But they managed to meet those [pollution] goals by using gasoline. Diesel makers had a much harder time satisfying pollution regulations.
Yeah, 1960s-era diesel engines really were dirty. You didn't ever want to stand downwind of one, unless you didn't mind being covered in soot.
These turbine-engine cars would have been great for rural people capable of making their own fuel.
No, as it turns out, in the real world, people who make their own fuel really really want a vehicle with high mileage, not low.
Counting for time, effort, equipment, and such, fuel you make yourself in small batches is actually vastly more expensive than fuel that gets made in industrial quantities in refineries.
@vlm maybe ur shitty car. My #corvette hwy mpg = 2 x city mpg
Well, that's because a Corvette has a low drag coefficient, so there's not a huge aerodynamic penalty for highway speeds, but has an absurdly oversized engine, which is lousy at low speeds. So it's the city mpg that's shitty.
What would be a great car for MPG would be a 'Vette body with a lightweight frame, and a 20 horsepower engine with a ten-speed transmission. That would rock! (Well, in terms of MPG it would. Not gonna be great for 0 to 60).
Reading throught the comments, I see it was described as being quite quiet, so apparently noise was not the issue. 11.5 miles per gallon, though, that's not a good number, even by standards of the time. The article starts out "Turbines were the bucking broncos of the engine world: loud and hard to control, gulping vast quantities of fuel and air.". Looks like they solved the noise problem (except for that "turbine whine" described), but the "gulping vast quantities of fuel" wasn't so easily solvable.
This is the key sentence: "The primary culprit was OPEC's 1973 oil embargo and the panicked response of federal regulators, who set unrealistic standards to limit fuel consumption and air pollution."
Unrealistic? What exactly does that word mean? All of the car manufacturers managed to meet the fuel efficiency goals: all of them. And, it turns out, it wasn't even really very hard. The pollution goals as well. And its hardly true that "the Environmental Protection Agency required tailpipe emissions to be cleaner than the ambient air." Maybe the "ambient air" in polluted cities. I remember the air in those days-- I'm quite happy to have today's pollution standards, thank you. Twice as many cars in America as there were in 1963, but the air is much cleaner.
In any case, though, this is just the Wall Street Journal's sliding in a political opinion in the guise of a fact. The cars were made in 1962, and the article states "Most of the cars—46 of them—were destroyed in 1967." I don't think you can blame the OPEC Oil embargo of 1973 for the failure of the design six years previously. Perhaps the WSJ should have paid attention to this sentence: "Yes, turbine engines were expensive to mass produce."
People hate to admit it, but this really is a mission that is best done with nuclear explosives.
Not to "blow it up," no-- but to produce an impulse to nudge it onto a slightly altered course, a surface nuclear blast is about the best technique you can think of. Nukes have extremely high energy to mass ratio. And, despite what Hollywood would have you think, you don't need to have Bruce Willis dig a hole in the asteroid to plant it.
Some analysis is needed to make sure that you nudge the asteroid, not fragment it. Nevertheless, it's hard to beat the efficacy of a nuclear explosion.
What's particularly astonishing, though, is that Mr. Cuccinelli's legal case against Mr. Mann seems unrelated to any of the controversial research the attorney general spends so much time attacking. Mr. Cuccinelli is supposedly investigating whether Mr. Mann committed fraud when the scientist applied for and received a state-funded research grant -- to study what Mr. Mann describes as "the interaction of the land, atmosphere and vegetation in the African savannah." The topic "has nothing to do with climate change or paleoclimate," Mann says. The attorney general appears to argue that, since Mr. Mann listed his controversial papers on his curriculum vitae when he and two other scientists applied for the savannah research grant, he may have committed some kind of fraud.
The attorney general's logic is so tenuous as to leave only one plausible explanation: that he is on a fishing expedition designed to intimidate and suppress honest research and the free exchange of ideas upon which science and academia both depend -- all because he does not like what science says about climate change. "
We haven't terraformed Mars because the exact way to get it done has not been predicted, yet.
You should grab any hard-sci fi anthology on terraforming and/or Mars and look into it....
While I don't want to dissuade you from reading science fiction about terraforming, I will point out that science fiction really is not the best way to learn about real science. We science fiction writers make stuff up in order to make a good plot. In particular, SF writers often make up magical technology, in order to make terraforming happen at a rate faster than geological time scales.
Best way to learn about terraforming would be to read Martyn Fogg's book Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments (SAE Press). A few years old now, but still the best top level summary ever....and, as for science fiction, try Gardner Dozois' anthology Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming. (I only say this because I have a story in it.)
This is a very clever use of an iPhone. I would love to see this one used as a yearlong high school science project. The ROI on materials is incredible here.
Since there is a nonzero probability of losing the payload, the Return On Investment on a project flying an I-phone is definitely negative.
I know of several cases that were investigated. The statement, however, was about military personnel losing their jobs. In the case you discuss, was anybody ejected from the military?
An important thing to note is that the administration lied about the background checks. They stated that invasive personal background checks were required by a presidential directive called "HSPD-12". This, as it turns out, is incorrect.
The full text of HSPD-12 is available on the web. In fact, what it says is that the government identification cards should be difficult to forge. As a part of that, it said that the government should verify the identification of its employees before issuing identification cards. That's it. The only background check required it "check their ID."
...My friend is a patient and kind man. He offered to refuse to testify at a trial for attempted murder if the subject gave up his claim and went back to work.
That would be "obstruction of justice," Your friend is not only stupid, he should be in jail.
Wow, I'm not sure, but this may be the first time any of my comments has been moderated "Troll". (I believe I may have gotten "flamebait" before).
Offering to refuse to testify at a trial for attempted murder because you made a deal with the defendent is obstruction of justice, i'm afraid, whether or not the guy is the attempted victim. he guy should be in jail.
In the 80s, a good friend of mine retired from police work and went into PI work for insurance companies...
...the subject put down the axe, walkd over and picked up his rifle, and looked to be sighting a deer. My friend is still taping, and he zooms in for a moment, sighting right down the scope. He can see the subject's eye in the scope. The first round hit 2 feet to his right.
Wow. Stupidest friend EVAH!
...My friend is a patient and kind man. He offered to refuse to testify at a trial for attempted murder if the subject gave up his claim and went back to work.
That would be "obstruction of justice," Your friend is not only stupid, he should be in jail.
Good calculation, except the proposed 9% tax is only on the amount over $200,000 per year, $400,000 if he files jointly.
No, the 9% tax is on the amount over $500,000 per year. It's only 5% on the amount over $200,000.
Oops, you're right-- and that cut-off is doubled to one million per year, assuming he's filing jointly. So let's see, 5% on the amount over $400K, plus 9% on the amount over one million... So, he'd have to be making 1.778 million per year in order for his $100K investment in fighting the tax to pay off in a year. Obviously, he's doing it purely out of altrusim... oh, wait, I forgot; he made two hundred million dollars in dividends on his Microsoft stock last year.
No it wouldn't. A 9% tax on ~$1.1 million would break even in one year. I have a sneaking suspicion those guys make more than $1.1 million in a year, and they will probably do so for more than one year.
Good calculation, except the proposed 9% tax is only on the amount over $200,000 per year, $400,000 if he files jointly. So the correct calculation is that a 9% tax on $1.511 Million earned per year would break even in a year.
This guy Ballmer has a salary of only $1,276,627 per year-- give him a break, he's almost working for free, by the standards of American CEO salary. It will take him a year and a quarter before his hundred grand investment in fighting the tax pays back its cost.
Of course, he owns ten billion dollars worth of Microsoft stock... I guess he won't go into the poorhouse too soon.
Living in a state that does have an income tax, I have to say that I don't have much sympathy for the billionaires who are crying over the fact that they might get taxed on the part of their income over $200,000 per year. Aw, isn't that just too bad.
Exactly. Take a look at that curve: "blue" is the part to the left of the peak, where it drops off abruptly below about 475 nm, on the far left side of the curve. Power is the integral of the curve-- what fraction of the power in the spectrum is to the left of 475 nm?
There is more power in blue getting through out atmosphere than any other wavelength.
Integrate.
(It will also help if you plot the spectrum in terms of photons per square meter per unit energy, versus energy (in eV), since, like the eye, solar cells are quantum devices, and this is actually the response function. In fact, if you plot the spectrum this way, instead of the more common W/m2/nm, you can then calculate the optimum bandgap of a solar cell directly.)
To ignore it is the dumbest thing one could do.
Solar cells don't "ignore" blue. As a general thing, solar cells respond to all photons more energetic than their bandgap cut-off. So, they don't "ignore" the blue at all; they respond to it fine. (They do tend to "ignore" the UV, since it is absorbed too shallowly to efficiently convert. But the glass covers will cut off UV anyway, and there's not a lot of UV below the atmosphere even if it were used.)
Optimum single-layer solar cell bandgap, for terrestrial spectrum below the atmosphere, is about 1.4-1.5 eV. (look it up.) That corresponds to a wavelength of about 825-890 nm.
Fewer photons only means you need less surface area to acquire the same amount of energy.
Slashdot Mirror
every vendor i've worked with takes great effort in determining what the users want....
I have to say that at no time has Microsoft ever tried to determine what I want.
But they managed to meet those [pollution] goals by using gasoline. Diesel makers had a much harder time satisfying pollution regulations.
Yeah, 1960s-era diesel engines really were dirty. You didn't ever want to stand downwind of one, unless you didn't mind being covered in soot.
These turbine-engine cars would have been great for rural people capable of making their own fuel.
No, as it turns out, in the real world, people who make their own fuel really really want a vehicle with high mileage, not low.
Counting for time, effort, equipment, and such, fuel you make yourself in small batches is actually vastly more expensive than fuel that gets made in industrial quantities in refineries.
@vlm maybe ur shitty car. My #corvette hwy mpg = 2 x city mpg
Well, that's because a Corvette has a low drag coefficient, so there's not a huge aerodynamic penalty for highway speeds, but has an absurdly oversized engine, which is lousy at low speeds. So it's the city mpg that's shitty.
What would be a great car for MPG would be a 'Vette body with a lightweight frame, and a 20 horsepower engine with a ten-speed transmission. That would rock! (Well, in terms of MPG it would. Not gonna be great for 0 to 60).
Reading throught the comments, I see it was described as being quite quiet, so apparently noise was not the issue. 11.5 miles per gallon, though, that's not a good number, even by standards of the time. The article starts out "Turbines were the bucking broncos of the engine world: loud and hard to control, gulping vast quantities of fuel and air.". Looks like they solved the noise problem (except for that "turbine whine" described), but the "gulping vast quantities of fuel" wasn't so easily solvable.
This is the key sentence: "The primary culprit was OPEC's 1973 oil embargo and the panicked response of federal regulators, who set unrealistic standards to limit fuel consumption and air pollution."
Unrealistic? What exactly does that word mean? All of the car manufacturers managed to meet the fuel efficiency goals: all of them. And, it turns out, it wasn't even really very hard. The pollution goals as well. And its hardly true that "the Environmental Protection Agency required tailpipe emissions to be cleaner than the ambient air." Maybe the "ambient air" in polluted cities. I remember the air in those days-- I'm quite happy to have today's pollution standards, thank you. Twice as many cars in America as there were in 1963, but the air is much cleaner.
In any case, though, this is just the Wall Street Journal's sliding in a political opinion in the guise of a fact. The cars were made in 1962, and the article states "Most of the cars—46 of them—were destroyed in 1967." I don't think you can blame the OPEC Oil embargo of 1973 for the failure of the design six years previously. Perhaps the WSJ should have paid attention to this sentence: "Yes, turbine engines were expensive to mass produce."
The word, I think, is "turbine" (or even "jet turbine,")-- not "Jet powered".
How noisy were they?
People hate to admit it, but this really is a mission that is best done with nuclear explosives.
Not to "blow it up," no-- but to produce an impulse to nudge it onto a slightly altered course, a surface nuclear blast is about the best technique you can think of. Nukes have extremely high energy to mass ratio. And, despite what Hollywood would have you think, you don't need to have Bruce Willis dig a hole in the asteroid to plant it.
Some analysis is needed to make sure that you nudge the asteroid, not fragment it. Nevertheless, it's hard to beat the efficacy of a nuclear explosion.
Washington Post: "Ken Cuccinelli seems determined to embarrass Virginia":
What's particularly astonishing, though, is that Mr. Cuccinelli's legal case against Mr. Mann seems unrelated to any of the controversial research the attorney general spends so much time attacking. Mr. Cuccinelli is supposedly investigating whether Mr. Mann committed fraud when the scientist applied for and received a state-funded research grant -- to study what Mr. Mann describes as "the interaction of the land, atmosphere and vegetation in the African savannah." The topic "has nothing to do with climate change or paleoclimate," Mann says. The attorney general appears to argue that, since Mr. Mann listed his controversial papers on his curriculum vitae when he and two other scientists applied for the savannah research grant, he may have committed some kind of fraud.
The attorney general's logic is so tenuous as to leave only one plausible explanation: that he is on a fishing expedition designed to intimidate and suppress honest research and the free exchange of ideas upon which science and academia both depend -- all because he does not like what science says about climate change. "
already a few times. No?
That's correct: no.
We haven't terraformed Mars because the exact way to get it done has not been predicted, yet.
You should grab any hard-sci fi anthology on terraforming and/or Mars and look into it. ...
While I don't want to dissuade you from reading science fiction about terraforming, I will point out that science fiction really is not the best way to learn about real science. We science fiction writers make stuff up in order to make a good plot. In particular, SF writers often make up magical technology, in order to make terraforming happen at a rate faster than geological time scales.
Best way to learn about terraforming would be to read Martyn Fogg's book Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments (SAE Press). A few years old now, but still the best top level summary ever. ...and, as for science fiction, try Gardner Dozois' anthology Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming . (I only say this because I have a story in it.)
I hear the deep fried dynamite is especially good.
Don't believe it-- it will give you a headache.
This is a very clever use of an iPhone. I would love to see this one used as a yearlong high school science project. The ROI on materials is incredible here.
Since there is a nonzero probability of losing the payload, the Return On Investment on a project flying an I-phone is definitely negative.
No Myers Motors Duo?,
I know of several cases that were investigated. The statement, however, was about military personnel losing their jobs. In the case you discuss, was anybody ejected from the military?
An important thing to note is that the administration lied about the background checks. They stated that invasive personal background checks were required by a presidential directive called "HSPD-12". This, as it turns out, is incorrect.
The full text of HSPD-12 is available on the web. In fact, what it says is that the government identification cards should be difficult to forge. As a part of that, it said that the government should verify the identification of its employees before issuing identification cards. That's it. The only background check required it "check their ID."
Don't forget that adultery (and homosexuality) are against the rules for all active military personnel. They can lose their jobs over it.
But military personnel don't, in fact, lose their jobs over adultery.
They could-- it's still on the books-- but that hasn't really been enforced for years, except when it's the commanding officer's wife.
(*or husband, I suppose, but I haven't heard of that case happening).
...My friend is a patient and kind man. He offered to refuse to testify at a trial for attempted murder if the subject gave up his claim and went back to work.
That would be "obstruction of justice," Your friend is not only stupid, he should be in jail.
Wow, I'm not sure, but this may be the first time any of my comments has been moderated "Troll". (I believe I may have gotten "flamebait" before).
Offering to refuse to testify at a trial for attempted murder because you made a deal with the defendent is obstruction of justice, i'm afraid, whether or not the guy is the attempted victim. he guy should be in jail.
Look up Ed Schultz, Tom Hartman, Randi Rhodes, Stephanie Miller, Ron Reagan.
Ronald Reagan's a liberal? Cool.
In the 80s, a good friend of mine retired from police work and went into PI work for insurance companies...
Wow. Stupidest friend EVAH!
...My friend is a patient and kind man. He offered to refuse to testify at a trial for attempted murder if the subject gave up his claim and went back to work.
That would be "obstruction of justice," Your friend is not only stupid, he should be in jail.
Good calculation, except the proposed 9% tax is only on the amount over $200,000 per year, $400,000 if he files jointly.
No, the 9% tax is on the amount over $500,000 per year. It's only 5% on the amount over $200,000.
Oops, you're right-- and that cut-off is doubled to one million per year, assuming he's filing jointly. So let's see, 5% on the amount over $400K, plus 9% on the amount over one million... So, he'd have to be making 1.778 million per year in order for his $100K investment in fighting the tax to pay off in a year. Obviously, he's doing it purely out of altrusim... oh, wait, I forgot; he made two hundred million dollars in dividends on his Microsoft stock last year.
It would be cheaper for them to just pay the tax.
No it wouldn't. A 9% tax on ~$1.1 million would break even in one year. I have a sneaking suspicion those guys make more than $1.1 million in a year, and they will probably do so for more than one year.
Good calculation, except the proposed 9% tax is only on the amount over $200,000 per year, $400,000 if he files jointly. So the correct calculation is that a 9% tax on $1.511 Million earned per year would break even in a year.
This guy Ballmer has a salary of only $1,276,627 per year-- give him a break, he's almost working for free, by the standards of American CEO salary. It will take him a year and a quarter before his hundred grand investment in fighting the tax pays back its cost.
Of course, he owns ten billion dollars worth of Microsoft stock... I guess he won't go into the poorhouse too soon.
Living in a state that does have an income tax, I have to say that I don't have much sympathy for the billionaires who are crying over the fact that they might get taxed on the part of their income over $200,000 per year. Aw, isn't that just too bad.
So, what we're saying is that Google is being regularly shot down by yahoos?
...There's gotta be a witty quip to be made there somewhere...
3 eV? You're joking.
Direct link to the original article (instead of the yahoo rebroadcast): http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-us-odd-zombie-class,0,2027516.story
"Blue does have higher energy per photon, but the spectrum has far fewer photons there."
Just because it has far fewer photons does not mean it's not a much more viable source. In fact:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SunLightSpectrum-280-2500nm.PNG
Exactly. Take a look at that curve: "blue" is the part to the left of the peak, where it drops off abruptly below about 475 nm, on the far left side of the curve. Power is the integral of the curve-- what fraction of the power in the spectrum is to the left of 475 nm?
There is more power in blue getting through out atmosphere than any other wavelength.
Integrate.
(It will also help if you plot the spectrum in terms of photons per square meter per unit energy, versus energy (in eV), since, like the eye, solar cells are quantum devices, and this is actually the response function. In fact, if you plot the spectrum this way, instead of the more common W/m2/nm, you can then calculate the optimum bandgap of a solar cell directly.)
To ignore it is the dumbest thing one could do.
Solar cells don't "ignore" blue. As a general thing, solar cells respond to all photons more energetic than their bandgap cut-off. So, they don't "ignore" the blue at all; they respond to it fine. (They do tend to "ignore" the UV, since it is absorbed too shallowly to efficiently convert. But the glass covers will cut off UV anyway, and there's not a lot of UV below the atmosphere even if it were used.)
Optimum single-layer solar cell bandgap, for terrestrial spectrum below the atmosphere, is about 1.4-1.5 eV. (look it up.) That corresponds to a wavelength of about 825-890 nm.
Fewer photons only means you need less surface area to acquire the same amount of energy.
Integrate.