Posts by Alan Brown 15091 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"Canada remains a monarchy mostly out of expediency."
As do most of the other countries who retain a monarch
There are a few countries on that list who are looking at swiching away from the figurehead. I suspect they'll find it costs a lot more than they were expecting (both financially and in terms of political stability)
"Gearbox overheating is the reason why the Osprey cannot stay in prolonged hover."
Or prolonged flight, in the case of 3 units in Norway. One is currently bogged up to the landing gear doors in a wildlife refuge having emergency landed on "rather soft" ground
" the only cyber attacks that have ever been acts of war are the ones perpetrated by Russia upon Ukraine."
Russia's cyber attacks on satellite terminals knocked out supervisory and safety systems at almost all windfarms in Europe
The TARGET might have been Ukraine, but the splash damage was widespread
And yes the industry is hellaciously sloppy. Not only on security
Moon has a number of downsides including the abrasive dust issue.
It's been argued for a long time that if we can't go to Mars direct then we should target mining asteroids as this would be _easier_ (and far less dangerous) than the Moon (in fact the argument is that Asteroids should be first, planets later)
Ceres is one big iceball containing more water than the entire Earth's surface (oceans, rivers and atmosphere), others appear to have significant quantities of iron and other metals (virtually all metals mined at the earth's surface were delivered by asteroid strikes)
Quick and Easy for whom?
I'm minded of a bunch of frankenstein projects I had to deal with where blowhard techs would exclaim "It's all proven stuff", then tie things al together using a rat's nest of other shit which wasn't tested properly and interfered with all the existing equipment, vs a simple redesign of the existing stuff to rescale it slightly ("Too hard, I forbid you to work on it")
Unfortunately such people end up in manglement and sales
One of the reasons for using methane is that the tanks end up about roughly equal size. mass and temperature whilst still having a decent ISP and total thrust.
The temperature part matters more than you might think. Significant problems have been caused by tank/plumbing interactions between LOX/RP-1 and LOX/LH2 at various points in the past
Obtrivia: there are significantly more hydrogen atoms in a gallon of RP-1 (or any other liquid hydrocarbon fuel at room temperature) than a gallon of liquid hydrogen
"FRA was Germany's most important international freight hub"
One airport in New Zealand which had plans on ensuring its freight ops didn't get interfered with spent 25 years acquiring farmland under the approach paths to prevent development occurring and hoovered up all the nearby housing as it went up for sale - reselling it as leasehold with a covenant prohibiting complaining about the airport
It's one of the few without a night curfew. I wonder why? :)
LED streetlighting can be dimmed 90% (or turned off entirely) and only brightened when there's movement below the units
Try doing that with a sodium or mercury fitting
Apart from the power savings, you get a large effect on light pollution
"Adding carbon to hydrogen kind of defeats the whole point of using hydrogen in the first place - reducing CO₂ emissions."
That depends on the source of the carbon. Fossil fuels or old-growth forests are definitely out
Atmospheric carbon is perfect and a net-zero emitter as long as your energy and hydrogen source is zero-carbon (realistically this means nuclear power, not wind or solar - these processes need consistent energy sources)
"It takes about 3x the energy to compress or cool it as it does to mfg it."
This is why I tell people that if they have the abundant cheap energy available to manufacture hydrogen they may as well take the extra step of tacking on atmospheric carbon atoms to make it easier to handle at the next few stages (storage, transportation, usage)
Unfortunately talking to hydrogen proponents is mostly like dealing with Brexit cultists. They invariably invoke magic unicorn poo in order to get to step 1 (in this case, cheap carbon-free hydrogen - there's no point in stripping carbon off hydrocarbons to manufacture it - so no matter which way they cut it, the per kWh(*) cost of the hydrogen will be substantially higher than the per kWh cost of equivalent electricity, so the entire premise of reticulated domestic hydrogen gas networks or gas-fuelled cars falls apart and the only viable use case for synthetic hydrocarbon fuels is long-haul aviation or other niche purposes)
(*) or per 3.6MJ if you prefer
That was true IN SPACE and amounted to 2-4psi
However that wasn't true on the ground and that's the root cause of the Apollo 1 fire
The problem was that they were pressurised to 2-4psi over atmospheric pressure _with pure oxygen_ in order to verify the leak integrity of the capsule (16.7psi, according to the report, vs 14.7psi atmospheric)
Pure oxygen at 16-18psi makes velcro (nylon) essentially an explosive and there was a LOT of velcro in the cabin - apparently various engineers had been pleading for these tests not to be done in case there was a spark, or at least to reduce the amount of flammables in the cabin, whilst the astronauts themselves were worried about the quality of the wiring
It turned out that the netting used for the wiring harnesses was also made of nylon
Once the fire took hold and spread from the wiring harnesses to the cabin velcro, pressure inside the capsule ballooned due to combusion gasses plus temperature rise and the door essentially corked itself shut. Bolted or not, it wasn't openable without several tons of force - an opening force that the ground crew weren't able to provide
https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/10.1119/1.5095379 - "The Apollo 1 Fire: A Case Study in the Flammability of Fabrics"
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/01/the-hell-of-apollo-1-pure-oxygen-a-single-spark-and-death-in-17-seconds/
I'm old enough and have lived in places backwater enough to have used phones with crank handles and needing to decode morse code rings to decide whether to answer the call
I also participated in replacing all those lines with individual service DTMF service a few years later as a young telco tech
My suspicion is that children would find the older voice-operated tech easier to interface with than rotary dials
There's a bigger problem with going to the moon than the rocketry
The dust
Lunar dust _wrecked_ every apollo EVA suit in less than 30 hours. It's extremely abrasive and sticks worse than shit to a blanket thanks to electrostatic charges.
Once inside a pressurised environment it presents a major silicosis hazard due to its extreme fineness
Compared to mars it's an incredibly hostile environment and major efforts will be required to keep people healthy over and above anything already being done in space/zero-g environments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFqpgmZAZgo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k9wIsKKgqo
"Super Heavy and Starship remain untested and unproven vehicles"
They've gone from concept to prototypes in a startlingly short period of time and NASA wouldn't DARE repeatedly building up/tearing down prelaunch iterations until they felt happy about launching one. There's just too much political pressure on them for that option
It waasn't _just_ cost reasons.
The very limited technology of the day made multi-mission orbital rendezvous risky and it was something that was only really proven reliable in the mid 1970s
As it was, the LEMs were eggshell-fragile machines. Good enough to win a sprint but not for sustained exploration programs - one would have been lost sooner or later if Apollo had continued - and continued using them
The moon race essentially put space exploration back at least 20 years
" It was not just "not visible" but actually glowed grey."
This sounds like an "active interference" IR backlit plate - I'd still give the fottage to police as they tend to have multiple ways of identifying vehicles/drivers even with fake plates - if they're determined enough
"They're not even trying to position it as an legally defensible "anti-dust" cover or somesuch."
As with removing cats, selling the items or fitting them to the car isn't illegal in the UK. It's only when on the road that it becomes an offence
The workaround for that would be charges along the lines of "engaging in a conspiracy to commit criminal activity", but I'm betting that CPS would find that too hard to make stick even if they had video confessions from the sellers of the true intent of the devices
" There's been some changes recently to the phone systems mandated by the FCC"
It had a lot more to do with fraudulent call routing information being injected into the system and the terminating telcos NOT getting their fees tor connecting the calls
Ripping off the customers is one thing. Ripping off the telcos is crossing the line way too far
Idiom is important. High quality companies educate and train their staff in the idom they need to provide support in
Cheap ones just fill seats with Bangalore graduates
As others have pointed out, it's part of the "race to the bottom" - and part of that is DISCOURAGING people from calling helpdesks in the first place
There's a mentality (particularly amongst American and British companies thanks to a bad infestation of MBAs who worship at the Temple of Rand(*)) that support is a cost centre. Done right it's a repeat sales tool
(*) Never mind that the goddess of neoliberalism was on social security when she died....
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
The STEM issue is self-feeding and has a lot to do with the very poor pay teachers receive
Poor pay means poor quality teachers, many of whom are there for the wrong reasons and many of whom bring their antipathy to STEM subjects with them
Someone who has an attitude of "Math is HARD" tends to turn out students who don't do well in math - why is that not a surprise? By the time they get to high school it's already too late to undo a lot of the damage
TSMC is only putting money into US foundries because the US government has essentially put a gun to their head and forced them to build there as well as facilitating at federal level to kill pesky red tape
There have been a bunch of similar investments announced over the past few years which reality showed were a lot smaller and frequently ended up being distribution sites, not factories
$100B doesn't buy much in this kind of game in any case. Heathrow T6 cost $10B and that's just a big passenger handling shed. Some of the indivdual devices going inside a fab plant are above the $1B mark
The nazi history of the USA is worth researching - there were MORE card carrying USA Nazis in 1940 than German ones (complete with Nuremberg-style rallies at Madison Square Gardens) and a coup was actually planned/thwarted in 1934
Naziism was popular in the USA because Hitler modelled its ideology and iconography on Deep South/Confederate/Jim Crow laws (he waxed lyrical about this stuff in Mein Kampf), including the flag worship and THAT salute ("Bellamy salute")
The USA never weeded these people out after WW2 and they simply rebranded themselves as "anticommunists"
Couple this with a 80-year linkup between corporates+evangelists to destroy the New Deal (search for "How Corporate America created Christian America") and you have a rather toxic mix with very poisonous fruit
The highly ironic thing is that it's far better for a company to end up Chinese-owned - and invested in/expanded - than American owned and asset stripped/offshored
It's worth looking at WHY America regards China as a threat (hint, it's not military, despite the continual American sabre-rattling and rhetoric which in turn drives Chinese nationalism - it has to do with which currencies are used for international trading and how debt levels are assessed/carried)
At some point China's likely to invoke Pax Morporkia, which will be "interesting" at the very least
The UK's universities are already falling out of the top groups
Of course, the people running those Universities don't see it that way because there are still a few at the top but the critical mass has already gone and the much-vaunted Russell Group is on shaky ground
An yes, this has everything to do with Brexit - These outfits were top tier because they attracted top international talent which is now gravitating elsewhere
On gas turbines, 100% is usually the continuous rating where exceeding it comes with rapidly dimininishing lifespans due to heat/blade stress in the turbines
On electric motors, 100% is usually the continuous rating where exceeding it comes with thermal penalties and you risk melting down the windings/insulation breakdown if the motor overheats(*)
(*) My ancient EV's motor is rated for 24kW continuous, 48kW for 5 minutes or 64kW for one minute. People have tweaked it to get significantly higher output (over 100kW) by bumping up cooling flow and/or limiting peak power duration and/or tighter thermal management - the ultimate limitation is how much torque the gearbox can transmit before self-destructing - it's impressive for being a bog-standard heavy-duty forklift motor at heart)
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