps we should all just walk out with our merchandise.
Rankine is simple: it's the absolute-zero referenced version of Fahrenheit. One degree Rankine is one degree Fahrenheit, by definition. Zero Rankine is absolute zero, or 459.67 F.
Or, put more compactly in word analogy form:
Rankine : Fahrenheit = Kelvin : Celcius
Great, now I'll have "In the Hall of the Mountain King" stuck in my head all day.
One could, without having to replicate all the work that this guy in TFA just did. It turns out to be possible to calculate the Nth digit of pi without calculating all the intervening digits:
Source 1, Source 2
Unfortunately, the expression is a summation that must be calculated from 0 to N, so it would take you a while if you went out to a quadrillion places.
Part of me to give deference to individual state voting commissions, truly. But the rest of me really wants to demand that we have one unifying certification process for the whole country. We have national standards for all manner of other important equipment (again, medical devices come first to mind, transportation is another), why not here? Sure, we have the Federal Election Commission, but their jurisdiction does not extend to the mechanics of voting, just campaigning.
I'm not saying that all elections across the country must be run exactly the same using the same equipment. But it seems to me that, since the outcome of federal elections is based on how elections are run at the local level, the federal government ought to have some jurisdiction, with teeth. The Help America Vote Act ought to have done that, but all they did was give states a lot of money, with voluntary guidelines and almost no restrictions, and told them to buy whatever whiz-bang technology from whichever company had the slickest salespitch.
Are you kidding me? I use Nitinol (the main shape memory alloy) every time I put on my glasses. Many shape memory alloys exhibit a behavior other than the heat-activated shape memory effect: superelasticity. That is what allows me to bend my frames in all kinds of weird ways without having the metal permanently deform.
It seems to me that the organizers of such a system could look for precedent in the medical device industry. There is a central repository for medical device problems, the MAUDE database, that keeps track of adverse events, and is searchable by anyone. Any respectable medical device manufacturer will consult that database to make sure that their new wiz-bang product isn't susceptible to the same failings as existing products, and you can bet the FDA will do the same before approving a new device. Practitioners and users can search the database to see if there are issues with a particular device (or class of devices).
It doesn't mean that problems with medical devices don't still exist, but at least there is mandated uniform reporting.
Another key issue here is that the FDA is empowered to take devices off the market if enough serious problems come up. As far as I know, there is nothing like that in voting systems (but damn well should be).
Well, considering I feel that flash games are an idiotic waste of my time, this revelation doesn't change matters much.
If you want the same black box technology, accessible by any accident investigator in any country, and you want it in every plane regardless of manufacturer, then you cannot rely on manufacturers to do that job. Being experts, they certainly should be utilized in the research, design, specifying, regulation, and manufacture of such systems. But it does ultimately have to come from some higher authority, whatever libertarians might want to say about it.
If it were true that manufacturers could be entrusted with the job, then why aren't there standardized black boxes in all automobiles? There are a whole lot more automobile accidents, causing many times more damage and loss of life, than there are airplane crashes. A few manufacturers can poll a very limited data set from their vehicles after a crash, but those are entirely proprietary systems that only the manufacturer has access to, and they are far from reliable. Even if there were rules and regulations mandating such data recorders on new automobiles, they would be of little use if they were not standardized and developed across the entire industry.
The simple fact is that you can't take ordinary hardware, put it in a box, and say that it's ready to be a flight data recorder. The simple example is storage: even though you can get a 2-TB harddrive into your computer, it'd never pass muster for flight data. Even once you find ultra-ruggedized hardware that you're happy with, you then need to subject it to a few years of excruciatingly brutal tests to make sure that, in the event of a crash, you have a reasonable chance of getting useful information back.
Because the pipeline is so long, the FAA ought to, years ago, have put a development program in place. They should model it along the lines of a DARPA program: one- or two-year commitments with substantial deliverables. Want to play again next year? Better deliver this year. When the contract's up, the money's done. They ought to pit competing factions against each other: have development teams one year become destructive testers of someone else's hardware the next year.
Unfortunately, I think you underestimate the scale of what you are suggesting. Nuclear supplies about 20% of the United States' electrical power. But electricity is itself only about 40% of our total energy consumption - the rest largely being transportation fuels, heat, and industrial. In total, the US consumes approximately 100 quads (quadrillion BTUs - a terribly arcane unit. It's also about 105 exajoules) of energy. Nuclear right now supplies about 8.3 quads, and that's all electricity. To replace all the rest with nuclear would require a twelve-fold increase in nuclear capacity - at least. To replace just our petroleum consumption would require enough nuclear to roughly double the entire US electrical grid.
Is that really how we want to solve our problems?
Electricity can do that, too, despite over a century of widespread use. I've worked with people that've lost arms and legs while working with electricity. I have not, as yet, worked with someone who died from electricity, but that's probably because I make a point of not working with zombies: they're so unreliable.
Seriously, though, I'd say that an earlier post was correct: when you pack energy into a very dense form, there's a good chance that, sooner or later, you'll get a catastrophic sudden release.
The medical industry does have a standard: the tapered Luer fitting. The problem stems from the fact that they use it for everything.
You think that's misleading, how about the awesome box art... for a text-based role playing game.
This is not a new problem. In the area I live, there are plenty of mountains that, while looking outwardly benign, kill a number of people (experienced or not) each year. Because of their proximity to a number of major cities, relatively short hikes to the summit (day trips), and extremely changeable weather (70 F and sunny to zero visibility, freezing temperatures, and gale-force winds in an hour), lots of inexperienced hikers get way in over their heads.
Their recourse? Not to plan carefully and accordingly. Not to travel with more experienced and better-equipped friends or guides. Not to heed the signs at treeline warning of the numerous weather-related dangers. Not to stick to less dangerous ascents in the region. Not to bag it when the weather turns sour. Nope, just whip out the cellphone and call in a rescue.
It's one thing if you take a fall due to dumb luck, it's another thing to get soaked, freezing, and lost due to, well, being dumb.
It did get bad enough that the state legislature passed a law a number of years back that, if you need rescue because you were stupid or inadequately prepared for the hike, you can get charged for the rescue costs. This is typically upwards of a few tens out thousands of dollars.
You do realize that Air is already 78% nitrogen, don't you? Oxygen makes up about nearly 21%, and argon is nearly 1%; the the rest are trace gasses that combined make up less than 1%. (source)
Diffusion of gasses through a permeable barrier (such as a tire wall) is largely a matter of how large the molecule is. Helium will leak out of an ordinary latex balloon quickly compared to air, because the helium atom is so small. In the atmosphere, nitrogen and oxygen are both diatomic molecules and, being right next to each other on the periodic table, are almost the same size.
So tell me, genius, what magical part of Air are you worried about leaking out, that replacing it with pure nitrogen is going to help?