Blowing the wind.
May 27, 1931: Wind Tunnel Lets Airplanes ‘Fly’ on Ground
In a massive building covering more than two acres, the wind tunnel used a pair of 35-foot propellers connected to 4,000-horsepower electric motors. Air was sucked through large funnel-like structures that directed a smooth flow of air past the staging area where airplanes, helicopters, race cars and even a Navy SEAL submarine were tested.
GPS is getting an $8-billion upgrade
[S]cientists and engineers — including those at a sprawling satellite-making factory in El Segundo — are developing an $8-billion GPS upgrade that will make the system more reliable, more widespread and much more accurate.
The new system is designed to pinpoint someone’s location within an arm’s length, compared with a margin of error of 20 feet or more today. With that kind of precision, a GPS-enabled mobile phone could guide you right to the front steps of Starbucks, rather than somewhere on the block.
The story mentions that a predecessor of GPS was Transit, to support Polaris submarines. I went to a talk recently which mentioned other programs as well: there was SECOR (SEquential COllation of Range), 621B and TIMATION. I found a brief history of these programs. The military was testing various strategies for geolocation, and each had its strengths and weaknesses. You could have the satellites be autonomous or rely on ground stations; autonomous satellites need good space-qualified clocks, which were tough to come by in the 60s, but if ground station was lost, the whole system would go down. Orbital altitude was another variable — geostationary satellites had poor coverage at high latitudes, but you required more satellites as you got into lower orbits, with progressively shorter observation windows. (A low-earth orbit (LEO), like the ISS, would require of order 100 satellites for good coverage) And various communication strategies could be employed.
They were able to draw on the experiences of each program and come up with a system that seems to have worked out pretty well.
No, not what you might be thinking.
Hitting a golf ball. Or, in the lab frame, a golf ball hitting a surface. At 150 mph (about 250 kph).
Ah, those sweet curvaceous normal modes.
For me the first few frames are wonky, so for completeness here’s a gif of the same footage
In this unique time-lapse video created from thousands of individual frames, photographers Scott Andrews, Stan Jirman and Philip Scott Andrews condense six weeks of painstaking work into three minutes, 52 seconds
The required reading/viewing apparently did not include the Tacoma Narrows Bridge for the Russian engineers who built this
The bridge across Volga river is 1260 meters long and 32 meters wide. It was opened less than a year ago in October 2009.
Paintball guns: spool valve vs poppet valve
Rube Goldberg device (full-screen version — it’s modular — complete with annoying music)
A toy I’ve seen. Not sure if/where this is incorporated in functioning machines.
Radial engine and Wankel rotary engine (more engines at a site to which I’ve previously linked)
Geroter aka “Generated Rotor”
Air Force may suffer collateral damage from PS3 firmware update
Another grotesque waste of taxpayer dollars? Exactly the opposite, according to research lab staff. Off-the-shelf PS3s could take advantage of Sony’s hardware subsidy to get powerful Cell processors more cheaply than via any other solution.
I thought it was mildly interesting that Sony sells the hardware at a loss because they expect you to buy games, and here we have customer who will never buy any games, buying many consoles. I’m sure this is completely unrelated: Sony Tumbles After Forecasts Miss Analyst Estimates
13 Things That Saved Apollo 13
If the explosion happened earlier (and assuming it would have occurred after Apollo 13 left Earth orbit), the distance and time to get back to Earth would have been so great that there wouldn’t have been sufficient power, water and oxygen for the crew to survive. Had it happened much later, perhaps after astronauts Jim Lovell and Fred Haise had already descended to the lunar surface, there would not have been the opportunity to use the lunar lander as a lifeboat.
…
But this was not the first time the crew had been ordered to stir the tank. It was the fifth time during the mission.
Links to the other 12 things are in the post.
I just got a new iPod Touch. My old iPod — purchased before the touch was on the market — is suffering from rapid battery depletion, and isn’t going to serve its purpose of distracting me for a long period of time on an upcoming trip to the left coast. So I decided to buy myself a present. It’s my birthday, and besides, I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and, doggone it, people like me! Even after playing with it for only a short time, I found myself thinking that the whole web-surfing experience would be so much better with a larger screen and omigod. I’ve just purchased a gateway gadget, and addiction is imminent. I expect I’ll be jonesing for an iPad before long. But not before I rant a little.
Which brings to mind a number of articles I’ve read over the years, usually appearing in bunches whenever a new product has hit the market, which have tried to convince me that Apple actually sucks, and I’m just a victim of a slick marketing campaign. Yeah, right. The hypnosis must be very good, because I keep buying, which makes me a fanboy in the mind of many critics, in whose world there are two types of people: those who loathe Apple, and fanboys who unquestioningly buy the products, despite the fact that they suck. And I just don’t get it.
I bought a sports car because I wanted a sports car and is (for all practical purposes) a two-seater. Trying to convince me that I’ve been duped, and that I don’t love my sports car — and I couldn’t possibly enjoy it, because it has insufficient seating — seems pretty stupid. If I had wanted or needed a car that seats four or eight, I would have gotten a sedan or a minivan. If I had purchased a sports car knowing that I needed more seating capacity, I would be an idiot. But if you think I bought it because I was taken in by some glitzy ad, I think you have misjudged things. Sucky products suck because they don’t work the way they are supposed to, and good products do. That’s the dividing line. My car doesn’t have a trailer hitch, but that’s because it’s not designed to haul a trailer, not because it’s a shoddy product.
The Lab Lemming tells us we shouldn’t be afraid of laser isotope separation of Uranium, and then tells us what we should really be scared of.
[T]he critics of this planned laser separation technique don’t even explain how they expect proliferation to happen. It is just a vague sentiment that if this particular nuclear technology works, it will somehow spread to the hands of the bad guys.
