I'm a Canadian who works in the US, and I'm retired military to boot, so I've been following this election with some interest. Here's my take.
The Democatic Party nominated THE single least electable canditate they could have laid their hands on.
You could have had General Clark - impeccable personal integrity, proven leadership ability (he ran NATO fer crissakes!) super handle on foreign policy - can you imagine Bush debating him? And no Senate voting record to dog him around.
You could have had Howard Dean, and gone for the young rockstar angle. New and hip vs old-skool and scary. Look at Illinois for how effective that can be.
You could have even had Al Sharpton and gone for pure shock and entertainment value.
Instead, you wound up with the Democratic version of your opponent - old-skool, big money, old boys club, pork-barrel, professional weasel-featured politician.
You made an election that _should_ have been a simple decision between good and evil into a choice between the lesser of two evils. What the HELL kind of strategy is "our guy may suck, but he sucks less"?
The American public is CRYING out for simple, strong, effective, and HONEST leadership. You actually sucker a decent man into the job, and you'll carry the country in a landslide. What the HELL were you thinking when you let Kerry get nominated?
My advice to you and your fellow confused and befuddled Democrats is to get active in the internal politics of your own party, and to work like mad to make sure the next guy you present to the electorate actually stands a chance at being elected.
If you want to believe that some sort of Supreme Being kicked off the Big Bang (or whatever cosmic event triggered the evolution of the Universe as we know it) either with or without the foreknowledge that Humanity would one day arise from the muck, and He has been sitting back benignly observing the unfolding of His Plan... well... I don't share that belief, but it really doesn't matter, because that particular manifestation of Deity would have no interaction with the operation of the world.
The existance of such a God would be unprovable and irrelevant - ie, if He chose to go pay attention to some other universe for a while and left us unguarded, the lack of divine attention changes nothing in the daily course of events.
But as soon as you introduce a Scripture in which supposedly resides ultimate authority, now you've got a problem, because any time Scripture self-contradicts or is contradicted by the scientific (natural) world, you throw the ultimate authority of that Scripture into doubt.
This problem is made worse by th efact that the Bible is (mostly) presented as historical narrative - meaning that the stuff in there supposedly actually happened. This means it becomes subject to historical and scientific analysis - one "book" intrudes into the province of another.
If the Bible was a list of God's Laws and Commandments along the line of the text of the Ten Commandments, then there'd little room for debate (unless in one place God says "Do X" and in another spot, "Do Not Do X") So when God says "Thou shalt not murder", via Moses, there's no place for Science to get involved.
But when the Bible claims the world is 6000 years old, or that all life save the contents of an Ark with a known volume was wiped out via a flood that "covered all the lands of the earth" (for example) now you have wandered into areas where Science can definitvely prove that those statements lack truth. And if one portion of Scripture is to be found in error, how much of the rest of it is?
The root problem here is that the two camps are separated by a fundimental, unbridgable divide:
- For a Scientist, Truth is discovered/uncovered by a rigourous process of interacting with the world. Theories are postulated, they are tested with experimentation, and the Big Picture slowly resolves itself.
- For a Diest, Truth was dictated to humanity by some sort of Supreme Being, where it is recorded in some sort of Holy Work. That work contains the literal Word of God, which is de facto Truth. Anything that gainsays this Word is by definition, Untruth, and the gainsayers themselves are Diabolically motivated and must be opposed.
So with one camp, we have a tradition of skepticism, of viewing the picture of Truth as incomplete, and requiring rigourous human effort to complete the bigger picture.
With the other, there is a tradition of "faith" (a nicer way of saying "believe what we tell you or face the consequences"), of viewing the Picture of Truth as complete and well-defined, and requiring Humanity to fall in line and stop believing the Lies of the Devil.
There is absolutely no intellectual common ground here. This goes beyond just simple human stubborness (an attribute common to both the Scientist and the Deist). A Scientist, used to having to "prove" his position (a core feature of the scientific method) cannot "prove" anything to someone who refutes the use of logic in discovering truth in the first place!
The bottom line here is that Scientists cannot convert Deists via force of argument - you might as well argue with a plant.
Actually, there's some pretty sound physics behind those wheelie bars on FWD drag cars.
The amount of rearward weight transfer is a function of CG height, wheelbase and longnitudnal acceleration amount - that's it.
The resultant pitch ANGLE that the sprung mass adopts as a result of the weight transfer is a function of weight transfer, pitch stiffness (driven primarily by spring rate) and jacking geometry (anti-squat) and you'd be suprised how many people confuse pitch angle with weight transfer.... anyway...
The amount of grip produced by a tire is a function of the normal load on it - more load, more grip - and when accelerating, weight is transfered rearward, reducing the grip on the fronts and increasing the grip on the rears. If you are a FWD, this is bad news, as the harder you accelerate, the more weight you lose from your drive weheels, the less grip you get.
You can change springs all day, and you can't change this fact. You CAN change the pitch angle, but not the weight transfer amount.
But by attaching wheelie bars, when the bars contact the ground the wheelbase lengthens - and a longer wheelbase actually REDUCES the amount of rearward weight transfer. Tada! Magic!
Where some cars were getting into trouble though is that the wheelie bars tend to be pretty close together, which give a narrow track width - the analogue of wheelbase, but in roll. The front tires, being low pressure slicks, are very soft in roll as well. So if something happened to induce a roll movement (like a steering input) there was very little force to oppose the roll, and the car would suddenly hook in a random direction. VERY directionally unstable. Much more exciting for the driver than is probably healthy.
Disclaimer: I'm a race car engineer. I make race cars go faster. It's my day job.
If we work under the assumption that the wing in question actually produces signifigant downforce (not a trivial assumption, given the typical aluminum extrusion pretending to be a wing from most rice shops) the download generated by the wing will be borne by all 4 tires.
Depending on a number of parameters, the rears may carry a larger share of that download, but the net effect will be increased normal force on the front tires, which in turn increases grip.
Now if our boy was smart enough to use a real airfoil on his wing, he was probably smart enough to fit a front airdam and splitter, which means he probably has way more FRONT downforce than rear, and is probably using the wing to help balance out a high-speed oversteer condition. On production-based cars, building front downforce is much easier than building rear downforce.
1) It is possible to vote out Mr. Kennedy, should enough of the electorate decide to do so. If you have an election where Kennedy loses, he's gone.
That he seems to be very popular with the voters must mean he's doing a good job in their eyes, which you may or may not like very much, but does not mean de facto that the voting process is broken and is in need of violent revolution to fix.
If you think that the democratic process in the US is wounded, then vote for candidates who will fix it - or become a candidate yourself, and get yourself elected.
As far as democracy being equal to mob rule, your Founders would agree - that's why your govenment IS NOT a democracy. It is a deomcratic republic.
2) I don't think that even Ben Franklin could have forseen the ENORMOUS increases in firepower availible to an individual person today. In fact, I think that if you dropped a machine gun in front of ol' Ben, at first he'd be facinated by the mechanism, and then very shortly he'd be utterly horrified at what it represented - and on several levels.
They is the phrase "a well-regulated Militia". In Franklin's day, it was assumed that, should it come to fighting off a new tyrrany, that men would have to be organized into a fighting organization (with all the trappings; officers, NCOs and the like) because there was no physical way to do otherwise. Fighting battles meant masses of men in ranks. THAT, in turn, means you need a lot of like-minded people to get together, organize, and train. Battalions of musket-wielding infantry do not materialize out of the aether.
But with machine guns (and other modern weapons) that's no longer true. It is now possible for small groups of men to wreak utter havoc should they be so inclined. It is no longer a valid assumption that to do battle, one needs mass.
The risk posed to the general public by a standard battlefield arm has gone up from negligible in Ben's day, to enormous in ours. I find it very hard to believe that your founding fathers forsaw that.
As far as the owners of Yankee revolutionary war cannon - the true owners were either British (captured guns) or French (donated guns) and after the Revolutionary War, production of native cannon was the province of the government.
1) While the concept of a democratic republic was hardly new, it took the Americans to get it right. The Netherlands, notionally a republic in the 1700s, in practice was an alliance of monarchies in all but name, the office of statholder being for life.
2) a) While rifles were in use (the English, for example, employed rifle companies) their slow rate of fire meant that they could not go toe-to-toe with the faster rate of fire of the smoothbores. Greater accuracy and slightly longer range don't count for much when the enemy is getting off 5 volleys for every two of yours.
The role of rifles was to act as skirmishers - set up in advance of the main body, engage the enemy (using the extra range and accuracy of the rifle) until the enemy got close enough to pose a threat, and then withdraw and let the massed smoothbores take over.
The analogy to modern weaponry is the sniper. Snipers don't fight in the main line of battle. That doesn't mean they are ineffective (quite the contrary) but they are specialists and rare.
b) Shotguns have even shorter ranges than the smoothbore muskets, and have to be close to produce any serious damage. They work well in VERY close quarters (urban, tunnels, shipboard) but have no place on an open battlefield.
The one exception - canister rounds for cannon. But canister uses musket balls as "shot" and cannot be fired by individuals. Which leads us to:
c) Cannon. Yes, cannon are an integral and important part of the gunpowder battlefield. But cannon are not _arms_ - they are _artillery_ and artillery has always been the private domain of governments and (especially) royalty. Ever see a British cannon? You can tell when it was cast by looking at whose arms are cast into it.
I can find no evidence of privately-owned cannon anytime in American history.
It seems appropriate here, in a thread about/by Neal S., maaestro of the historical novel, to examine some of the history around the Second Amendment and how well it applies to the modern day.
(Quick point - after reading the Baroque Cycle, go re-read Crypto. Many suprises abound!)
OK then. At the time the Second Amendment was penned:
1) There was no such thing as a representative democratic republic. Governments were monarchies or oligarchies of one sort or another, and the common people had little or no say in the mechanisms of government. Government was something that _happened to you_ rather something that you _participated in_
As such, the only real way to deal with a tyrrany was violent revolution.
In the modern day, there exist elections. If you want to get rid of the government of the day, you are given regular opportunities to do so - in the US, one is coming up very quickly, and I rather expect to see one government removed and another installed in its place.
The requirement for violent revolution is pretty much past - one might even claim that the success of the American Revolution and the democratic republic it established is the _direct cause_ of violent revolution being made obsolete as a tool of political science.
2) The standard infantry arm of the day was the smoothbore musket - smoothbore, because it allowed for greater rates of fire than a rifled musket (the rifling makes it tough to ram the ball home)
Smoothbore muskets project great force to a reasonable distance, but the individual accuracy of the weapon suffers quite a bit compared to a rifle. Attempting to hit an individual with an aimed shot at any distance other than point-blank is wasted effort.
In order to make smoothbores work, you need to collect a bunch of them into a group and fire en masse. While individuals cannot hit individuals, a mass firing crates a wall of fast-moving lead roughly the width of the frontage of the firing unit and roughly 10 feet high. Anything occupying this space has a very high probability of being struck. Increase the rate of fire (as you can with a smoothbore) and the probability of being struck rises proportionately.
Yes, you can get good results using irregulars/skirmishers with rifles, who gain accuracy (and with it, effectiveness) at the cost of a slower rate of fire. That slow ROF though, means that your rifled skirmishers are unable to hold ground in the face of a massed formation of smoothbores. They are harrassing troops, not war-winners.
That the American Revolutionary Army, being composed primarily of skirmishers, defeated the British regular army, speaks more to the amount of strategic value placed on America by the British than to the superiority of the rifle over the massed formation. Note that in the American Civil War 100 years later (ish) it was massed formation vs massed formation.
The point of all that? If you're going to overthrow a government by strength of arms, and assuming that government actually intends to stick it out and fight (as one would assume any home-grown American government would) you're going to need a lot of muskets concentrated in one place. A LOT of muskets.
The flip side? A lone nutcase with a musket can't cause all that much damage.
Now then, fast forward to today. A modern assault rifle is accurate out to 600m (as in, at 600m I assume that a single aimed shot will hit its target) The rate of fire of a good shot is about 2 aimed shots per 3 seconds. A typical magazine holds 30 rounds, and the normal battle load is between 5 to as many as 12 magazines.
A single modern rifleman - or anybody equipped with a modern battle rifle - carries more firepower than a typical 18th century regiment.
Give that rifleman a modern LMG (a belt-fed, portable weapon like the Minimi) And you double his firepower yet again.
Want to trade ROF for distance? Modern sniper rifles have ranges measured in KILOMETRES (a Canadian sniper scored a kill at 2400m in Afgan
Every car I've owned for the last 10 years at least has been a manual, and my daily commute is ~ 30 miles each way in DETROIT.
My current commuter is also the tow vehicle for the race car - a Dodge Ram 2500 with the Cummins Turbo Diesel, a 6-speed manual, and 4.10 rear gears - meaning I shift three times to cross an intersection. It also has the Mother of All Heavy Clutches.
My clutch leg is just fine. In fact, the exercise does me good.
AND I get better gas milage AND the truck is lighter and less complex - meaning "more reliable".
AND it's a whole lot more fun to drive. There's little else you can do solo in a vehicle that matches the staisfaction of a perfectly rev-matched downshift.
With the majority of economy cars, the clutch effort is so light that you can activate the clutch with your ankle, not your whole leg. My wife's Neon (also a manual) has a clutch that requires about the same effort as the gas pedal.
Manuals are just FAR superior to automatics in every way possible.
The first is that there's typically not a lot of mechanical advantage and/or pad area in the e-brake. Accordingly, they can't produce a whole lot of braking force. Most cars are quite capable of driving through their e-brake.
The second is that 99% of e-brakes brake the rear wheels only. This results in 100% rear brake bias, which is very unstable. Assuming you somehow managed to lock (or very nearly lock) the rears wheels with the e-brake, if there is ANY cornering force on the car at all, it will go around.
You can try this in a snowy, *empty* parking lot. Drive in a big circle at slow speed, then pop the e-brake. Whee!
If you have a stuck throttle, the last thing you need to worry about is directional stability.
Most every car made since the mid eighties has an electronic rev limiter on it. Attempt to rev past this limit, and the ECU will selectively cut fuel/spark to keep the engine speed under control.
It's very accurate; +/- 20 RPM typically.
Sticking an engine with a stuck throttle into neutral will result in it banging off the limiter and making a lot of noise, but it won't overrev.
You can, however, MECHANICALLY overrev a manual transmission by downshifting into a lower gear while the wheels are turning at a faster speed than is otherwise proper for that gear. The wheels and the engine are mechanically connected, and downshifting to too low a gear will spin the motor up - no rev limiter can protect against this.
In certain BMW M3s, the transmission mounts get a little sloppy, and engine torque reaction under hard acceleration can rotate the transmission enough to move the shift gates. It's possible then to try and go 2->3 or 3->4, and hit 1 or 2 instead. This is invariably fatal to the motor. You will bring your pistons home in a bucket.
Depending on the contstruction of any given automatic transmission, it may or may not allow you to take it out of gear and go into neutral under throttle. If you are silly enough to be driving an automatic, this could be a problem - but anybody who'd buy an auto trans where a manual was availible would steal sheep - so you probably had it coming.;)
I'm not an American either, but I worked alongside (and "fought" against them) many times - and there is unquestionably a "national character" to the US (and other nations') Army.
Keep in mind that I'm generalizing here.
The American Army is huge, has a lot of really good and impressive kit (not necessarily the best stuff, but the average iquality level is pretty good and they have a LOT of it) and undertrained.
By "undertrained" I mean that the average American soldier is very heavily specialized and is often explicitly forbidden to branch out. Each soldier has a specific job and a specific purpose.
Whereas in smaller armies like the Canadian or the Isreali, soldiers are expected to do much more and are encouraged (within certain limits) to improvise.
A quick example: let's say you are a commander, on top of a ridgeline, advancing with an armoured brigade towards an objective a few km away. On the next ridge up is a wooded area you think might be harbouring an enemy infantry position.
If you are Canadian, you will send forward your very highly trained and impressively skilled brigade recce troop. They will sneak forward, scout out the woods, and report back on what they found without the enemy (if he is there or not) ever noticing that they were there. If the enemy is in the woods, you will then quickly plan out a brilliant and innovative quick attack that takes the enemy completely by suprise (and in the flank too) eliminating the enemy with the minimum amount of own losses and ammo expenditure.
If you are American, you call up two more brigades out of your division, and the three of you pound the wooded area flat with direct fire, while divisional artillery fires in indirect support, and the Air Force adds a squadron of B52s. Once the fire mission stops, you will send a patrol of junior privates up to the matchstick pile to see if they can find any fragments of the enemy. If they don't, there was a company in there; if they do, it was at least a division.
Which technique is more effective? *shrug*
What does wind up happening though is that any time you fight the Yanks size-on-size, they Yanks typically get the short end of the stick. The counter-argument is that the Yanks NEVER fight size-on-size, so it doesn't matter.
I will say this though - any time we schooled some Yanks, they were typically VERY enthusiastic about how we did it, and wanted to learn. They weren't stupid or unprofessional, just undertrained and overmanaged.
There's used to be an annual NATO tank competition called the "Canadian Army Trophy".
When the M1 first came out, it caused quite a stir, as it was far faster and quieter than had been expected. But the thermal sights also gave the Yanks a huge advantage on the pop-up target range.
It seems that the motors used to raise/lower the popups were hot enough to show up on the thermal sights, and the thermal load from raising a target made the motor glow hotter before the target was fully raised and visible. Accordingly, the M1 kicked ass on the popup range, and overall swept the competition.
The following year, the Canadians (who hosted the competition) placed a large number of thermal dummy motors out on the popup range - and the M1 placed miserably. They also adjusted their own tactics to deal with the M1's strengths, and soundly defeated the Yanks.
The lesson here is that while a technological advantage can indeed give you the upper hand, such an advantage is fleeting. Properly motivated and creative soldiers can devise ways to defeat your tech anvantage and can and will hand you your ass.
I went to a really good, Canadian, public high school with a lot of really good teachers and a pretty good "advanced" track for gifted students - honours Math, and honours English.
And as your typical Slashdot gifted geek-type, kicked ass even at the higher levels from the advanced track.
(I also took a lot of shop electives, which really paid off in a BIG way later in life... but that's a digression)
Because school was so easy, I got to having a pretty high opinion of myself - which is a nice way of saying I was an arrogant, know it all shithead.
I applied for, and was accepted to, a Canadian Military College (le College Militaire Royale de St Jean), which was unique in Canada in accepting students in advance of their high school graduation - that's right, I joined the Army and went to MilCol at 17, when all my peers were still in Grade 12.
I did this for a couple of reasons. It got me "free" post-secondary education. It made me special. It filled a recruiting officer's quota. A couple of others I'll gloss over.
None of these are good reasons for going, and I was completely and utterly ignorant of both the reasons why these institutions exist and of the ethos of the professional military officer. I could not have possibly been more unprepared for what I was getting into.
Did I mention that CMR was a bilingual institution, and that the operating language of everything outside of classes switched from French to English and vice versa every week? Or that I didn't speak French at all?
So anyway, I dropped into this for all the wrong reasons, and I got the mother of all wake-up kicks to the head. Not only did my private life totally change around, but I was now surrounded by people every bit as smart as me - and more than a few a damn sight smarter. No more special me. All of a sudden, I gotta STUDY. I gotta WORK.
I spent a large portion of the next 4 years in and out of a good bit of disciplinary and academic trouble.
And it was the best goddamned thing that ever happened to me, and I'm thouroughly glad of it.
Suprised?
What that place did - although it took a while - was cure me of of being an asshole. It taught me humility, leadership, and established a personal ethos that I still live by today. (Verite, Devoir, Valliance)
I am a much *much* better person than I was before I went there. The pre-CMR me was a total shithead. Post CMR... less so,;)
And along the way, I got a decent education and learned to speak French, plus a military career, and the best friends I've ever made.
The media, and especially Hollywood, makes military institutions look like brainwashing hellholes. Nothing could be further from the truth. If I had my life to do over again, I'd go back in a heartbeat - except this time I'd skip all the subversive rebel bullshit and learn what they were trying to teach me.
I just got a new laptop for racecar support - brand spankin' new HP zd7280us with all the bells and whistles. P4-3.2. Monster 17" widescreen. DVD burner. USB ports up the yinyang. No floppy, no serial port.
The machine it replaces is a Panasonic Toughbook CF-25, a military-spec indestructable deal. P150. No CD burner, no USB - but a floppy drive.
99% of the software moved from one machine to the other was actually installed from scratch, so the lack of connectivity from one to the other wasn't all that big a deal. DATA, on the other hand, is proving to be a pain in the ass. It'd be SO simple to just zip it and dump it to floppy.....
Where I have a real bitch though is the deletion of the serial port from modern laptops. I found a USB-serial converter at RadioShack, but that's the last thing I wanted to do - further complicate my cabling. Grr. Don't the laptop people realize that the most popular way to connect widgets to computers (save printers) is via the serial port?
My phone uses a serial port. The ECU and datalogger on the race car uses the serial port. The scales, pyrometer, shock dyno, and every other measuring equipment I have all use the serial port. And in a pinch, a null-modem cable and ZMODEM makes for a decent file-transfer solution.
Well, your truck cornering poorly is more than just suspension design....
Pity the poor OEM suspension engineer, who must build a design that is all things to all people.
In the specific case of a truck, he has to deal with loads ranging from an empty truck low on fuel, to a fully-loaded, fully-fueled truck towing 15,000 lbs of trailer, and carrying 6 burly passengers. A weight distribution that can vary from 70% front to 60% rear. Surfaces ranging from freshly paved Interstate, to some cow track out in the back 40.
The live-axle, leaf spring rear is strong, simple, and cheap - at the cost of being heavy. One could design an independant rear that could handle the same (or higher) loads and varience in operating condidtions (in fact, such a suspension esists on the Hummer - and even on the old VW Thing) but all that really adds is a lot more cost and complexity.
But when you have more control over the operating conditions of the vehicle - like I do on the racetrack - you can eliminate a lot of the compromises. The race car corners at well over 1 G without the aid of aero, and yet the ride is perfectly smooth.
Actually, when the rules permit, current cars often can and do give the driver control over certain chassis parameters.
Most race cars have a cockpit brake bias adjuster and at least one sway bar adjuster - have since the 1960s.
F1 adds different diff mappings as a minimum.
Some drivers do change settings on the fly. Shumacher is infamous for adjusting brake bias and diff mapping per corner (when there is an advantage to it) Watch any of his in-car camera shots, and you'll see him twiddling his steering wheel controls all the time.
I've heard his in-car radio in practice. One of the things he does is play with these controls to see what they need to be set at for each individual corner.
Which leads nicely into active suspension.
Active suspension, properly programmed, is flat-out awesome. It lets you have your cake and eat it too.
But what most people don't know was that the active suspension of a few years ago wasn't parametric - ie, it didn't read sensors, work out an algorithm, and then do the appropriate thing. Instead, it was at least 50% geographic - "at this spot on the track, (usually expressed as a running distance per lap) do this"
This was partially due to the inability of the onboard computers of the time to hold enough dats and run fast enough, but it was also due to the inability to come up with a single general-purpose program that would always do the right thing given the proper inputs.
We've had actuators capable of doing active suspension for quite some time. We've had computers capable of driving parametric-active for less time, but still a little while. What we're lacking is the control logic to make it work.
Wheeled vehicle dynamics is HARD. Rocket dynamics and atmospheric flight dynmamics is much easier.
In some ways, it gets easier on a race car, where you know a lot more about the tires, surface, and track - but it's still pretty goddamned hard. I don't think we're at the point where we could do general-purpose parametric active suspension.
Too bad. It'd be useful to have 3 knobs "Corner entrace balance" "midphase balance" and "exit balance" and be able to dial in all 3 to my liking. It'd save a lot of time on the shock dyno at least.;)
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Lemme guess - creative differences?
DGOK then Mr Reviewer, how about cluing us in on what a Pivot Table is and why we might care?
DG
Hey, very good of you to sign up Roger. Extra cool points for you.
BTW, you've got mail.
DG
I'm a Canadian who works in the US, and I'm retired military to boot, so I've been following this election with some interest. Here's my take.
The Democatic Party nominated THE single least electable canditate they could have laid their hands on.
You could have had General Clark - impeccable personal integrity, proven leadership ability (he ran NATO fer crissakes!) super handle on foreign policy - can you imagine Bush debating him? And no Senate voting record to dog him around.
You could have had Howard Dean, and gone for the young rockstar angle. New and hip vs old-skool and scary. Look at Illinois for how effective that can be.
You could have even had Al Sharpton and gone for pure shock and entertainment value.
Instead, you wound up with the Democratic version of your opponent - old-skool, big money, old boys club, pork-barrel, professional weasel-featured politician.
You made an election that _should_ have been a simple decision between good and evil into a choice between the lesser of two evils. What the HELL kind of strategy is "our guy may suck, but he sucks less"?
The American public is CRYING out for simple, strong, effective, and HONEST leadership. You actually sucker a decent man into the job, and you'll carry the country in a landslide. What the HELL were you thinking when you let Kerry get nominated?
My advice to you and your fellow confused and befuddled Democrats is to get active in the internal politics of your own party, and to work like mad to make sure the next guy you present to the electorate actually stands a chance at being elected.
DG
If the trends of the last few years keep up, I expect the Canadian Dollar to over-value the American sometime in the next 4 years.
Dammit.
DG
Ayoi, here I go breaking my own rule...
If you want to believe that some sort of Supreme Being kicked off the Big Bang (or whatever cosmic event triggered the evolution of the Universe as we know it) either with or without the foreknowledge that Humanity would one day arise from the muck, and He has been sitting back benignly observing the unfolding of His Plan... well... I don't share that belief, but it really doesn't matter, because that particular manifestation of Deity would have no interaction with the operation of the world.
The existance of such a God would be unprovable and irrelevant - ie, if He chose to go pay attention to some other universe for a while and left us unguarded, the lack of divine attention changes nothing in the daily course of events.
But as soon as you introduce a Scripture in which supposedly resides ultimate authority, now you've got a problem, because any time Scripture self-contradicts or is contradicted by the scientific (natural) world, you throw the ultimate authority of that Scripture into doubt.
This problem is made worse by th efact that the Bible is (mostly) presented as historical narrative - meaning that the stuff in there supposedly actually happened. This means it becomes subject to historical and scientific analysis - one "book" intrudes into the province of another.
If the Bible was a list of God's Laws and Commandments along the line of the text of the Ten Commandments, then there'd little room for debate (unless in one place God says "Do X" and in another spot, "Do Not Do X") So when God says "Thou shalt not murder", via Moses, there's no place for Science to get involved.
But when the Bible claims the world is 6000 years old, or that all life save the contents of an Ark with a known volume was wiped out via a flood that "covered all the lands of the earth" (for example) now you have wandered into areas where Science can definitvely prove that those statements lack truth. And if one portion of Scripture is to be found in error, how much of the rest of it is?
DG
The root problem here is that the two camps are separated by a fundimental, unbridgable divide:
- For a Scientist, Truth is discovered/uncovered by a rigourous process of interacting with the world. Theories are postulated, they are tested with experimentation, and the Big Picture slowly resolves itself.
- For a Diest, Truth was dictated to humanity by some sort of Supreme Being, where it is recorded in some sort of Holy Work. That work contains the literal Word of God, which is de facto Truth. Anything that gainsays this Word is by definition, Untruth, and the gainsayers themselves are Diabolically motivated and must be opposed.
So with one camp, we have a tradition of skepticism, of viewing the picture of Truth as incomplete, and requiring rigourous human effort to complete the bigger picture.
With the other, there is a tradition of "faith" (a nicer way of saying "believe what we tell you or face the consequences"), of viewing the Picture of Truth as complete and well-defined, and requiring Humanity to fall in line and stop believing the Lies of the Devil.
There is absolutely no intellectual common ground here. This goes beyond just simple human stubborness (an attribute common to both the Scientist and the Deist). A Scientist, used to having to "prove" his position (a core feature of the scientific method) cannot "prove" anything to someone who refutes the use of logic in discovering truth in the first place!
The bottom line here is that Scientists cannot convert Deists via force of argument - you might as well argue with a plant.
DG
Actually, there's some pretty sound physics behind those wheelie bars on FWD drag cars.
The amount of rearward weight transfer is a function of CG height, wheelbase and longnitudnal acceleration amount - that's it.
The resultant pitch ANGLE that the sprung mass adopts as a result of the weight transfer is a function of weight transfer, pitch stiffness (driven primarily by spring rate) and jacking geometry (anti-squat) and you'd be suprised how many people confuse pitch angle with weight transfer.... anyway...
The amount of grip produced by a tire is a function of the normal load on it - more load, more grip - and when accelerating, weight is transfered rearward, reducing the grip on the fronts and increasing the grip on the rears. If you are a FWD, this is bad news, as the harder you accelerate, the more weight you lose from your drive weheels, the less grip you get.
You can change springs all day, and you can't change this fact. You CAN change the pitch angle, but not the weight transfer amount.
But by attaching wheelie bars, when the bars contact the ground the wheelbase lengthens - and a longer wheelbase actually REDUCES the amount of rearward weight transfer. Tada! Magic!
Where some cars were getting into trouble though is that the wheelie bars tend to be pretty close together, which give a narrow track width - the analogue of wheelbase, but in roll. The front tires, being low pressure slicks, are very soft in roll as well. So if something happened to induce a roll movement (like a steering input) there was very little force to oppose the roll, and the car would suddenly hook in a random direction. VERY directionally unstable. Much more exciting for the driver than is probably healthy.
DG
A little bit of self promotion here. :)
Amongst my other racing-oriented duties, I maintain a web page full of links to books on Amazon that will teach you a LOT about race car engineeering
Yes, I make a little kickback from Amazon on this, but that helps to offset the bandwidth costs. It's main purpose is to educate.
See The Street Modified Engineering Resources page for more info. I've also got a smattering of techical articles on the team home page at Far North Racing
Have fun!
DGDisclaimer: I'm a race car engineer. I make race cars go faster. It's my day job.
If we work under the assumption that the wing in question actually produces signifigant downforce (not a trivial assumption, given the typical aluminum extrusion pretending to be a wing from most rice shops) the download generated by the wing will be borne by all 4 tires.
Depending on a number of parameters, the rears may carry a larger share of that download, but the net effect will be increased normal force on the front tires, which in turn increases grip.
Now if our boy was smart enough to use a real airfoil on his wing, he was probably smart enough to fit a front airdam and splitter, which means he probably has way more FRONT downforce than rear, and is probably using the wing to help balance out a high-speed oversteer condition. On production-based cars, building front downforce is much easier than building rear downforce.
DG
Does it play "The Blue Danube"?
DG
1) It is possible to vote out Mr. Kennedy, should enough of the electorate decide to do so. If you have an election where Kennedy loses, he's gone.
That he seems to be very popular with the voters must mean he's doing a good job in their eyes, which you may or may not like very much, but does not mean de facto that the voting process is broken and is in need of violent revolution to fix.
If you think that the democratic process in the US is wounded, then vote for candidates who will fix it - or become a candidate yourself, and get yourself elected.
As far as democracy being equal to mob rule, your Founders would agree - that's why your govenment IS NOT a democracy. It is a deomcratic republic.
2) I don't think that even Ben Franklin could have forseen the ENORMOUS increases in firepower availible to an individual person today. In fact, I think that if you dropped a machine gun in front of ol' Ben, at first he'd be facinated by the mechanism, and then very shortly he'd be utterly horrified at what it represented - and on several levels.
They is the phrase "a well-regulated Militia". In Franklin's day, it was assumed that, should it come to fighting off a new tyrrany, that men would have to be organized into a fighting organization (with all the trappings; officers, NCOs and the like) because there was no physical way to do otherwise. Fighting battles meant masses of men in ranks. THAT, in turn, means you need a lot of like-minded people to get together, organize, and train. Battalions of musket-wielding infantry do not materialize out of the aether.
But with machine guns (and other modern weapons) that's no longer true. It is now possible for small groups of men to wreak utter havoc should they be so inclined. It is no longer a valid assumption that to do battle, one needs mass.
The risk posed to the general public by a standard battlefield arm has gone up from negligible in Ben's day, to enormous in ours. I find it very hard to believe that your founding fathers forsaw that.
As far as the owners of Yankee revolutionary war cannon - the true owners were either British (captured guns) or French (donated guns) and after the Revolutionary War, production of native cannon was the province of the government.
DG
1) While the concept of a democratic republic was hardly new, it took the Americans to get it right. The Netherlands, notionally a republic in the 1700s, in practice was an alliance of monarchies in all but name, the office of statholder being for life.
2) a) While rifles were in use (the English, for example, employed rifle companies) their slow rate of fire meant that they could not go toe-to-toe with the faster rate of fire of the smoothbores. Greater accuracy and slightly longer range don't count for much when the enemy is getting off 5 volleys for every two of yours.
The role of rifles was to act as skirmishers - set up in advance of the main body, engage the enemy (using the extra range and accuracy of the rifle) until the enemy got close enough to pose a threat, and then withdraw and let the massed smoothbores take over.
The analogy to modern weaponry is the sniper. Snipers don't fight in the main line of battle. That doesn't mean they are ineffective (quite the contrary) but they are specialists and rare.
b) Shotguns have even shorter ranges than the smoothbore muskets, and have to be close to produce any serious damage. They work well in VERY close quarters (urban, tunnels, shipboard) but have no place on an open battlefield.
The one exception - canister rounds for cannon. But canister uses musket balls as "shot" and cannot be fired by individuals. Which leads us to:
c) Cannon. Yes, cannon are an integral and important part of the gunpowder battlefield. But cannon are not _arms_ - they are _artillery_ and artillery has always been the private domain of governments and (especially) royalty. Ever see a British cannon? You can tell when it was cast by looking at whose arms are cast into it.
I can find no evidence of privately-owned cannon anytime in American history.
DG
The magic word there is "entrenched defense"
But you are correct that the US Civil War was a transitional war where a new technology superceded an earlier one and changed tactics accordingly.
Moving troops by rail, the metal cartridge, explosive artillery, and the development of early rapid-fire weapons _heavily_ forshadowed WW1.
DG
It seems appropriate here, in a thread about/by Neal S., maaestro of the historical novel, to examine some of the history around the Second Amendment and how well it applies to the modern day.
(Quick point - after reading the Baroque Cycle, go re-read Crypto. Many suprises abound!)
OK then. At the time the Second Amendment was penned:
1) There was no such thing as a representative democratic republic. Governments were monarchies or oligarchies of one sort or another, and the common people had little or no say in the mechanisms of government. Government was something that _happened to you_ rather something that you _participated in_
As such, the only real way to deal with a tyrrany was violent revolution.
In the modern day, there exist elections. If you want to get rid of the government of the day, you are given regular opportunities to do so - in the US, one is coming up very quickly, and I rather expect to see one government removed and another installed in its place.
The requirement for violent revolution is pretty much past - one might even claim that the success of the American Revolution and the democratic republic it established is the _direct cause_ of violent revolution being made obsolete as a tool of political science.
2) The standard infantry arm of the day was the smoothbore musket - smoothbore, because it allowed for greater rates of fire than a rifled musket (the rifling makes it tough to ram the ball home)
Smoothbore muskets project great force to a reasonable distance, but the individual accuracy of the weapon suffers quite a bit compared to a rifle. Attempting to hit an individual with an aimed shot at any distance other than point-blank is wasted effort.
In order to make smoothbores work, you need to collect a bunch of them into a group and fire en masse. While individuals cannot hit individuals, a mass firing crates a wall of fast-moving lead roughly the width of the frontage of the firing unit and roughly 10 feet high. Anything occupying this space has a very high probability of being struck. Increase the rate of fire (as you can with a smoothbore) and the probability of being struck rises proportionately.
Yes, you can get good results using irregulars/skirmishers with rifles, who gain accuracy (and with it, effectiveness) at the cost of a slower rate of fire. That slow ROF though, means that your rifled skirmishers are unable to hold ground in the face of a massed formation of smoothbores. They are harrassing troops, not war-winners.
That the American Revolutionary Army, being composed primarily of skirmishers, defeated the British regular army, speaks more to the amount of strategic value placed on America by the British than to the superiority of the rifle over the massed formation. Note that in the American Civil War 100 years later (ish) it was massed formation vs massed formation.
The point of all that? If you're going to overthrow a government by strength of arms, and assuming that government actually intends to stick it out and fight (as one would assume any home-grown American government would) you're going to need a lot of muskets concentrated in one place. A LOT of muskets.
The flip side? A lone nutcase with a musket can't cause all that much damage.
Now then, fast forward to today. A modern assault rifle is accurate out to 600m (as in, at 600m I assume that a single aimed shot will hit its target) The rate of fire of a good shot is about 2 aimed shots per 3 seconds. A typical magazine holds 30 rounds, and the normal battle load is between 5 to as many as 12 magazines.
A single modern rifleman - or anybody equipped with a modern battle rifle - carries more firepower than a typical 18th century regiment.
Give that rifleman a modern LMG (a belt-fed, portable weapon like the Minimi) And you double his firepower yet again.
Want to trade ROF for distance? Modern sniper rifles have ranges measured in KILOMETRES (a Canadian sniper scored a kill at 2400m in Afgan
It's called diesel.
DG
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Bullshit.
Every car I've owned for the last 10 years at least has been a manual, and my daily commute is ~ 30 miles each way in DETROIT.
My current commuter is also the tow vehicle for the race car - a Dodge Ram 2500 with the Cummins Turbo Diesel, a 6-speed manual, and 4.10 rear gears - meaning I shift three times to cross an intersection. It also has the Mother of All Heavy Clutches.
My clutch leg is just fine. In fact, the exercise does me good.
AND I get better gas milage AND the truck is lighter and less complex - meaning "more reliable".
AND it's a whole lot more fun to drive. There's little else you can do solo in a vehicle that matches the staisfaction of a perfectly rev-matched downshift.
With the majority of economy cars, the clutch effort is so light that you can activate the clutch with your ankle, not your whole leg. My wife's Neon (also a manual) has a clutch that requires about the same effort as the gas pedal.
Manuals are just FAR superior to automatics in every way possible.
DG
There's a couple of problems with the e-brake.
The first is that there's typically not a lot of mechanical advantage and/or pad area in the e-brake. Accordingly, they can't produce a whole lot of braking force. Most cars are quite capable of driving through their e-brake.
The second is that 99% of e-brakes brake the rear wheels only. This results in 100% rear brake bias, which is very unstable. Assuming you somehow managed to lock (or very nearly lock) the rears wheels with the e-brake, if there is ANY cornering force on the car at all, it will go around.
You can try this in a snowy, *empty* parking lot. Drive in a big circle at slow speed, then pop the e-brake. Whee!
If you have a stuck throttle, the last thing you need to worry about is directional stability.
DG
Most every car made since the mid eighties has an electronic rev limiter on it. Attempt to rev past this limit, and the ECU will selectively cut fuel/spark to keep the engine speed under control.
;)
It's very accurate; +/- 20 RPM typically.
Sticking an engine with a stuck throttle into neutral will result in it banging off the limiter and making a lot of noise, but it won't overrev.
You can, however, MECHANICALLY overrev a manual transmission by downshifting into a lower gear while the wheels are turning at a faster speed than is otherwise proper for that gear. The wheels and the engine are mechanically connected, and downshifting to too low a gear will spin the motor up - no rev limiter can protect against this.
In certain BMW M3s, the transmission mounts get a little sloppy, and engine torque reaction under hard acceleration can rotate the transmission enough to move the shift gates. It's possible then to try and go 2->3 or 3->4, and hit 1 or 2 instead. This is invariably fatal to the motor. You will bring your pistons home in a bucket.
Depending on the contstruction of any given automatic transmission, it may or may not allow you to take it out of gear and go into neutral under throttle. If you are silly enough to be driving an automatic, this could be a problem - but anybody who'd buy an auto trans where a manual was availible would steal sheep - so you probably had it coming.
DG
I'm not an American either, but I worked alongside (and "fought" against them) many times - and there is unquestionably a "national character" to the US (and other nations') Army.
Keep in mind that I'm generalizing here.
The American Army is huge, has a lot of really good and impressive kit (not necessarily the best stuff, but the average iquality level is pretty good and they have a LOT of it) and undertrained.
By "undertrained" I mean that the average American soldier is very heavily specialized and is often explicitly forbidden to branch out. Each soldier has a specific job and a specific purpose.
Whereas in smaller armies like the Canadian or the Isreali, soldiers are expected to do much more and are encouraged (within certain limits) to improvise.
A quick example: let's say you are a commander, on top of a ridgeline, advancing with an armoured brigade towards an objective a few km away. On the next ridge up is a wooded area you think might be harbouring an enemy infantry position.
If you are Canadian, you will send forward your very highly trained and impressively skilled brigade recce troop. They will sneak forward, scout out the woods, and report back on what they found without the enemy (if he is there or not) ever noticing that they were there. If the enemy is in the woods, you will then quickly plan out a brilliant and innovative quick attack that takes the enemy completely by suprise (and in the flank too) eliminating the enemy with the minimum amount of own losses and ammo expenditure.
If you are American, you call up two more brigades out of your division, and the three of you pound the wooded area flat with direct fire, while divisional artillery fires in indirect support, and the Air Force adds a squadron of B52s. Once the fire mission stops, you will send a patrol of junior privates up to the matchstick pile to see if they can find any fragments of the enemy. If they don't, there was a company in there; if they do, it was at least a division.
Which technique is more effective? *shrug*
What does wind up happening though is that any time you fight the Yanks size-on-size, they Yanks typically get the short end of the stick. The counter-argument is that the Yanks NEVER fight size-on-size, so it doesn't matter.
I will say this though - any time we schooled some Yanks, they were typically VERY enthusiastic about how we did it, and wanted to learn. They weren't stupid or unprofessional, just undertrained and overmanaged.
DG
I've got a good story 'bout this.
There's used to be an annual NATO tank competition called the "Canadian Army Trophy".
When the M1 first came out, it caused quite a stir, as it was far faster and quieter than had been expected. But the thermal sights also gave the Yanks a huge advantage on the pop-up target range.
It seems that the motors used to raise/lower the popups were hot enough to show up on the thermal sights, and the thermal load from raising a target made the motor glow hotter before the target was fully raised and visible. Accordingly, the M1 kicked ass on the popup range, and overall swept the competition.
The following year, the Canadians (who hosted the competition) placed a large number of thermal dummy motors out on the popup range - and the M1 placed miserably. They also adjusted their own tactics to deal with the M1's strengths, and soundly defeated the Yanks.
The lesson here is that while a technological advantage can indeed give you the upper hand, such an advantage is fleeting. Properly motivated and creative soldiers can devise ways to defeat your tech anvantage and can and will hand you your ass.
DG
I went to a really good, Canadian, public high school with a lot of really good teachers and a pretty good "advanced" track for gifted students - honours Math, and honours English.
;)
And as your typical Slashdot gifted geek-type, kicked ass even at the higher levels from the advanced track.
(I also took a lot of shop electives, which really paid off in a BIG way later in life... but that's a digression)
Because school was so easy, I got to having a pretty high opinion of myself - which is a nice way of saying I was an arrogant, know it all shithead.
I applied for, and was accepted to, a Canadian Military College (le College Militaire Royale de St Jean), which was unique in Canada in accepting students in advance of their high school graduation - that's right, I joined the Army and went to MilCol at 17, when all my peers were still in Grade 12.
I did this for a couple of reasons. It got me "free" post-secondary education. It made me special. It filled a recruiting officer's quota. A couple of others I'll gloss over.
None of these are good reasons for going, and I was completely and utterly ignorant of both the reasons why these institutions exist and of the ethos of the professional military officer. I could not have possibly been more unprepared for what I was getting into.
Did I mention that CMR was a bilingual institution, and that the operating language of everything outside of classes switched from French to English and vice versa every week? Or that I didn't speak French at all?
So anyway, I dropped into this for all the wrong reasons, and I got the mother of all wake-up kicks to the head. Not only did my private life totally change around, but I was now surrounded by people every bit as smart as me - and more than a few a damn sight smarter. No more special me. All of a sudden, I gotta STUDY. I gotta WORK.
I spent a large portion of the next 4 years in and out of a good bit of disciplinary and academic trouble.
And it was the best goddamned thing that ever happened to me, and I'm thouroughly glad of it.
Suprised?
What that place did - although it took a while - was cure me of of being an asshole. It taught me humility, leadership, and established a personal ethos that I still live by today. (Verite, Devoir, Valliance)
I am a much *much* better person than I was before I went there. The pre-CMR me was a total shithead. Post CMR... less so,
And along the way, I got a decent education and learned to speak French, plus a military career, and the best friends I've ever made.
The media, and especially Hollywood, makes military institutions look like brainwashing hellholes. Nothing could be further from the truth. If I had my life to do over again, I'd go back in a heartbeat - except this time I'd skip all the subversive rebel bullshit and learn what they were trying to teach me.
DG
I, for one, really miss the floppy.
I just got a new laptop for racecar support - brand spankin' new HP zd7280us with all the bells and whistles. P4-3.2. Monster 17" widescreen. DVD burner. USB ports up the yinyang. No floppy, no serial port.
The machine it replaces is a Panasonic Toughbook CF-25, a military-spec indestructable deal. P150. No CD burner, no USB - but a floppy drive.
99% of the software moved from one machine to the other was actually installed from scratch, so the lack of connectivity from one to the other wasn't all that big a deal. DATA, on the other hand, is proving to be a pain in the ass. It'd be SO simple to just zip it and dump it to floppy.....
Where I have a real bitch though is the deletion of the serial port from modern laptops. I found a USB-serial converter at RadioShack, but that's the last thing I wanted to do - further complicate my cabling. Grr. Don't the laptop people realize that the most popular way to connect widgets to computers (save printers) is via the serial port?
My phone uses a serial port. The ECU and datalogger on the race car uses the serial port. The scales, pyrometer, shock dyno, and every other measuring equipment I have all use the serial port. And in a pinch, a null-modem cable and ZMODEM makes for a decent file-transfer solution.
Grrr. I want my damn serial port back!
DG
Well, your truck cornering poorly is more than just suspension design....
Pity the poor OEM suspension engineer, who must build a design that is all things to all people.
In the specific case of a truck, he has to deal with loads ranging from an empty truck low on fuel, to a fully-loaded, fully-fueled truck towing 15,000 lbs of trailer, and carrying 6 burly passengers. A weight distribution that can vary from 70% front to 60% rear. Surfaces ranging from freshly paved Interstate, to some cow track out in the back 40.
The live-axle, leaf spring rear is strong, simple, and cheap - at the cost of being heavy. One could design an independant rear that could handle the same (or higher) loads and varience in operating condidtions (in fact, such a suspension esists on the Hummer - and even on the old VW Thing) but all that really adds is a lot more cost and complexity.
But when you have more control over the operating conditions of the vehicle - like I do on the racetrack - you can eliminate a lot of the compromises. The race car corners at well over 1 G without the aid of aero, and yet the ride is perfectly smooth.
DG
Actually, when the rules permit, current cars often can and do give the driver control over certain chassis parameters.
;)
Most race cars have a cockpit brake bias adjuster and at least one sway bar adjuster - have since the 1960s.
F1 adds different diff mappings as a minimum.
Some drivers do change settings on the fly. Shumacher is infamous for adjusting brake bias and diff mapping per corner (when there is an advantage to it) Watch any of his in-car camera shots, and you'll see him twiddling his steering wheel controls all the time.
I've heard his in-car radio in practice. One of the things he does is play with these controls to see what they need to be set at for each individual corner.
Which leads nicely into active suspension.
Active suspension, properly programmed, is flat-out awesome. It lets you have your cake and eat it too.
But what most people don't know was that the active suspension of a few years ago wasn't parametric - ie, it didn't read sensors, work out an algorithm, and then do the appropriate thing. Instead, it was at least 50% geographic - "at this spot on the track, (usually expressed as a running distance per lap) do this"
This was partially due to the inability of the onboard computers of the time to hold enough dats and run fast enough, but it was also due to the inability to come up with a single general-purpose program that would always do the right thing given the proper inputs.
We've had actuators capable of doing active suspension for quite some time. We've had computers capable of driving parametric-active for less time, but still a little while. What we're lacking is the control logic to make it work.
Wheeled vehicle dynamics is HARD. Rocket dynamics and atmospheric flight dynmamics is much easier.
In some ways, it gets easier on a race car, where you know a lot more about the tires, surface, and track - but it's still pretty goddamned hard. I don't think we're at the point where we could do general-purpose parametric active suspension.
Too bad. It'd be useful to have 3 knobs "Corner entrace balance" "midphase balance" and "exit balance" and be able to dial in all 3 to my liking. It'd save a lot of time on the shock dyno at least.
DG