Wait, so the rocket will be bigger, with less thrust? That doesn't sound like an improvement to me.
The relevant criterion is not thrust, but thrust to weight ratio. If they're using a lighter weight, higher specific impulse fuel, methane, since most of the take-off mass is fuel, they may be lighter. So the same thrust to weight ratio may be achieved with lower total thrust.
Or do they just mean taller (there are diagrams in the article), but it will somehow manage to have lower mass and so get a better thrust to weight ratio?
Exactly: thrust to weight is more important than just thrust.
However, the optimum lift-off thrust is an optimization, and is not necessarily the highest thrust. If you compare two vehicles, without knowing a lot more details, you can't tell which one is better based only on the thrust.
New Shepard is named after the first American to reach space on a suborbital flight, and has reached space on suborbital flights. New Glenn is named after the first American to reach orbit, and is intended to achieve orbital flights. Sounds logical.
It's "losers" not "lusers". Internet dictionaries are free.
You mean, like the Hacker's Dictionary? "Luser" is in there. Even with that spelling.
"Luser" is ancient late-70s/early 80s computer jargon, an insulting word for the computer users, a portmanteau of loser and user. (Not acknowledged in the jargon files, but it originally stems from an anti-drug ad from the late '70s that got played ad nauseum as a public-service announcement on the radio, with the refrain "users are losers and losers are users.")
the belief "it doesn't matter when they restrict our freedoms because we only care about it when the government restricts freedoms" is a poor argument.
Actually, that is a little interesting-- does the GPS on the watch work on its own, or does it only work if you carry the iPhone with you in bluetooth range?
Apple's first attempt at the smart watch failed because it was grossly over-priced compared to the competition. I love my Pebble time, but would never have bought it for >$150
I don't know-- if I wanted that sort of function, a few hundred dollars doesn't seem to be too much to pay-- spending some money on something I'd be wearing pretty much 24/7 seems a good use of funds.
My problem is that I don't see why I'd want one in the first place.
An article about Sweden, with one(!) example from Germany where a false local news story was picked up in russian newspapers. I'm sure if I google for a few minutes I can find similar examples between the US and Germany, or the UK, or France, or China or any other country that has a mild interest in Europe.
Correct; you could google it yourself, instead of asking me to.
What we most urgently need to do is to strengthen the integrity of the voting process, find and fix the flaws and backdoors in machines, trash the un-secureable machines, establish better watchdog protocols, and most of all, make sure that all votes have a verifiable paper trail.
Yeah, but we're not going to do any of that. Asking for us to do the things you list here is like saying "we need to build some generation ships and send them to Proxima Centauri with in the next 5 years." Sounds nice, but it's completely unrealistic.
And your reply is like saying "if we can't make security perfect, we shouldn't have any security at all."
Even if we can't make voting security perfect, we can, and should, make it better. There are a lot of obvious places to start.
Frankly, whilst it's easy to dismiss based on an already high distrust in the US for the establishment I don't think this can rationally be dismissed out of hand as mere deflection. It's in the US national spirit to distrust authority, it was the basis of creation of your country and it's enshrined somewhat in your constitution - I get it, but what you can't do is let that national distrust of your own authority blind you to the threats caused by authorities from elsewhere.
Distrust of the establishment is both America's strength and also our weakness. The Russians are trying to use it against us to sow discord and divisiveness. Of course they are.
What we most urgently need to do is to strengthen the integrity of the voting process, find and fix the flaws and backdoors in machines, trash the un-secureable machines, establish better watchdog protocols, and most of all, make sure that all votes have a verifiable paper trail.
A Russian disinformation campaign has already been in full swing in Germany for over a year. Russia has identified Germany as the key player in European politics and foreign policy and Russian internet trolls are flooding the comment sections of German news sites with pro-Russian propaganda while trying to sow distrust in German institutions, the government and mainstream German media.
If it's a reactionless thruster, it's can be made into a perpetual motion machine of the first type. If you design it right, you can get more energy out than you put in. That's infinite efficiency. Or better than infinite efficiency. Any thruster that violates conservation of momentum also violates conservation of energy.
People who follow the Em Drive usually use a metric of thrust per kilowatt of electric power. Much better; and by this measure, efficiency is definitely not infinite.
People who follow the Em Drive don't typically understand conservation of momentum or conservation of energy. Don't bother using it to fly a rocket, use it to run a generator. Run the generator fast enough, and your one kilowatt of input power will product two kilowatts of output power. Use the first to keep it running, and you get one kilowatt is free power: efficiency, infinite.
Absolutely nobody actually involved in any of the experiments has made any such claim. Stop spreading FUD. The claim is that when power is applied, a propulsive force is measured. I see no reason to believe that deeper observation and understanding won't find the equal and opposite reaction.
If a deeper observation "finds the equal and opposite reaction", then this is not a reactionless drive, and it is utterly and completely uninteresting.
The only thing that makes it interesting is their claim that there is not a reaction.
So every single successful reproduction is due to bad science, even from NASA...
There aren't any "successful reproductions." Their work has not confirmed any of the previous results-- they have seen different things-- and other people haven't confirmed their results, at least, not to date.
So far, every new test has failed to reproduce the results of the previous tests.
If it works as advertised,...it produces a force with no reaction mass.
OK, I'm not a physicist and it's been a long time since my physics classes, but I don't see why mass is important at all. Mass and energy are interchangeable by E=mc^2. Electric motors produce motion without losing any mass,
Well, to product thrust, they have to push on something.
so I don't really see why it's impossible for there to be some way of producing thrust in a vacuum using only energy. Just because all our prior methods of producing thrust in space depend on Newton's 3rd law doesn't mean that it has to be that way. While there may be no mass escaping from this device, it absolutely is consuming energy. Where does that go? We already know we can produce thrust with lasers, which are pure energy; we've even talked about making micro-miniature space probes and sending them to Alpha Centauri with a big laser, and the whole principle of solar sails rests on thrust provided by pure energy.
If it released energy out one side, that counts as reaction mass. They would get thrust according to Einstein's relation: momentum = E/c But, as claimed, the device produces thrust by just bounding energy around inside a cavity-- they claim that it is not simply the photon force.
How does the energy efficiency of this drive compare to a normal rocket?
If it works as advertised, it violates the law of conservation of energy, so its energy efficiency can be infinite.
(it produces a force with no reaction mass. Since energy is 1/2 mV^2, power is force times velocity, and thus the change in energy (per unit time) is proportional to velocity. So, if it runs at a given power level to produce a given thrust level, you can get more energy out than you put in simply be starting out in motion.)
Could this allow interstellar travel, by humans, within a normal human lifespan? What kind of reletavistic effects happen at high speed? I would assume thrust would drop as you approach C.
Well, if it violates the theory of relativity, anything could happen, I guess. Right now the thrust level quoted is micronewtons, so it would take millions of years to get up to the speed of light. But if the machine works, even at all, all bets on physics are off.
Correction factors are used for systematic errors.
Correct. And if you read the link, that's exactly what the NOAA corrections were: they corrected for known systematic errors, such as the change from fluid-in-glass thermometers to electronically-measured thermistors.
The measurement errors are random errors.
Random errors can be reduced by taking many measurements (which NOAA also does). The random error decreases as the square root of the number of measurements.
First time I heard that adjusting data to fit sought for conclusions is science.
You just asserted, without evidence, that the data was adjusted "to fit sought-for conclusions."
Again, it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" argument by the deniers. If the data isn't adjusted to correct for known instrument drift, the deniers shout "the data needs to be corrected," and if it is, the deniers shout "the data was adjusted." All data is analyzed. If you don't understand that, about all I can say is that you've never done real experimental science. If you don't correct for errors, the data is wrong. The question is: was the data analysis right? not: was the data analyzed?
In fact it is only people who really 'suck at science', who would do anything of the sort. Questioning such practices is opposite of "arrogance"; It is a sign humbleness to look afresh at unvarnished evidence that universe throw at us to arrive at conclusions through scientific method.
Questioning is good. Asserting that the data was analyzed to fit a "preconceived conclusions" however, is not questioning-- you've already come to your conclusion without even looking at the data analysis. Is the data analysis wrong? You haven't shown any analysis supporting that conclusion.
> I challenge you to find any scientific study that uses raw, unfiltered data.
Im a mycologist and when doing spore measurements we measure the length and width or many spores. Then average the length and average the width. Providing largest measurements, smallest measurements, and average. We don't "adjust" our actual measurements to make sure the spore size meets the expected size.
Possibly you should, since other mycologists do make corrections. Here are some corrections factors noted by Smith et al: "Sources of Variability in the Measurement of Fungal Spore Yields": http://aem.asm.org/content/54/...
"Quantification of the sources of experimental error in spore production measurements provided a basis for recommendations concerning the necessary degree of replication"
"to ensure that these precise counts are also accurate, checks must be made for interference from nonspore particles in the same size range as spores and for the clumping of spores. The degree of clumping that we encountered necessitated a correction factor that was much larger than that expected from the coincidental passage of conidia through the aperture, which should have been less than 2% if the conidia were all separate. Also, our correction factor was only approximate and probably varied with culture age, as did the mean weight per spore. "
see also Chapels: "Spore size revisited: Analysis of spore populations using an automated particle sizer" http://www.zobodat.at/pdf/Sydo...
If you looked at the page you linked, you'd see that the heat-island effect you reference is 0.1F (0.056 C). The article says that this July was 0.55 degrees Celsius higher than the July average for 1981-2010, so that's ten times more than the entire heat-island correction between 1900 to 2000. And it was is one-fifth of a degree Celsius higher than previous July temperature records-- which still five times larger than the entire heat island change between 1900 and 2000.
Note that all data is always "adjusted" (in your term)-- this is how data analysis is done. It is how science is done. The question is whether the data is analyzed in a way that is transparent. The fact that you can point to the discussion of exactly how the data is analyzed is a strong point in favor of the data analysis. Here's a clue: you should be worried when the scientists don't explain how the data is analyzed.
This is, of course, a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" argument by the deniers-- if the temperature wasn't corrected for these errors, the deniers were shouting how the measured temperatures aren't reliable because they needed to be corrected for all these effects.
Venus is close to, but not exactly in, an orbital resonance with Earth, but no, I'm not talking about orbital resonance (nor was that what the original poster was talking about.) Venus is -- very possibly by coincidence-- in a rotational lock with Earth.
... but now we're in this era where "leftist" is unanimously used as an insult and...
"leftist" should be a unanimous insult considering how...
If the left started supporting scientific progress once again,,,,
Sigh. Science is not be "left" or "right." The science is the science. Facts shouldn't be adapted to your ideologies; your ideologies should deal with whatever the facts are, not work at denying them.
The facts don't 'support' a left or right ideology: they just are what they are.
Wow you crammed a ton of incorrect information into a single post. Are you trolling or just too stupid to look things up?
The same question could be asked of you. You just "corrected" two fact that were not incorrect.
On Earth it appears that the oceans put enough water into the crust as to make plate tectonics possible (the water lubricates fault lines. If Venus ever had plate tectonics, it probably stopped when the water evaporated.
This is not known. Hydration is driven into rocks by subduction, and water content does decrease the viscosity of magma. So it is a plausible, although unproven, hypothesis that water is needed for plate tectonics.
And then there is the fact that Venus is tide-locked between the Sun and Earth (always has the save face toward Earth when the two planets are closest together)
Not only is Venus not tide-locked to earth, it doesn't even rotate in the same direction as earth.
Nevertheless, Venus does has the same face toward Earth when the two planets are closest together. This is not likely to be due to tidal effects, but the quoted statement that Venus always has the same face toward Earth when the two planets are closest together is correct. Unexpected, but correct.
Since you clearly have no idea what you are talking about I suggest you cease doing that until you learn considerably more than you are demonstrating.
and, likewise, you might do research before correcting facts that aren't actually incorrect.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, so the rocket will be bigger, with less thrust? That doesn't sound like an improvement to me.
The relevant criterion is not thrust, but thrust to weight ratio. If they're using a lighter weight, higher specific impulse fuel, methane, since most of the take-off mass is fuel, they may be lighter. So the same thrust to weight ratio may be achieved with lower total thrust.
Or do they just mean taller (there are diagrams in the article), but it will somehow manage to have lower mass and so get a better thrust to weight ratio?
Exactly: thrust to weight is more important than just thrust.
However, the optimum lift-off thrust is an optimization, and is not necessarily the highest thrust. If you compare two vehicles, without knowing a lot more details, you can't tell which one is better based only on the thrust.
New Shepard is named after the first American to reach space on a suborbital flight, and has reached space on suborbital flights.
New Glenn is named after the first American to reach orbit, and is intended to achieve orbital flights.
Sounds logical.
It's "losers" not "lusers". Internet dictionaries are free.
You mean, like the Hacker's Dictionary? "Luser" is in there. Even with that spelling.
"Luser" is ancient late-70s/early 80s computer jargon, an insulting word for the computer users, a portmanteau of loser and user. (Not acknowledged in the jargon files, but it originally stems from an anti-drug ad from the late '70s that got played ad nauseum as a public-service announcement on the radio, with the refrain "users are losers and losers are users.")
the belief "it doesn't matter when they restrict our freedoms because we only care about it when the government restricts freedoms" is a poor argument.
So, to coin a phrase: "All freedoms matter."
Actually, that is a little interesting-- does the GPS on the watch work on its own, or does it only work if you carry the iPhone with you in bluetooth range?
Apple's first attempt at the smart watch failed because it was grossly over-priced compared to the competition. I love my Pebble time, but would never have bought it for >$150
I don't know-- if I wanted that sort of function, a few hundred dollars doesn't seem to be too much to pay-- spending some money on something I'd be wearing pretty much 24/7 seems a good use of funds.
My problem is that I don't see why I'd want one in the first place.
But it offers bokeh capability!
What more would anybody want? You can get your bokeh right from the phone!
Correct; you could google it yourself, instead of asking me to.
And I would find one misleading news story. How is that evidence of a large-scale, government-controlled desinformation campaign?.
About 258,000 results (0.49 seconds), according to Google over here. Doesn't Google work over there?
Here's the first page, with sources ranging from The New York Times to The Guardian to Der Spiegel::
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org...
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
http://khpg.org/en/index.php?i...
http://www.dw.com/en/german-me...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08...
http://uaposition.com/kharkiv-...
You made a claim, you have flimsy evidence to back it up.
Since you're unwilling to look at any of the 258,000 results, I doubt that anything I can post is likely to affect your position.
An article about Sweden, with one(!) example from Germany where a false local news story was picked up in russian newspapers. I'm sure if I google for a few minutes I can find similar examples between the US and Germany, or the UK, or France, or China or any other country that has a mild interest in Europe.
Correct; you could google it yourself, instead of asking me to.
What we most urgently need to do is to strengthen the integrity of the voting process, find and fix the flaws and backdoors in machines, trash the un-secureable machines, establish better watchdog protocols, and most of all, make sure that all votes have a verifiable paper trail.
Yeah, but we're not going to do any of that. Asking for us to do the things you list here is like saying "we need to build some generation ships and send them to Proxima Centauri with in the next 5 years." Sounds nice, but it's completely unrealistic.
And your reply is like saying "if we can't make security perfect, we shouldn't have any security at all."
Even if we can't make voting security perfect, we can, and should, make it better. There are a lot of obvious places to start.
Frankly, whilst it's easy to dismiss based on an already high distrust in the US for the establishment I don't think this can rationally be dismissed out of hand as mere deflection. It's in the US national spirit to distrust authority, it was the basis of creation of your country and it's enshrined somewhat in your constitution - I get it, but what you can't do is let that national distrust of your own authority blind you to the threats caused by authorities from elsewhere.
Distrust of the establishment is both America's strength and also our weakness. The Russians are trying to use it against us to sow discord and divisiveness. Of course they are.
What we most urgently need to do is to strengthen the integrity of the voting process, find and fix the flaws and backdoors in machines, trash the un-secureable machines, establish better watchdog protocols, and most of all, make sure that all votes have a verifiable paper trail.
We should do this anyway.
A Russian disinformation campaign has already been in full swing in Germany for over a year.
Funny. I live in Germany. Show me this information war, because I don't see any sign of it.
OK. Look here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/world/europe/russia-sweden-disinformation.htm
A Russian disinformation campaign has already been in full swing in Germany for over a year. Russia has identified Germany as the key player in European politics and foreign policy and Russian internet trolls are flooding the comment sections of German news sites with pro-Russian propaganda while trying to sow distrust in German institutions, the government and mainstream German media.
That's well documented.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/the-kremlins-troll-army/375932/
or here http://euromaidanpress.com/201...
or here http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05...
If it's a reactionless thruster, it's can be made into a perpetual motion machine of the first type. If you design it right, you can get more energy out than you put in. That's infinite efficiency. Or better than infinite efficiency.
Any thruster that violates conservation of momentum also violates conservation of energy.
People who follow the Em Drive usually use a metric of thrust per kilowatt of electric power. Much better; and by this measure, efficiency is definitely not infinite.
People who follow the Em Drive don't typically understand conservation of momentum or conservation of energy. Don't bother using it to fly a rocket, use it to run a generator. Run the generator fast enough, and your one kilowatt of input power will product two kilowatts of output power. Use the first to keep it running, and you get one kilowatt is free power: efficiency, infinite.
Absolutely nobody actually involved in any of the experiments has made any such claim. Stop spreading FUD. The claim is that when power is applied, a propulsive force is measured. I see no reason to believe that deeper observation and understanding won't find the equal and opposite reaction.
If a deeper observation "finds the equal and opposite reaction", then this is not a reactionless drive, and it is utterly and completely uninteresting.
The only thing that makes it interesting is their claim that there is not a reaction.
So every single successful reproduction is due to bad science, even from NASA...
There aren't any "successful reproductions." Their work has not confirmed any of the previous results-- they have seen different things-- and other people haven't confirmed their results, at least, not to date.
So far, every new test has failed to reproduce the results of the previous tests.
If it works as advertised,...it produces a force with no reaction mass.
OK, I'm not a physicist and it's been a long time since my physics classes, but I don't see why mass is important at all. Mass and energy are interchangeable by E=mc^2. Electric motors produce motion without losing any mass,
Well, to product thrust, they have to push on something.
so I don't really see why it's impossible for there to be some way of producing thrust in a vacuum using only energy. Just because all our prior methods of producing thrust in space depend on Newton's 3rd law doesn't mean that it has to be that way. While there may be no mass escaping from this device, it absolutely is consuming energy. Where does that go? We already know we can produce thrust with lasers, which are pure energy; we've even talked about making micro-miniature space probes and sending them to Alpha Centauri with a big laser, and the whole principle of solar sails rests on thrust provided by pure energy.
If it released energy out one side, that counts as reaction mass. They would get thrust according to Einstein's relation: momentum = E/c
But, as claimed, the device produces thrust by just bounding energy around inside a cavity-- they claim that it is not simply the photon force.
How does the energy efficiency of this drive compare to a normal rocket?
If it works as advertised, it violates the law of conservation of energy, so its energy efficiency can be infinite.
(it produces a force with no reaction mass. Since energy is 1/2 mV^2, power is force times velocity, and thus the change in energy (per unit time) is proportional to velocity. So, if it runs at a given power level to produce a given thrust level, you can get more energy out than you put in simply be starting out in motion.)
Could this allow interstellar travel, by humans, within a normal human lifespan? What kind of reletavistic effects happen at high speed? I would assume thrust would drop as you approach C.
Well, if it violates the theory of relativity, anything could happen, I guess. Right now the thrust level quoted is micronewtons, so it would take millions of years to get up to the speed of light. But if the machine works, even at all, all bets on physics are off.
Doesn't take much irony. I've taken experimental data.
Correction factors are used for systematic errors.
Correct. And if you read the link, that's exactly what the NOAA corrections were: they corrected for known systematic errors, such as the change from fluid-in-glass thermometers to electronically-measured thermistors.
The measurement errors are random errors.
Random errors can be reduced by taking many measurements (which NOAA also does). The random error decreases as the square root of the number of measurements.
First time I heard that adjusting data to fit sought for conclusions is science.
You just asserted, without evidence, that the data was adjusted "to fit sought-for conclusions."
Again, it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" argument by the deniers. If the data isn't adjusted to correct for known instrument drift, the deniers shout "the data needs to be corrected," and if it is, the deniers shout "the data was adjusted." All data is analyzed. If you don't understand that, about all I can say is that you've never done real experimental science. If you don't correct for errors, the data is wrong. The question is: was the data analysis right? not: was the data analyzed?
In fact it is only people who really 'suck at science', who would do anything of the sort. Questioning such practices is opposite of "arrogance"; It is a sign humbleness to look afresh at unvarnished evidence that universe throw at us to arrive at conclusions through scientific method.
Questioning is good. Asserting that the data was analyzed to fit a "preconceived conclusions" however, is not questioning-- you've already come to your conclusion without even looking at the data analysis. Is the data analysis wrong? You haven't shown any analysis supporting that conclusion.
> I challenge you to find any scientific study that uses raw, unfiltered data.
Im a mycologist and when doing spore measurements we measure the length and width or many spores. Then average the length and average the width. Providing largest measurements, smallest measurements, and average. We don't "adjust" our actual measurements to make sure the spore size meets the expected size.
Possibly you should, since other mycologists do make corrections. Here are some corrections factors noted by Smith et al: "Sources of Variability in the Measurement of Fungal Spore Yields": http://aem.asm.org/content/54/...
see also Chapels: "Spore size revisited: Analysis of spore populations using an automated particle sizer" http://www.zobodat.at/pdf/Sydo...
Was this before or after adjusting the data?
If you looked at the page you linked, you'd see that the heat-island effect you reference is 0.1F (0.056 C). The article says that this July was 0.55 degrees Celsius higher than the July average for 1981-2010, so that's ten times more than the entire heat-island correction between 1900 to 2000. And it was is one-fifth of a degree Celsius higher than previous July temperature records-- which still five times larger than the entire heat island change between 1900 and 2000.
Note that all data is always "adjusted" (in your term)-- this is how data analysis is done. It is how science is done. The question is whether the data is analyzed in a way that is transparent. The fact that you can point to the discussion of exactly how the data is analyzed is a strong point in favor of the data analysis. Here's a clue: you should be worried when the scientists don't explain how the data is analyzed.
This is, of course, a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" argument by the deniers-- if the temperature wasn't corrected for these errors, the deniers were shouting how the measured temperatures aren't reliable because they needed to be corrected for all these effects.
Venus is close to, but not exactly in, an orbital resonance with Earth, but no, I'm not talking about orbital resonance (nor was that what the original poster was talking about.)
Venus is -- very possibly by coincidence-- in a rotational lock with Earth.
If you're looking for a Wikipedia reference, try this one instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
... but now we're in this era where "leftist" is unanimously used as an insult and ...
"leftist" should be a unanimous insult considering how...
If the left started supporting scientific progress once again, ,,,
Sigh. Science is not be "left" or "right." The science is the science. Facts shouldn't be adapted to your ideologies; your ideologies should deal with whatever the facts are, not work at denying them.
The facts don't 'support' a left or right ideology: they just are what they are.
Wow you crammed a ton of incorrect information into a single post. Are you trolling or just too stupid to look things up?
The same question could be asked of you. You just "corrected" two fact that were not incorrect.
On Earth it appears that the oceans put enough water into the crust as to make plate tectonics possible (the water lubricates fault lines. If Venus ever had plate tectonics, it probably stopped when the water evaporated.
Water is not and never has been a requirement for a planet to have plate tectonics.
This is not known. Hydration is driven into rocks by subduction, and water content does decrease the viscosity of magma. So it is a plausible, although unproven, hypothesis that water is needed for plate tectonics.
And then there is the fact that Venus is tide-locked between the Sun and Earth (always has the save face toward Earth when the two planets are closest together)
Not only is Venus not tide-locked to earth, it doesn't even rotate in the same direction as earth.
Nevertheless, Venus does has the same face toward Earth when the two planets are closest together. This is not likely to be due to tidal effects, but the quoted statement that Venus always has the same face toward Earth when the two planets are closest together is correct. Unexpected, but correct.
Since you clearly have no idea what you are talking about I suggest you cease doing that until you learn considerably more than you are demonstrating.
and, likewise, you might do research before correcting facts that aren't actually incorrect.