> > I can't name one recent band that will have a rolling stones type of > > career....When was the last time fans mobbed an airport when their band flew in? When was the last time they broke through a police cordon to pack into an already-full auditorium?
Forty years from now, will albums by their band still command a 30% premium over new albums by new groups?
Forty years from now, will a bunch of 60-somethings still sell out all their concerts on their "retired but still touring for the hell of it" tour?
I suspect it won't be long before mention of "Eminem" and "Alanis
Morissette" are met with a blank look. Which is as it should be,
actually...
"WE are your overlords..."
- Jeff Duntemann
> > Ahem. As a professional geologist (earth scientist), I read at least > > one or two things per day. Sometimes more.High school "earth science" wasn't geology. It was a jock/retard course, where they learned things like "See the white puffy things in the sky? Those are clouds. Clouds are white puffy things. In the sky!" After hammering that sort of thing into them for 9 weeks, they'd be tested, and most could pass with a D average.
There was an entire alternate class structure for the feetball jocks, tailored to their available class time (they spent half a day at the gym, which limited scholastic work), and to their aptitudes. For example, they also had "calculator math", where they did addition and subtraction using pocket calculators. Most of them were barely proficient there, either.
> > Little fluffy clouds and little fluffy clouds and > > lililillilililililillililililililili little fluffy clouds and little > > fluffy clouds and lilililililililililililililililililililiI dunno. I think it needs more cowbell.
translation: "My last connection with operational responsibility was too long ago to remember."
- anonymous, via Bob Lewis
> > http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=motorcycle > > +engine&hl=en&lr=&start=10&sa=N > > > > I also found suspension papers including an MRF shock study.I've been playing with this. I get two types of responses - servers that want my credit card info so they can sell me a pdf, and responses that access is only allowed if I'm enrolled at a particular school of part of some specialty library network.
Hm.
I never knew. Apparently there are "academic" libraries where you can get all kinds of technical data that are kept hidden from the rest of the world. It'd be enough to make me paranoid, if I wasn't already.
We've talked about how some kinds of papers don't seem to exist, and figured it was because it was sponsored by OEMs who kept it to themselves. Maybe not; it looks like a big chunk of it is hidden away in those private libraries.
I don't necessarily mind that they're private, or what some of them charge money, but it pisses me off that after decades of buying books and scrabbling for hard data, I finally found such things exist.
I've also been surfing colleges, looking for theses. The going rate is $33, it seems... I bet it works like the SAE, and the author never sees a cent. Nice scam, if you can get it.
- Londo to Vir, Babylon 5, "Born to the Purple"
A couple of years ago I borrowed DVD sets of each. I don't know if it was apparent during the original broadcasts or in syndication, but both series had a heavy slant. Every episode came down to one of a handful of heavily-handed moral lessons:
Technology is evil.
Humans are evil.
Fear the unknown.
Just give up, there's no hope anyway.
I watched about half of the first season of each, skipped through odd episodes of the rest, and gave the DVDs back to their owner in bitter disappointment. One or two episodes like that I could put up with, but the entire underlying theme of the programs is contrary to what I believe in.
Of course, the link between crime and punishment is more complex than that. By and large, criminals don't expect to be caught, so they simply don't think about punishment. Another class of criminal simply doesn't care.
Over the years there have been many approaches to penology - punishment, rehabilitation, and everything in between. The only provable conclusion is that nothing works... at least, no one method works noticeably better than any other.
Meanwhile, prisons are expensive. It costs over $16,000/yr to house a single prisoner for a year in the state of Arkansas.
My solution: give them a new suit, $16,000 in cash, and a first-plass airplane ticket to anywhere that will take them... in exchange for irrevocably giving up their US citizenship, and being put on the Homeland Security "no entry" list.
Who would take such an offer? Probably not all of them, but each one that did would be a problem permanently solved, at the cost of little more than a year's expense for incarcerating them.
- Londo, Babylon 5, "Chrysalis"
> > nation. In Algeria, France didn't want to lose one of > > their last colonies.Roosevelt made the disassembly of the colonial France a keystone of US policy during WWII. This was continued by the State Department under the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.
As Roosevelt interpreted it, the "1939 borders" mentioned in the Atlantic Charter did not apply to France.
I've never quite figured out what the reasons were; the actions the USA took to strip France of its outlying territories are well documented, but make no sense, militarily or politically. And these actions led us directly to Vietnam, so they sure didn't help *us* any.
> > War is bloody and unpredicatable? What about the > > French choice of when and who to engage? A good > > example is WW II. France didn't have to be invaded. > > They just didn't know when to fight.The French, being, er, French, had decided they had learned a lesson from the War of 1871 and WWI. They had decided that war could not be done halfway; it required commitment. So their *only* plan for deploying the military - any military force at all - was a complex plan involving calling up the reserves, conscription, and so forth. This is why they were paralyzed when the Nazis re-attached the regions near the French border. The French "government" changed almost literally from week to week as different parties gained or lost votes in their parliament. The French "military" was so inbred and blind they had absolutely no idea of what was going on in the outside world, and no plans to deal with anything short of full mobilization.
> > They pussied out of stepping on the Wehrmacht when the > > Germans rearmed the Sudentenland in violation of the > > armistice. The French could have beaten the Germans > > then, but instead decided to hide behide a half assed > > fortification, and sell out Checkoslovakia.The Brits were also in on selling out the Czechs, with similar mutual-defense treaties. For which both France and Britain paid in money, blood, and the loss of their empires.
> > I don't doubt that no one else surrounding them did > > better against the German early on, but the French > > pissed away every situational advantage.The French high command might as well have been paid in Reichsmarks; their lack of competence was so dramatic it is hard to tell it from outright treason.
> Grainger is your friend - they have a store in Little Rock and 3 > other locations in AR, probably would have what you need.Grainger is *not* my friend. Their store is 25 miles away, on the other side of the metro area. They cost twice what anything mail order is. They have a nice catalog, but they don't keep much in local inventory. And they don't like to sell except to "business accounts." Which I have to re-open every time I have to go there (maybe once every two years), which requires major confrontation with their sales and clerical staff. *Every time*, since they seem incapable of keeping their files straight.
W.W. Grainger & Co. can kiss my ass.
> Yes, they do, in any quantity. Their prices range from remarkably good > to frightening, with no real pattern."Supermarket pricing." Set prices for some common items low, and market heavily. Then rook them for randomly selected items to make up the difference. Most people will pay it rather than drive to another store.
> I can take them a business card, I can take them a business license > (never mind that there's very little my business does that they'd > have anything directly applicable for), I don't do resale but no > one's ever refused to sell to me for 'equipment maintenance'.They want a copy of your license, here. And they're not the only ones; most of the places that sell anything that might be classified as "industrial equipment" work the same way.
Hell, at least they let you walk in the store, even if they don't want to wait on you. I went to a metal supplier in Memphis once, with Kemper, and we got to stand outside a steel door while they examined us through a peephole to decide if they were going to open the door or not. For some reason, they let Kemper in anyway...
> > As Royce says, ventilation is important. And don't weld zinc plated > > materials.In the USA, the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta maintains the "Material Safety Data Sheets" for everything from helium to Zyklon-B. They're supposedly to help physicians determine when something might be a problem. In practice, due to the way things are in the USA, *everything* is toxic. The MSDS sheet for "SAND, WASHED AND DRIED" is downright scary - you sure wouldn't want any of that stuff to get on you!
Since *every* source of information here comes down to "Wolf!" or "The sky is falling!" nobody pays much attention to safety warnings. However, sometimes there really is a wolf. I'd welded galvanized steel a few times without any problem. One day I got a big whiff, went numb all over, and staggered off to sit on the porch for a while. I can report from personal experience that breathing zinc fumes is bad juju.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/dupont/FarmingWithDynamite/
-> to put it together. I remember that he was showing how the Chinese -> could have put together the Jet engine around 2K years ago, they had -> all the required materials but did not put them together in the right -> order.They couldn't have made anything that would run more than a few seconds, or perhaps minutes, and it couldn't have made much thrust. You need bearings, decent steel, and a whole bunch of things to make a jet engine hold together - the NACA papers or FangleBase will quickly show you some of the problems, but the fact is, if they'd had all the materials sitting there right in front of them they wouldn't have been able to do one damned thing with them! It wasn't until the 1800s when we got decent steelmaking processes, Naysmith invented the metal shaper, Maudslay invented the engine lathe, Whitney invented a whole snotload of stuff.
The world might as well have begun in 1800, because the tools that created the modern industrial society did not exist before then.
- Dave "tools are good karma" Williams
- Neil Gaiman
> > Having an *indestructible* Logitech trackball for the last six or so > > years, I'd give anything Logitech makes a try.My first mouse as a Logitech. I replaced it with a Microsoft mouse (the old one that weighed half a pound) later on, but I kept the Logitech mouse driver all the way through Windows 98. The Logitech driver did "ballistic acceleration", meaning the faster you moved the mouse, the faster the cursor would go, sort of like a paddleball. It was one of those things that sounds stupid until you try it, and then you mourn for its loss later.
Logitech shit their bed later, first with insane Einstein-in-a-tutu and pissing baby (!?) ads, then when the redesigned their *entire* product line to make it "ergonomic", which in Logitech-land, appeared to mean "operable only with the right hand."
> So then buy a lefty specific mouse.Such things do not exist. Or perhaps more accurately, the handful I've seen have had configurations that would have made them impossible for practical use.
-> How did the Husky Autos operate? I was never exposed -> to one but was always interested in just how the trans -> was shifted or not shifted.It had several centrifugal clutches, each coming in at a different RPM, with their own gear pairs to the output shaft. One-way sprag clutches were used to keep things from binding up.
The US Army used a bunch of them, then went to Kawasaki KLRs. My brother does USAF Special Ops air drop stuff; he's dropped lots of them into the woods by parachute.
Motorcycles are high-mobility transportation; in WWI and WWII Erwin Rommel made extensive use of motorcycles for reconaissance; Tuchman's "Guns Of August" describes how the demoralized French forces came to associate the sound of Rommel's motorcycles with the German vanguard, and how Rommel used to send his motorcycles on feints to keep the French guessing where his main forces really were.
The Germans also made heavy use of bicycle infantry, a concept which seems ridiculous nowadays, but bicycles were cheap, highly efficient, and could more than double the striking range of troops at very little cost.
After WWII the concept of light, high-mobility infantry was overshadowed by all the new bombers, missiles, and nukes, but by the 1970s the US Army, among others, was realizing that there were still combat situations where a motorcycle would be useful, hence their acquisition of a bunch of Husqvarna Automatics. The original idea was that the soldiers would ride them one-handed and shoot with the other hand. That turned out to be more difficult than it was worth, so the idea changed. Now they use dirt bikes to get small tactical groups into position rapidly. Once near position, they park the bikes and attack on foot. This is the same stuff the Army does with helicopters, but the advent of cheap, man-portable surface-to-air missiles means you can't use the choppers in all situations nowadays, hence the motorcycles.
The Army presumably has training schools for normal riding; my brother just tosses the riders and bikes out the back of a C5, where they get dropped into strange territory and have to use orienteering methods to make it to the official rendezvous point. He drops a lot of them at night; they use helmets with infrared and Starlight viewers. My brother says it's all ancient, bulky Vietnam-era technology right now, no depth perception, and they run into trees a lot. When the DoD procurement system finally does its thing, they're supposed to get new "TimeRider" helmets with binocular color displays, built-in GPS map overlays, frequency-hopping packet communications, and so forth.
I can hardly wait for one of those skid lids to show up at the government surplus auctions...
- Dave "just another off-topic excursion" Williams
> > The UN is afraid of their constituents,The UN's constituents are *nations,* many of whom have supersonic bombers, aircraft carriers, armies, nuclear submarines, and intercontinental ballistic missiles...
-Garibaldi, Babylon 5, "Believers"
> The team of researchers will receive $1 million in funding annually > from Harvard over the next few years. The project begins with an > admission that some mysteries about life's origins cannot be explained.So before they even begin, they've decided "some mysteries about life's origins cannot be explained." So that absolves them of any failure to explain anything, since they're doomed from the beginning.
Gorons.
> All this week, hundreds of women have been demonstrating outside > the Kuwaiti parliament building where the all-male legislature > is debating a bill that would give women the right to vote and > stand in elections.DON'T DO IT! NO NO NO!
Let 'em vote and run for office, and they'll start getting uppity around the house, and then they're going to hit the job market and take your freaking JOBs, man! And what's going to happen? You're going to wind up washing your own underwear, and some bitch with a uniform and a pistol is going to say you were driving too fast, and it's all going to go downhill from there.
Trust me, the USA tried that routine a century ago, and it sure didn't work out like the suffragettes said it would...
>> With ANY camera you really should learn some basic functions.I bought a new camera a couple of years ago. The buttons and rockers only have mystery symbols. I can get a menu to come up on the viewfinder - there's no optical finder - but it's mostly mystery symbols too.
A warranty card came in the package. And a CD. The CD contained a Windows .msi installer file. Wine barfed on it, and I had no Windows machine, so the CD got tossed in a pile. Eventually I had access to a Windows box and put the CD in. It installed about a hundred megabytes of crap, and a .pdf "manual." The "manual" contained instructions on how to change the batteries in a dozen different languages. No explanation anywhere about the mystery symbols.
The camera probably does all kinds of stuff, and the symbols are probably some kind of ISO "standard", but with no documentation with the camera, and no way to search for graphics on the web, I'm shit out of luck.
No wonder the paint looks a bit faded...
Got another letter from them today - they've upped the percentage rate from 20% to 25%. Because they can, I guess. Bear in mind that's a 27-year-old account that has never had a late payment.
People laughed at Richard Nixon when he talked about how installment buying and credit cards were evil during one of his State of the Union addresses, but as has been so often the case, Tricky Dick got the last laugh.
This guy went into the zoneinfo (GMT offset and DST date) database and found comments. Zoneinfo goes back to the 19th century, so there are interesting historical oddities, like Eastern War Time and Eastern Peace Time during and after WWII, or Mount Washington Observatory, which has its own time zone, and places like Alaska, which changed calendars from Julian to Gregorian when we bought it from the Tsar, etc.
Very interesting article, worth a few minutes of your time.
- Terry Pratchett, "Unseen Academicals"
The data are meaningless without some sort of explanation of how they were derived, as you noted.
To me, the collection of the data would be of vastly more interest than the little list. My state, county, and city have no regulation or registration of firearms, and neither know nor care. Most of my firearms were bought in private transactions, perfectly legal here. Only a couple were purchased over the counter, and those over 20 years ago.
Knocking on doors and asking, census-style, wouldn't necessarily prove much. I'm not likely to admit to a stranger at my house that there are firearms inside, because I'd like them not to get stolen when I'm not home. Even if I were to answer, I might admit to one or two, but not everything.
Then there are people like my Dad, who never owned a gun in his life until last month when he bought a .38 snubnose. Despite the fact that he's owned a Stevens 12-gauge for 65 years and a Marlin .22 for 35 years. He was born in Georgia in 1929, and to him they're simply tools. A "gun" is a pistol or a military arm of some sort.
Let's see... registration, 4473s, canvassing with questionnaires... companies that sell homeowner's insurance might give a better picture. Not everyone has homeowner's insurance, though, and not everyone's policy would cover their guns.
Then there are the children. For the last 10 to 15 years, if you take your child to a doctor, they're liable to ask them if there are any guns in their house. This is a "risk assessment" form many clinics use. Also, some public schools have been doing this for at least as long. That this is done has been widely reported; where the collected data winds up has never been made clear to me.
You'd need most or all of those sources to provide a reasonably useful picture of gun ownership demographics. You could probably wind up with a 15% margin of error if you were careful, good enough for government work, anyway.
> the only technology missing, is the flying car itselfEven if I were to concede in the technical viability of a flying car (or TTW, for that matter!), there are certain practical problems that are likely to make it forever a commercial failure.
Back years ago, I was hot to build an ultralight aircraft. Under the USFAA regulations of the time, if I kept the aircraft below a certain takeoff weight and below a certain airspeed, I could fly it without having to go through the ridiculously intricate and expensive process of obtaining a private pilot's license.
Then I found out that, where I was seeing empty blue sky, a pilot sees a maze of restrictions. Most metropolitan areas have at *least* one airport. Airports restrict large amounts of airspace, off-limits to small aircraft. In the USA, any largeish town will also likely have at least one military base, with its own no-fly zones. Some cities don't care for aircraft zooming around overhead, and further restrict flight zones. And after 9-11, no-fly zones around various political and military areas have been extended.
So, the crowded urban/suburban areas where a skycar would be most popular, are also the ones where your flight area would be most restricted. It would take *massive* political clout to fight the military, the FAA, and fearful politicians; frankly, I doubt that much clout exists.
Politics has a lot to do with vehicle design. Remember the Concorde, or the fate of the USS Savannah.
The advectorial claims the water pump could be turned off or run at an extemely low speed for quick warm-up. Hmm, interesting thought. I bet most engines could get away with thermosiphon in normal cruise, when they're only making 20 or 30 hp.
They mention potential packaging advantages to the electric pump. Hot rod bits mostly mount in place of the stock pump, but one of the aftermarket hot rod companies makes a nifty radiator that has the pump and thermostat built into the radiator as an integrated cooling unit. After tackling a couple of pumps with accessory belts from hell, or that required removing the timing belt, the idea of putting a pump on the fender or firewall and attaching a couple of hoses looks damned good, even if you only got a few years out of the thing. At least it wouldn't be a whole-weekend replacement project.
The proportional flow control valve replaces the usual thermostat, and gives more even cooling, instead of the usual gush/stop of a wax pellet. I like that idea.
The head gasket with embedded temp sender is a bad idea, as far as I'm concerned. Ford Mod gaskets are $90 each, and I just paid $50 for a Geo head gasket. Criminy, I can buy whole gasket *sets* for most older motors for less than that! And temp senders don't last forever, either.
Dana was pushing a head gasket with embedded "ignitors" built into the fire rings a few years back, basically spark plug electrodes that hung out of the gasket into the bore. Not the best place to put a spark plug, but it all makes sense when you realize Dana is a major gasket manufacturer (they own Victor-Reinz), and their purpose is to sell gaskets.
Later Ford engines have temp senders that screw into the metal of the head and don't contact coolant. The explanation is that they don't care what the coolant temp is, they really want to know what the *head* temp is, so why not measure it directly? Makes sense when you look at it that way.
I bet they have the "variable speed" fan sync'd with the water pump flow. Since I don't trust the long-term reliability of electric pumps, I'd cool the water with the fan as far as I could, then run the pump just enough to circulate it. Above 30mph the fan doesn't do much, so at higher speeds you'd have to run the pump faster.
> > It would be fun to watch and hear the reaction from walking into a room of > > 20-something engineers on an aircraft project and say, "You guys see this > > piece of paper, this pencil, and this straight edge? Well, you're gonna > > ....."No FEA? No CFD? No 3-D modeling systems?
Oh, you mean like the U-2, or B-70, or Apollo, or...
Funny, I don't see that all that computing power has shortened design
times much any. If anything, it takes longer now than before. Yeah,
yeah, more complicated systems... but it I bet you still wind up with
four or five guys doing the real work, and a few hundred people playing
computer operator, checking their work for corporate CYA.
Teardrop trailer link page. These became common in the 1950s. They
usually incorporated an inside bed, an outside kitchen, and some
storage. No toilet or bathing facilities in the classic design, anyway.
The teardrops were popular because you could see over them when towing
in traffic, a big deal back when few cars had outside mirrors. They
also tucked back inside the car's wake and didn't affect mileage much,
and being light, they didn't put too much load on undersized drum brakes.
The teardrops have made a comeback lately, and some of them are being
towed by motorcycles... of course, an 1800cc, 130hp, 1100-pound bike is
a pretty righteous tow vehicle by old-time standards. Most modern FWD
cars have minimal towing ratings, but they can drag a teardrop okay.
I've always been fascinated with teardrop trailers, for some reason.
Too many people, not enough space... it's easy to point the finger at
horsecarts, cars, or bicycles, but it's the human anthill that's the
problem.
10/30/2009:
http://q.webring.com/hub?ring=teardropper
10/31/2009:
> > Bicycles will be banned altogether from important streets in
> > Shanghai starting next year. "Bicycles put great pressure on the
> > city's troubled traffic situation," said police official Chen
> > Yuangao.
A couple of thousand years ago, the Romans banned all wheeled vehicles
from the streets of Rome during daylight. Because of traffic.