Posts by rickyjames

OK, boomer? Gen-X-ers, elder millennials most likely to name their cars, says DVLA

Being A Boomer Comes With Memories of A Better Time

We geezers name cars here in the US, too. My current 2007 Mercedes SLK 350, a car I will drive to my grave, is named Veronica in honor of convertible-loving spunky TV detective Veronica Mars. She replaced my 2003 jet-black inside-and-out Mitsu Eclipse Spyder named Elizabeth in honor of Elizabeth Jennings, super spy from The Americans. Before that was Patricia, a silver 1998 Eclipse Spyder. Before THOSE girls were three GM convertibles not classy enough for their own names, tho I did occasionally refer to my first convertible as Whistler because her turbo was a little off. My very first car in the mid 70s was Stable - she was full of stalls. I've owned six convertibles in the last 30 years, a boyhood dream after watching the incomparable Diana Rigg drive around in her Lotus covertible as the ultimate Avenger, Emma Peel.

RIP Ursula K Le Guin: The wizard of Earthsea

Read Omelas Now

Click below to read her best short story - one whose relevance grows by the day.

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

Ex-sperm-inate! Sam the sex-droid 'heavily soiled' in randy nerd rampage

Re: Scott Adams is ahead of us again...

Or Cherry 2000.

Oculus Rift will reach UK in September – and will cost more than two PS4s

Because one universe...

Your "Because one universe..." subtitle made me laugh out loud. Thanks, I needed that.

Bitcoin, schmitcoin. Let's play piggyback on the blockchain

Re: The Real Story About The Bitcoin Blockchain

The "consideration" clause is legally met once the miner adds the block which is a undeniable benefit to bitcoin. The scam part comes because bitcoin has no limitation on the number of miner and more importantly no requirement for standardized mining rigs. If all had an equal chance it would be just a lottery. But with 50k winners and 325k losers during the effective lifetime of the (majority inferior) gear, there is no equal chance for all. That makes it a scam. All the rest is irrelevant details.

Are ALIENS hiding on Jupiter's Europa? Let's find out, cry NASA bods

....Not A Drop To Drink

"Having abundant liquid water next to Jupiter could make the moon the filling station for a generation of space probes, provided the ice isn't too deep to drill through."

This is the space equivalent of "water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink". Yes, the surface / subsurface of Europa has a treasure trove of tempting water to use as reaction mass / oxygen / fuel. Going down to get it will fry anything that tries to do so. Europa orbits in the Jovian equivalent of Earth's Van Allen radiation belts. An astronaut strolling on the surface of Europa in a spacesuit for a day will die of radiation poisoning shortly thereafter. A spacecraft sitting on the surface for weeks had better have some very good (and very heavy) shielding.

Pity, that.

A good effort, if a bit odd: Windows 10 IoT Core on Raspberry Pi 2

Need Wifi and Bluetooth Support?

"The current preview has several limitations. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are not supported..."

Looks like the $9 CHIP computer over on Kickstarter has an advantage besides price. It has wifi/Bluetooth built in.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598272670/chip-the-worlds-first-9-computer

Orion hacker sends stowaway into SPAAAAACE

Orbital vs. Suborbital

Um, Orion was an orbital flight, not a "sub-orbital" one. Its flight lasted only about four hours, but definitely multiple orbits - anything that stays up over 90 0r so minutes always is.

Pioneering spidernaut snuffs it after short Smithsonian stay

The first spiders in space were Anita and Arabella on Skylab in the 70s. Today they (at least, Arabella) are also a Smithsonian artifact:

http://chemistry.about.com/od/chemistryinthenews/a/spiders-in-space-skylab.htm

http://airandspace.si.edu/collections/artifact.cfm?id=A19740484001

Star Trek app warps into TiVo space

Re: Quick, Get A Screen Capture !!!

LOL !!! !!! !!!

Re: Quick, Get A Screen Capture !!!

LOL - I was so impressed by the text error I didn't even see the photo error!!!! Absolute Classic Epic Fail...

Quick, Get A Screen Capture !!!

The photo of the app is showing "Season 1, Episode1" of ST:TOS, "Where No Man Has Gone Before", as being about "A shape shifting, salt craving creature..."

Um, no, CBS, that plot synopsis belongs to your later ST:TOS episode "The Man Trap".

Come on, El Reg, edit and pump up your title here. This is an absolute classic gaffe!!!

LOHAN eyes hardcore partner's impressive girth

The Rest Of The Best

Woohoo - more research, more Estes Technical Report gems found. First link is a collection of TR-1 thru TR-7 (with TR-4 and TR-7 specifically about boost gliders) and my beloved TR-9 on "Designing Stable Rockets" which was the foundation of my 10th grade science fair project. No, I didn't win. Stupid judges.

http://www2.estesrockets.com/pdf/2845_Classic_Collection_TR-TN.pdf

http://www.ninfinger.org/rockets/EstesTR9.pdf

Doing It Old School

What a blast from the past I've found. Here's some links to the PDF copies of key Estes Model Rocket Technical Reports from the mid-1960s that I cut my teeth on back when I was a kid flying these things: TR-4 about boost gliders, TR-10 about altitude prediction, and TR-11 about aerodynamic drag and fin design. Anybody associated with or interested in LOHAN should read these things cover to cover as I did a million years or so ago. There is no better intro to these subjects.

http://www2.estesrockets.com/pdf/2266_TR-4_Boost_Gliders.pdf

http://sargrocket.org/Documents/Estes/TR-10.pdf

http://sargrocket.org/Documents/Estes/TR-11.pdf

You Wanna Gain Some Altitude?

Forget about 2-pound-thrust G class engines. Go with one of these babies:

http://www.pro38.com/products/pro150/motor.php

Fins.

What John Sager said. Also, realize that is theoretical performance which is only going to happen if the rocket orientation is controlled to keep the tip pointing straight up. In most amateur rockets, this is accomplished by fins - the "wind" going by the rocket works to "weathervane" the rocket via aerodynamic forces on the fins. For LOHAN, we are launching from a dead stop at 90,000 feet where the air is very thin. The fins are going to have to be really oversized (read:heavy) compared to what people are used to on a ground launched vehicle to generate the control forces to keep the tip pointed up.

Unless there's some kind of spin/gyroscopic stabilization....nah.

Phoenix Rocket Glider

If the decision is made to go with a G class engine, there's not going to be very much altitude gained. Here's a link to a 25 ounce (just over 700 gram) rocket glider kit that only gets up to 1000 feet (just over 300 meters) with a Aerotech RMS-RC 32-60/100 class G engine.

http://www.skykingrcproducts.com/rcplanes/bob_parks_kits.html

Basically, the rocket engine selected would keep a two-pound rocket hovering at its relaese altitude for around eight seconds, neither rising nor falling back to Earth. If the rocket weighs less than two-pounds, it will go up. But since a rocket can't be made in this case for much less than two pounds, it's not going up very far. Especially in only 8 seconds.

The key for altitude gain is thrust-to-weight ratio. The selected engine is going to severely limit performance in this area.

LOHAN: She's low orbit and helium assisted

"Orbit" Is Perfectly Appropriate

Don't take any guff about using "orbit" in your acronym. After rocket burnout, the vehicle will officially be in an orbit that just happens to intersect the surface of the Earth. Some people will sniff that is the same as "suborbital", but it's not your fault that dirt gets in the way of your path around the center of the earth. That's just part of (literally) "down and dirty" engineering.

Good luck! Try not to accidentally trigger a Russian nuclear counterstrike!

How to build your own Watson Jeopardy! supermachine

B-9

Um, I actually DID grow up watching Robbie the Robot on Lost in Space ...in his guest apperance there. The Robot that was there every week wasn't Robbie from the movie Forbidden Planet, it was a totally new model known as a B-9. As Watson wuld have known....

B9 was Best. Kid's. Friend. Ever. Can you say, "Danger, Will Robinson!" ???

DDoS attack, sex warrant won't stop Assange's leaky discharge

Oh Sarah...

Sarah Palin is becoming a marketable pundit over here in the US and is starting to weigh in on every topic that comes along. I'm amazed she apparently realizes that Assange is Australian and therefore outside US law. (At least I think he is. Seems like there has been some cases in the Bush admin where they argued that acts on foreign soil were under American jurisdiction, which sounds nutty to me, but then I'm not a lawyer. Thank God.)

You Brits are truly missing a treat with Sarah's show on our TLC channel, "Sarah Palen's Alaska". Beautiful scenery, with every scene showing the multiple reasons why putting this woman in the White House for four years, let alone eight, would be a very bad idea. She needs to be focused on special needs baby and daughters, where she will do an excellent job as a loving hockey mom.

PARIS joins the 17-mile-high club

Further LOHAN Details

Huh - the more I research LOHAN (Lithium Overhead Haze At Night), the less nutty it sounds. If you dump a lithium aerosol into the atmosphere at too low an altitude, there will be so much air between the sun and the lithium atoms that the ionization rate (and thus the pretty red glow) would be pretty small. That's why these experiments are done with sounding rockets above just about all of the air, so the lithium atoms get a blast of pure, undiluted sunshine.

The Russians have this all figured out, see Section 2.3.2 on page 178 of this Googlebook version of "Airglow as an Indicator of Upper Atmospheric Structure and Dynamics" By Vladislav Yu Khomich, Anatoly I. Semenov, Nicolay N. Shefov:

http://books.google.com/books?id=vlg64lnz70sC&pg=PA183&lpg=PA183&dq=lithium+airglow&source=bl&ots=1l2IyHXT2a&sig=SXiIG7eBEHnjXVUZd9FM3x5FHd0&hl=en&ei=cz7UTN7fF4KBlAeUoqWUBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CDMQ6AEwBTgK#v=onepage&q=lithium%20airglow&f=false

However, by an interesting coincidence lithium aerosols are ionized at exactly the wavelength of red laser diode chips (at least some of the earlier types of laser diode chips) at exactly 670 nm. See Table 2-20 in the book above and also Sam's Laser FAQ:

http://www.repairfaq.org/sam/laserdio.htm

This implies that you could come up with a lithium fog machine that has battery-powered red laser diodes in the outlet nozzle and if everything is sized right you could achieve near 100% ionization of the ejected fog via the laser beam. Basically you could skywrite with a glowing red gas visible for tens to hundreds of miles.

Maybe worth a test or two with a lithium smoke grenade and a high powered laser diode in a low pressure chamber. Everybody has all of that kit laying around in their kitchen, no?

LOHAN - Lithium Overhead Haze At Night

Absolutely stunning project, gents, congrats congrats congrats. Now that you've done an airplane from space, naturally it is time to move on to a UFO. Seriously. Your next project is obviously LOHAN - Lithium Overhead Haze At Night. A few links to get you started...

http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF3/312.html

http://pinktentacle.com/2007/08/space-fireworks/

http://pinktentacle.com/2007/09/photos-of-space-fireworks/

Obviously your next balloon can only get to a tenth of the altitude of these sounding rockets, but if you time the flight to sunset when the ground is dark and the sun is still above the horizon as seen from the balloon, who knows....you might have quite a show from the ground...

In any event, jolly good show on PARIS!