This seems like a pretty big exclusion area for the satellite shot on Thursday. Is it going to disrupt airlanes? I’d be pretty annoyed if my trans-Pacific flight was delayed for it.
Get A Rooster
Lileks sets an alarm clock:
First you push the ALARM SET button, and you should get our old friend, Mr. Blinking Twelve. But no. You press SOURCE to select iPod or FM tuner. Repeatedly pressing this button just makes the iPod option flash on the display, though, and you figure you’ve done something wrong. So you turn the device OFF.
And the display face lights up. This is the first indication that the device was designed by the American Union of Nonintuitive Interfaces. These guys get a lot of work nowadays. You start again. SOURCE. You get the flashing iPod option. Ah hah: here’s another on/off button; let’s try that. It turns everything off and powers down the unit. That’s an option you’ve never had on an alarm clock before; if we had world enough and time, we could consider the possible scenarios in which one would want to power down the alarm clock. None come to mind.
Speaking of roosters, having spent some time in tropical climes where they run around wild, I can attest that the notion that they crow at dawn is a myth that has been foisted on city slickers like me. Or rather, that they only crow at dawn. I hear them crowing at dawn, at sunset, at lunchtime, at 2 AM. They may be good at waking you up, but not at any particularly useful time.
Is Nanotechnology Immoral?
Well, I don’t think so, at least not intrinsically. But apparently a lot of people do. I wonder how the results would come out if you said “molecular manufacturing” instead?
Gone The Way Of Eight Track And Betamax
Toshiba is throwing in the towel on HD-DVD. Looks like Sony won, this time.
That explains all the cut-rate players at Christmas time. I’m sure that the entertainment industry is happy to only have to deal with one new medium. Wonder how long they’ll continue to produce standard DVDs?
Too Good To Be True
I would love to see this happen:
The word on the street is that the Obama campaign and New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg have already met and devised an incredible plan if Clinton wins the nominee [sic]. Mayor Bloomberg would give nearly $1 billion to Obama’s campaign after which Obama would bolt from the Democratic Party and run as an Independent candidate with king-maker Bloomberg as his running mate.
That would make it a walk-in for McCain. In fact, it would be deliciously ironic, because it was exactly that kind of situation (with nutty billionaire Perot) that allowed Bill Clinton to slip into the White House in the first place. If Bush had gotten all the votes that Republicans normally get, Bill wouldn’t have had a chance. So the justice would be poetic if Hillary’s nomination was torpedoed by an independent run that pulled a lot of the Democrat vote.
Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s likely. Even if Hillary does win (or steal) the nomination, much as I’d like to see it, I don’t believe that Mike Bloomberg is so politically stupid as to think that he can run as a “centrist” on an Obama ticket. And “centrist” (nannyism and all) has always seemed to me what he fancies himself as. But an Obama campaign, whether Democrat or Independent, isn’t going to pull centrists, particularly once his voting record gets highlighted. It would split the Democrats, not the Republicans or “independents,” and it would probably not only give McCain the presidency, but possibly give the Republicans the Congress back.
If Bloomberg really does something like this, it can only be because he deludes himself that McCain is a “right winger” and that there is plenty of room to his left. As I said, I’d love to see it, but I’d have to see a lot more evidence than “the word on the street” from Armstrong Williams.
Where Has He Been?
An interesting comment from this post:
Me and my family used to be the biggest fans of Bill Clinton. Everyone in my community can’t stand to see Bill on TV anymore. I’m not sure if its his older age or maybe the lack of sleep lately, but I truly believe his lost his mind. He makes no sense anymore, cares about nothing other than attempting to get his wife elected, plucks words right out of the air while stating nothing, and now even goes against the voices of mass voters…
Bill Clinton is really not he same person I USED to respect and admire!
Sorry, he’s exactly the same person you used to (foolishly and myopically) respect and admire. He’s the same person he’s been his entire political career, going all the way back to the seventies in Arkansas. Anyone who has followed his career, or read non-hagiographic biographies of him knows this. The only thing that’s changed is that you’ve found a new empty vessel into which to pour your emotional political longings, and he’s attacked it, so now you see the Bill Clinton that the rest of us have seen all along.
As I’ve said many times, I don’t now, and never have “hated” Bill (or Hillary Rodham) Clinton. I find them far too trivial and unworthy subjects on which to expend such an intense and miserable emotion. I think that I’m in fact far more clinically objective about them than most Democrats have ever seemed to be able to be. The problem is not the “Clinton haters” (most of whom were merely pointing out the reality), but the far too many people who have loved him, far beyond reason, for decades. That was the source of his power.
And now that the scales have fallen from the eyes of many like the commenter above, the end may be very ugly, particularly if they are perceived to have stolen the nomination from Obama (something that they are surely plotting as I write this). Denver may make Chicago in 1968 look like a Sunday-school picnic.
They’ve never cared about the Democrat Party, other than as a convenient vehicle for the conveyance of their unlimited and insatiable ambition and lust for power, and they’ve been a disaster for it ever since they hit the national scene. They cost it the Congress for the first time in four decades, and the party couldn’t hold on to the White House at the end of their term, at least partly because of the stench of it in the minds of the voters in 2000. Having Bill Clinton campaign for a Democrat has generally been the kiss of death, but because of this irrational love of them, they’ve managed to keep on doing it.
When it comes to the Clintons, it’s always about them, and they always come first, and the national Democrats are finally starting to realize it, sixteen years later. If they’d been smart, and listened to Arkansas Democrats at the time, they could have had the much earlier epiphany, and spared their party a lot of corruption and embarrassment.
Oh, when the end comes, it won’t be as bad as the Ceausescus (this is America, after all), but it will certainly be as final. There will be no more comeback kids. If he’s still around in a couple decades, I suspect that Bill Clinton will be continuously enraged and deeply envious of the legacy of George W. Bush.
Frying A Turkey Without Oil?
Not exactly, despite the claim of this post:
Deep frying is a form of convection heating. Instead of hot air, you are using hot oil to transfer the heat. Depending on the oil used in the fryer, the temperature is usually about 375 degrees to keep the food from absorbing a lot of oil.
The Big Easy uses infrared energy to “bathe” food. It excites the proteins, not the water. Thus, you are literally frying it. It’s just like sitting in the sun all day. The infrared energy will “fry” your meat’s skin. The Big Easy doesn’t need a lid because it’s better to let the hot air escape. That way your food doesn’t dry out and there’s no basting necessary. Unlike conventional turkey fryers there is also no warm-up period. Just drop your thawed turkey (stuffed or unstuffed, injected or not, sugar-less rubbed or not) into the chamber and turn the Big Easy on. Infrared energy starts cooking it immediately and the cooking time for 12-14-pound turkey will be cut almost in half.
Without expressing an opinion on the relative merits of cooking a turkey this way, it’s not equivalent to deep-fat frying. As it says, it only radiates the skin, whereas a deep fryer gets hot oil inside the bird as well, which has to speed up the cooking time considerably. And if the oil is sufficiently hot, there’s no reason that it has to make the bird greasy, or any more so than it would be naturally from its own fat.
The Big Easy
[Update late evening]
Contrary to Glenn’s comment, I don’t call “foul.” The proper spelling is “fowl.”
More Blog Rebuilding Progress
Despite the vast suckitude of the Movable Type documentation, I’m slowly starting to figure things out. One of the nice features of the upgrade is that it allows multiple categories, rather than just one, and I’ve finally figured out how to display them. Not only that, but you’ll see that if you click on a category associated with a given post, that you’ll get an archive page of all posts in that category. That will allow those who complain that they come here only for the space stuff, or only for the politics, to customize the blog to their own tastes (assuming that I do a good job of categorizing things).
Unfortunately, it’s a huge page, because it contains literally every post in that category that I’ve ever written. It’s a fast load for me, because I have a good connection, but I may change it so that it only gives you the previous (say) month’s worth of posts, to help those that are more bandwidth challenged. This feature will also allow folks who have me in their blogroll with specific interests to link to that specific interest (e.g., fellow space bloggers might want to just link to the space posts). If I can figure out a way to build a link (and archive page) with a filter for multiple categories, I’ll let folks know, but at least some customization is doable now.
I also have to pretty up the archive pages so they look like this one.
And I still haven’t solved the timing-out problem, so we’ll just have to continue to suffer with it for now, until I can get some help from an MT guru.
What Do They Know?
As Clark says, I don’t know why anyone would think that space scientists or astronauts are experts on business. I don’t really care what Kathy Sullivan thinks the prospects are for suborbital tourism, and if I thought that astronauts’ opinions on the matter were of value, I can find many astronauts (including John Herrington, Rick Searfoss, etc.) who would disagree with her.
And who is this “Alvin” Aldrin of which they speak? Is that Andy’s evil twin? When I do a search for “Alvin Aldrin” I only get one hit–this article.
A couple other questions for Alvin/Andy. What numbers was he using for the Raptor cost? Marginal, or average per-unit? It makes a big difference.
In addition, I always get annoyed when people use a military fighter as a cost analogue for a spaceship. A lot of that dollar-per-pound number for the plane comes from something in it that weighs nothing at all–software. The avionics for the weapons systems, and the defensive systems are non-trivial in cost as well. Designing a combat aircraft, designed to kill other things and avoid being actively killed by other things, is an entirely different problem than designing a vehicle that has to only contend with passive and predictable nature (and pretty benign nature, for the most part, at least for suborbital). I’d bet that Burt’s own cost numbers for the SS2 already put the lie to Andy’s chart.
[Late afternoon update]
Jeff Foust has a much more extensive writeup of the discussion, which he apparently attended. As I suspected, it was Andy, not Alvin, Aldrin.
A Kludge
Is this the future of air travel?
Engineers created the A2 with the failures of its doomed supersonic predecessor, the Concorde, very much in mind. Reaction Engines’s technical director, Richard Varvill, and his colleagues believe that the Concorde was phased out because of a couple major limitations. First, it couldn’t fly far enough. “The range was inadequate to do trans-Pacific routes, which is where a lot of the potential market is thought to be for a supersonic transport,” Varvill explains. Second, the Concorde’s engines were efficient only at its Mach-2 cruising speed, which meant that when it was poking along overland at Mach 0.9 to avoid producing sonic booms, it got horrible gas mileage. “The [A2] engine has two modes because we’re very conscious of the Concorde experience,” he says.
Those two modes–a combination of turbojet and ramjet propulsion systems–would both make the A2 efficient at slower speeds and give it incredible speed capabilities. (Engineers didn’t include windows in the design because only space-shuttle windows, which are too heavy for use in an airliner, can withstand the heat the A2 would encounter.) In the A2’s first mode, its four Scimitar engines send incoming air through bypass ducts to turbines. These turbines produce thrust much like today’s conventional jet engines–by using the turbine to compress incoming air and then mixing it with fuel to achieve combustion–and that’s enough to get the jet in the air and up to Mach 2.5. Once it reaches Mach 2.5, the A2 switches into its second mode and does the job it was built for. Incoming air is rerouted directly to the engine’s core. Now that the plane is traveling at supersonic speed, the air gets rammed through the engine with enough pressure to sustain combustion at speeds of up to Mach 5.
A combination turbofan/ramjet. Hokay.
If I understand this properly, the idea is to fly fast subsonic over land to avoid breaking windows, and then to go like a bat out of hell over the water. When I look at that design, I have to wonder how they can really get the range, with all of the drag that is implied from those huge delta wings, not to mention the wave drag at Mach 5. I also wonder where they put the hydrogen–that stuff is very fluffy, and needs large tanks. It’s probably not wet wing (it would be very structurally inefficient), which is why the fuselage must be so huge, to provide enough volume in there for it.
Sorry, but I don’t think that this will be economically viable. As is discussed in comments and the article, hydrogen is not an energy source–it’s an energy storage method, and it’s unclear how they’ll generate it without a greenhouse footprint. Moreover, it’s not as “green” as claimed, because dihydrogen monoxide itself is a greenhouse gas. I’ll bet that this thing has to fly at sixty thousand feet or more to get itself sufficiently out of the atmosphere to mitigate the drag problem, and that’s not a place where you want to be injecting a lot of water.
This concept doesn’t learn the true lessons of Concorde: like Shuttle, a lot of people have learned lessons from Concorde, but the wrong ones. The correct lesson is that we need to get rid of shock waves and drag. Once we do that, we’ll be able to cruise at reasonable speeds (say, Mach 2.5) everywhere, over both land and water, so we won’t have to build the vehicle out of exotic materials and eliminate windows. We’ll also be able to have fast transcontinental trips (two hours coast to coast) which is another huge market that this concept doesn’t address at all. Finally, it has to do it with a reasonable lift/drag ratio, so that ticket prices will be affordable. And I think that the fuel issue is superfluous–Jet A will be just fine for the planet, as long as fuel consumption is reasonable, which makes the vehicle design much easier, with much more dense fuel.
Fortunately, I’ve been working for over a decade with a company that thinks it knows how to do this, and I’m hoping that we’ll be able to start to move forward on it very soon.
[Via Clark Lindsey]
[Update in the late afternoon]
In response to the question in comments, there’s not much publicly available on the web about shock-free supersonics, but here’s a piece I wrote a few years ago on the subject.