Posts by IvyKing 140 posts • joined 3 Jul 2009
Best working theory I've for Sporadic E is thunderstorms. The connection between T-stroms and Es was brought up in the VHF column in QST, by someone who correlated the center of a large number of Es contacts with weather reports of a large T-storm. Further evidence is the discovery of "sprites" in the mid-1990's traveling from the tops of thunderstorms and the upper atmosphere.
Having grown up 10 to 15 miles from Rocketdynes Santa Susanna test site, the noise from the rockets is very noticeable, but not objectionable. I was more aware of the things in the house rattling as opposed the very low pitches rumble without much energy in the voice frequency range. I've also gone to high school that was under the flight path of F4 Phantoms, which had a lot of energy in the voice frequency range.
If the tech companies are that gung-ho on renewables, they are certainly free to set up their own electric infrastructure, with all the joys of establishing transmission corridors. Bunch of hypocrites, arguing for regulation of utilities (e.g. net neutrality) and wanting government to keep hands off their business.
The space program was really Eisenhower's baby as he wanted the capability to do photo recon of the Soviet Union. There has been a lot of speculation that he wanted the Soviets to be first to launch a satellite so they would not be in a position to complain about American satellite overflights of the Soviet Union. Von Braun was in the position to launch a satellite in 1956, but Ike had orders to make sure he didn't try.
Kennedy's goal for a landing by the end of the 60's would not have been possible without the F-1 engine, and development started in 1958. Kennedy was also making a lot of noise about the "missile gap" when Ike knew the Soviets only had a handful of operational ICBM's in mid 1960.
With the exception of the neutron detector, symetrica's technology is nothing new, though refined with respect to previous implementations.
There are a couple of potential advantages to the IR laser based detection. The first is a much larger detector volume, since sensitivity is related to how many of the particles or photons interact with the detector - that's why neutrino detectors are HUGE. The flip side is that the detector can affectively b placed close to the source, getting around the inverse square law. The second is getting much quicker localization of the source.
One item not discussed in the article was spectral response, identifying a specific radionuclide may require energy resolution of better than 1%, and the method of operation suggests a very broad peak for a given energy (e.g. Tc99m at 140keV).
Back in 1980, 86-DOS supported 1.25MB 8" DSDD floppies. Weirdest aspect was supporting double sided single density floppies as separate drives for each side.
Not surprised to hear about Paterson's code for the inner workings of MS-DOS 1.25 as I've read his code for IO.SYS used in 86-DOS 1.14 and MS-DOS 1.25. Another thing about Tim's code is that he paid attention to Intel saying DO NOT USE interrupts below 20H, unlike IBM/MS with the PC ROM based BIOS.
Perhaps not the best choice of words in regards to Manchester, but bloodbath is a common term used to describe mass layoffs.
On a different note, the picture of the Sepulveda dam brought back a lot of memories, with some dating back almost 60 years. Do wonder if that site was chosen as a Buckaroo Bonzai reference.
Brown has given quite a few examples where he is as much of a science denier as Trump. One was when the Mediterranean Fruit Fly was causing havoc in Nor Cal, most scientists agreed that Malathion was a safe pesticide to use, but he went through the effort of finding one that disagreed. Another is his opposition to nuclear energy, if CO2 is so bad, why is he so intent on shutting down the let plant operating in the state?
He is also one heck of a hypocrite, using state resources to determine the oil/gas potential of his property.
I was careful not to set the color saturation at reasonable levels to give a somewhat realistic color rendering and didn't see much of the red shirt blooming. Speaking of red shirts, the very first red shirt fatality occurred just a few minutes into the first episode aired 50 years ago tonight.
Now for the bad news - I watched all but the first five minutes of that first episode when it hit the airwaves in the Pacific Time states.
Unfortunately this has been very typical of the Obama administration. In OPM's case, the top management was more focused on "diversity" than doing their job. In HRC's case, the Benghazi mess could also be traced to HRC not focusing on her job as SoS, which in itself is not criminal. OTOH, there is very good evidence that she mishandled classified material in violation of the law on such material, and many sections of the laws she violated do not require "intent" for connection.
I know what you mean. I use the private viewing feature of Firefox to take care of that ungodly behavior. Main way it works is deleting cookies after you close the session, and also deletes history. I've also removed Flash from my main system and that removes another vector for cookies.
On a somewhat different note,I've also configured FF to not auto play video and reject site redirects, and apparently this in combination with private viewing's blocking tracking ads seems to fool sites such as Wired into thinking that I'm running an adblocker.
Watts per total dollars for an installation is what matters. Dirt cheap cells with efficiencies of a few per cent could end up being more expensive when all of the support structure is taken into account.
Getting the efficiency up to 50% can get some interesting benefits for warm to hot climates, having such panels on the roof would lead to a significantly cooler roof.
Another reason is that the IR signature for UDMH/N2O4 is much lower than for the usual aluminum and ammonia perchlorate solid fuel mix. The IR signature is also less than the RP1/LOX mixture but greater than LH2/LOX.
FWIW, the Titan II was fueled by UDMH/N2O4, but there were a few nasty accidents involving fuel leaks.
The change in observed orbit implies a fairly significant impulse (momentum), the fact that the debris is in almost the same orbit implies high mass & relatively low velocity. High velocity would cease a large debris plume as what happened when an Iridium satellite collided with a cosmos satellite. My bet is a propellant tank let go.
I agree in that Computer Science was very poorly predicted in the Golden Age of SF, with A.I. postulated to be a much easier problem than it is and giving hort shrift to the need for numerical solutions to real world math problems. This may have been driven in part by the plot device of "man vs machine" that goes back to the story of Jawn Henry, if not earlier.
One of the big laughers was the manual piloting of rocket launches, the reality is that humans don't react fast enough to be effective. On the other hand, Heinlein did a fair representation of docking in his 1939 story "Misfit".
His story, "Blowups Happen", has one of the best descriptions of a nuclear power plant despite the 1941 version being written almost two ears before Fermi brought the Chicago Pile to critical. There were a few errors due to lack of knowledge of the fission process, in particular delayed neutrons, but he had a plausible work-around with an accelerator driven neutron source. One of the fairly close calls was stating that the energy of 2.5 tons of U235 fissioning would be equivalent to 100MT, where the actual yield would be half that.
The story also postulated that peoples lives would be saved by "artificial radioactives" - I probably wouldn't be alive today if it wasn't for a Tc-99m screening.
Investigators are not likely to grant immunity in a case where they think the prime target is likely to be innocent. Keep in mind the classified e-mails are only one side of the coin, the other is public corruption where HRC and WJC were getting money for favorable rulings from the US State Department. May end up having the first ex-pres in prison, though my guess is that HO would pardon both of them.
I remember racing the story in my brother's Boy's Life magazine back in 1964 and reading "The Wind From the Sun" maybe a decade or so later. Depressing since the first read was almost 52 years ago.
Kudos to Richard Chrigwin for mentioning "The Mote in God's Eye", though a Niven story of visiting traders had a similar plot device two to three years before "Mote" came out. This is unlike Scientific American that couldn't be bothered mentioning Niven or Pournelle with respect to laser powered lightsails back in the late 1990's - that was about the final straw leading to dropping my SciAm subscription.
If we have the technology to build a probe capable of reaching 0.05 to 0.1c, then it would be no problem a large space based receiving antenna that can pick up the signals from a probe 4 LY away. This would also get it away from all of the earth based interference.
Since the DSN can pick up signals from 100 a.u. with 70m dishes, this implies that 70 km diameter would pick the same signal source from a couple of light years.
@Herbert Thunderbird on the Mac works very nicely, also worked nicely on Solaris as well. Porting it to several platforms can be a pain, but it also brings out a lot of bus that would otherwise have gone unnoticed.
One of the things that I like about T-bird over Outlook is that the local folders are stored as separate files without any binary conversion.
A modified 767 probably would not work, being low wing, the wing box is in precisely the place you want the bomb bay to be. There's a reason that the big bombers such as the B-36, B-47 and B-52 had high wings. The 767 airframe was not designed the take the stresses of combat flight. Finally, the big fans on the 767 engines make really nice radar reflectors.
The newest B-52 airframes rolled out of the Boeing doors in 1962, although the avionics have been replaced many times since then.
The first reference that I've run across using a laser and lightsail for interstellar travel was from an early 1970's era short story by Larry Niven. This was also part of the opening of "The Mote in God's Eye" by Niven and Pournelle published in 1974.
My understanding is that Forward, Niven and Pournelle all knew each other, Forward has written some SF as well.
I'm very sure that the CDC 6600 was designed using silicon transistors, the germanium machine was the CDC-1604, which also pioneered the use of a peripheral processor. IIRC, the CDC-3600 was the 1604 redone with silicon transistors. FWIW, the Smithsonian Air & Space museum by Dulles has a CDC-3800 (dual processor 3600).
COMPASS == Complete pain in the ass
One nice thing about the 6000/7000 series instruction set was that it was really easy looking through an octal dump compared to what's involved with an x86 hex dump. Also had fond memories of the use of A1 to A5 for reading memory into the associated X register and A6 and A7 for writing to memory.
Text processing on the other hand was a royal pain.
W-e-l-l, Carlsbad has a couple of brewery/restaurants, Pizza Port and Karl Strauss. Stone Brewing Company (Arrogant Bastard Ale) is a short drive down 78 from the construction site where the fossils were found. Oceanside, which is right across 78 from Carlsbad, has a least one brewer of mead.
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