No one is saying it is money well spent, except you. But that doesn't mean you can't marvel at what it is. Pyramids are a terrible example of slave labor, but they are still impressive. Governments are good at spending money, every once in awhile, the product of their spending is very impressive...even if ill conceived.

>> ^messenger:

Defending a $320 billion jet program by highlighting its efficiency?>> ^GeeSussFreeK:
>> ^robbersdog49:
I'm not seeing anything impressive about this. The jet engine has been around for a long time, and the Harrier was doing this forty years ago. The only difference is the electronics controlling it, and you can see that in action in a £200 model helicopter I can control with my phone.
The only reaction this video got from me was a 'why has it taken them so long to do this and why do people think it's impressive?'

You could make the same comparison in computers, or cars. This isn't a revolution in planes, but an evolution. And is still thrilling to people who love this type of thing. Why would you see an action movie, seen one seen'em all? Then answer is you like seeing them. @Jinx summed it up quite well, it has a huge power plant enabling supersonic flight and maintain a VERY highly stable hover state without using as much fuel. Even with that huge power plant and strange mechanical and aerodynamic arrangements to accommodate vertical abilities, manages to be "stelthy".
The beauty of some things is the combination of abilities that are normally thought to be mutually exclusive. It would be the same as a truck coming out that can carry 2 tons and still get better gas millage than a Prius, very worthy to note. If NASA came out with a new shuttle that was highly refined and enabled 4 times as much payload into space, would you knock it because "shuttles are 30 years old"?

Defending a $320 billion jet program by highlighting its efficiency?>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

>> ^robbersdog49:
I'm not seeing anything impressive about this. The jet engine has been around for a long time, and the Harrier was doing this forty years ago. The only difference is the electronics controlling it, and you can see that in action in a £200 model helicopter I can control with my phone.
The only reaction this video got from me was a 'why has it taken them so long to do this and why do people think it's impressive?'

You could make the same comparison in computers, or cars. This isn't a revolution in planes, but an evolution. And is still thrilling to people who love this type of thing. Why would you see an action movie, seen one seen'em all? Then answer is you like seeing them. @Jinx summed it up quite well, it has a huge power plant enabling supersonic flight and maintain a VERY highly stable hover state without using as much fuel. Even with that huge power plant and strange mechanical and aerodynamic arrangements to accommodate vertical abilities, manages to be "stelthy".
The beauty of some things is the combination of abilities that are normally thought to be mutually exclusive. It would be the same as a truck coming out that can carry 2 tons and still get better gas millage than a Prius, very worthy to note. If NASA came out with a new shuttle that was highly refined and enabled 4 times as much payload into space, would you knock it because "shuttles are 30 years old"?

>> ^robbersdog49:

I'm not seeing anything impressive about this. The jet engine has been around for a long time, and the Harrier was doing this forty years ago. The only difference is the electronics controlling it, and you can see that in action in a £200 model helicopter I can control with my phone.
The only reaction this video got from me was a 'why has it taken them so long to do this and why do people think it's impressive?'


You could make the same comparison in computers, or cars. This isn't a revolution in planes, but an evolution. And is still thrilling to people who love this type of thing. Why would you see an action movie, seen one seen'em all? Then answer is you like seeing them. @Jinx summed it up quite well, it has a huge power plant enabling supersonic flight and maintain a VERY highly stable hover state without using as much fuel. Even with that huge power plant and strange mechanical and aerodynamic arrangements to accommodate vertical abilities, manages to be "stelthy".

The beauty of some things is the combination of abilities that are normally thought to be mutually exclusive. It would be the same as a truck coming out that can carry 2 tons and still get better gas millage than a Prius, very worthy to note. If NASA came out with a new shuttle that was highly refined and enabled 4 times as much payload into space, would you knock it because "shuttles are 30 years old"?

I'm thinking the bottom of the slinky hits the ground in the same time after dropping as it would if it was not attached to a spring, or if it were the bottom of a rigid object of the same weight and aerodynamics dropped at the same time.

The bottom ring is motionless until the compression wave hits it, then it accelerates faster than gravity to the average -V of the wave. They should do a video showing it next to a rigid object.

Tracklist

Alphabeat - Boyfriend
Alphabeat - Fascination
Bag Raiders - Shooting Stars
Black Eyed Peas - Gotta Feeling
Britney Spears - ...Baby One More Time
Capsule - Can I Have A Word
Chromeo - Mamma's Boy
Coldplay - Viva La Vida
Daft Punk - Aerodynamic
Daft Punk - Around The World
Deadmau5 - Raise Your Weapon (Madeon Remix)
Deadmau5 - Right This Second
Ellie Goulding - Starry Eyed
ELO - Mr. Blue Sky
Girls Aloud - Biology
Gorillaz - Dare
Gossip - Heavy Cross (Fred Falke Remix)
Gwen Stefani - What You Waitin For (Jacques Lu Cont Mix)
Housse de Racket - Oh Yeah
Justice - DVNO
Justice - Phantom Part II
Katy Perry - One Of The Boys
Ke$ha - Take It Off
Kylie Minogue - Wow
Lady Gaga - Alejandro
Linkin Park - Crawling
Madonna - Hung Up
Martin Solveig ft. Dragonette - Boys and Girls
Michael Jackson - Billie Jean
Nero - Me and You
One Republic - All The Right Moves (Danger Remix)
One-T - Magic Key
Ratatat - Shempi
Solange - I Decided (Freemasons Remix)
Stardust - Music Sounds Better With You
The Buggles - Video Killed The Radio Star
The Killers - Losing Touch
The Who - Baba O'Riley (SebastiAn Remix)
Yelle - Que Veux Tu (Madeon Remix)

I don't understand how the brakes can have any effect on the pitch while he's in the air.


They stop the wheels turning.

Imagine instead that there was just an axle and two wheels. If you hit the brakes, what would happen? The axle would start turning along with the wheels. The axle can't exert a force on the wheels without "feeling" it.

A car won't start spinning (its momentum is larger in proportion to the wheels) but it will get some rotational velocity going. As you see, though, the rotation will dissipate quickly because of other forces at play (there's a lot of aerodynamic silliness going on).

Accelerating is more complicated because it's not just wheels - there's an engine (which could be mounted in different ways) and in some cases a large flywheel involved. In some cases, accelerating could end up rotating your vehicle sideways in the air (probably not good).

Fucking aerodynamics, how do they work?

@westy

In that situation, however, you'd have someone else to spray it on for you. A coach or someone else. And I doubt they'd wear this because it doesn't seem all that aerodynamic to me. It looks very fluffy, not anything like the skin-tight suits that athletes wear.

Also, the more I think about it, the sillier a "booth" idea is. There's no way a booth can estimate your exact dimensions to properly give you a shirt, so you'll either end up with this in your hair, or have some form of tube top.

Also:

You:
"what are you on about vacume rapping ?"
"for example if u wanted to protect something as a way of rapping things quickly could be equivelent to vacume packing"

There's no way this material would be able to vacuum seal anything, it's a FABRIC, fabrics BREATHE. Even Astronauts space-suits have a layer of rubber and kevlar. Surgeons already have skin-tight gloves, it's a requirement, and how do you expect this to act as a raincoat when it doesn't repel water?

If you're in a survival situation, why wouldn't you already be prepared with thick gloves and a thick jacket, and even still, how would a paper-thin fabric retain enough heat to stave off either hypothermia or frostbite?

The only thing this opens up is field-bandaging, as anything else it basically flops.

Before you start opening up with more things it could do, think about that for a while. What practical use could it serve, and how would it achieve that?

If a solution is posted on the internet and everyone calls you an idiot, is it still a solution?

Rick figured that although a nut traveling DDWFTTW might be the simplest form of such a device, replacing the threaded rod with a wheeled vehicle would be more compelling – and possibly even less intuitive. He conceptualized replacing the device’s keel nut with gearing from a drive axle to a propeller shaft that would replicate the kinematic constraint perfectly. With the problem solved as far as he was concerned, he posed the new brainteaser on two internet forums, one for radio controlled helicopter pilots, the other for kitesurfers. Given the solution, Rick imagined people would find this clever.

Instead they considered him an idiot for ever imagining such a thing to be possible.

This is where the pointless brainteaser took on a life of its own. Science, physics and aerodynamics forums exploded. Sailing forums exploded. Flying-related forums exploded. It was silliness traveling at the speed of electrons. Turns out it’s serious business when someone is wrong on the internet, and boy did the internet ever believe Rick was wrong.

One interesting factoid emerged from the chaos. We learned that a Michigan University student posed this same non-problem – and a solution identical to Rick’s — in the 1940s. The student’s paper surfaced at Douglas Aircraft in the 1960s. Apollo M.O. Smith, the company’s chief aerodynamics engineer, and wind tunnel engineer Dr. Andrew Bauer went at it like Rick vs. the Internet. Bauer said it would work. Smith wasn’t convinced. Bauer bet Smith a dollar and went to work.

Read More http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/08/ddwfttw/all/1#ixzz0y2H81thY

>> ^entr0py:

>> ^Ryjkyj:
I love this attitude that people have sometimes. "I'm a pedestrian, so I have the legal right-of-way. Which means NO ONE can hit me EVER, because that would be illegal." This is why you'll see me riding my bike illegally on the sidewalk most of the time.

Doesn't that just make things worse for the pedestrians? Now there's literally nowhere they can walk without the risk of being run over by something.


Yeah, I don't live in a big city anymore so it's easy to get around in suburbia and not hit anyone. When foot traffic increases or I can't see around tight corners then I ride in the street.

Besides,I pose a lot less danger to pedestrians on when on my bike. I'm not one of those guys that wears the sweet little aerodynamic shorts and always has to be going down the street as fast as possible. And those guys piss me off even more, but not for any other reason then their own safety.

I respect bicyclists and I like that we're trying to integrate them into traffic more and more but (and this sounds dramatic) my 7th grade shop teacher was killed on his bike just a year ago commuting home from school. He was wearing a helmet, he was obeying traffic laws and he had about 20 years of experience riding around in traffic. But all of that means dick when some stoned sixteen year old decides, for whatever reason, to jerk the steering wheel to the right for just a fraction of a second... WHAM!, you're a pancake.

So anyway, whenever I'm driving down a rural highway with cars shooting by at 50 or 60 MPH and I see a cyclist hanging out into the lane (and that's his right dammit!), I still can't help but think the guy is kind of a prick for expecting everyone to obey traffic laws at his own expense. Of course, it's his life. If a cop were to pull me over on my bike for riding on the sidewalk, I would have no problem explaining exactly why I was doing it. Or explaining that I'm more than happy to pay a small fine for protecting my own life.

>> ^Asmo:
The problem with belief or lack of belief in the 'theory' of evolution is moot, by using the term theory science already admits that it has not been proven beyond doubt...
Hypothesis
Theory
Law


I'm not sure if this is correct asmo, at least as far as i understand it. You state those 3 like they're the stages of a scientific fact, but that's actually not true.

Firstly, when referring to scientific theory and law, there's no definitive proof for anything which might constitute a fact in the context i used.

Secondly, this ties into the first, the best we have for anything is a law - which describes observations that we have witnessed, or a theory - which is a hypothesis or group of hypotheses which can be tested and shown to be true and tries to explain why something is as we witnessed. The law states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, the theory tries to explain why.

We can't send stuff to a panel of administrators who put a stamp on a piece of paper and say "Yep, this is now a law, we will not permit the universe to disprove our quantification and understanding of this observation." It's not like some AD&D universe where we can check the back of the book for strict values and procedures. All we can do is spot patterns in nature and try to explain them to the best of our abilities.

I typed a bit more but realised i'm almost quoting this website which i didn't intend to do:
http://chemistry.about.com/od/chemistry101/a/lawtheory.htm

Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_law :-

"A law differs from a scientific theory in that it does not posit a mechanism or explanation of phenomena: it is merely a distillation of the results of repeated observation. As such, a law is limited in applicability to circumstances resembling those already observed, and is often found to be false when extrapolated.
Simplified: a law states what we observe, it doesn't try to explain it. It often is found lacking and as such we state boundaries for the law, as below:

Ohm's law only applies to constant currents, Newton's law of universal gravitation only applies in weak gravitational fields, the early laws of aerodynamics such as Bernoulli's principle do not apply in case of compressible flow such as occurs in transonic and supersonic flight, Hooke's law only applies to strain below the elastic limit, etc."

>> ^lucky760:
>> ^BURGNIEL:
Actually this does not even assume a vacumm.
This is exactly what I was going to say (except I was going to spell it vacuum). In a vacuum, everything falls at the same speed. Since both items being tested are the same size, weight, and shape, air resistance is nary a factor (however it would be different if it was a hammer versus a falcon feather). The only significant consideration here is the effect of wind on the fired bullet.


That's not really true (claims of air resistance not being a factor with regard to identical items moving vs. not moving). Throw an unpowered airplane at an appreciable speed and drop one straight down, and tell me that they'll hit at the same time.

I don't know enough about the aerodynamics of bullets to claim that they're going to get a lot of lift--in fact, the Mythbusters' test suggests that it's very small. But even that showed the dropped bullet hitting first. But large effects aren't just limited to airplanes, either. There are paintball guns that put backspin on the paintballs which give them lift and allows them to fly significantly further.

hahaha all of you couch physicists. Yea, the only force acting on the bullet in the "y" component is gravity. It's the same for both bullets. In fact the acceleration due to gravity is the same for a bullet and a bowling ball or a semi-truck and a feather (in a vacuum of course).

Now the spin of the bullet, while stabilizing the bullets trajectory in the "x" direction, has very little affect over the bullets fall. That's probably a little more difficult to understand. Would probably need a course in fluids and aerodynamics to solve that.

The harder thing to understand would be if I told you that if you fired a bullet from a rooftop straight down to the ground, or you fired it at an upward angle, due to the conservation of energy, both bullets would have to be travelling at the same velocity magnitude when they hit the ground (although direction at impact would be different, obviously).

Aerodynamics of the average reindeer..

>> ^cybrbeast:
Why did the technology die with him? Surely more could be built?


One person with extraordinary vision, coupled with technological know-how, engineering brilliance and the ability to get his hands dirty and plain-and-simple build what he imagines is a rare thing.

In the case of the Britten bike, this is a partial list of what made his bike special:

1) Partial girder-link front suspension with adjustable anti-dive properties.
-fork-type suspensions compress under braking and extend during acceleration, changing the geometry and handling characteristics of the machine quite drastically during the different driving modes. Britten's suspension design allowed him to control pretty much all variables of suspension geometry under changing load, making the bike behave however the rider wished.
- The rear suspension, while perhaps not as revolutionary, was a beautiful piece. It was essentially a carbon-fibre banana swing-arm with a linkage to the adjustable shock/spring assembly. If you look at the bike you'll see that there's no spring/shock assembly near the rear suspension, rather note the spring/shock assembly directly behind the front wheel- this is for the rear suspension! The front shock assembly is hidden in the front suspension linkage and cowling.

2) The engine itself was a stressed-member.
-While certainly not unheard of, Britten took the concept to an extreme, essentially eliminating the frame from the motorcycle. The front and rear suspensions essentially bolted directly to the engine, thus saving many kilos over contemporary designs. Take a look at any current MotoGP or Superbike- most use the engine as a partial stressed-member, but they all have frame members linking the engine, steering heads and seat-assemblies. Britten really only had a vestigial sub-frame for the rider's seat.

3) Well-controlled aerodynamics and fully-ducted cooling system
-Britten paid close attention to airflow over, around and through his bike. Look how cleanly the rider's body tucks into the bodywork. He paid close attention to details, notice how clean the entire assembly is- no exposed wiring, nothing dangling into the airflow, that incredibly sleek rear swing-arm and rear tire hugger. This keeps the airflow smooth and un-disturbed. Motorcycles aren't terribly aerodynamic machines in the first place, but a wise man once said God is in the details.
-The engine itself is a water cooled design, but where's the radiator? It's in a fully-sealed duct directly beneath the rider's seat. High-pressure air is inlet from the front of the bike, through the radiator and is exhausted into the low pressure area beneath the rider and above/ahead of the rear wheel. Greater cooling equals higher power potential.

4) The motor
- 999cc 60 degree V-Twin, belt-driven DOHC design, twin injectors per cylinder, sophisticated electronic ignition, hand-made carbon fibre velocity stacks, wet sump. The motor was designed to breathe hard, pumping out torque and horsepower (166 hp @ 11800 rpm- not sure about the torque figures), and run cool and reliably under racing conditions. Nothing here that any other manufacturer couldn't have figured out on their own, but Britten had the insight and the will to make the best motor in the world at the time. The 60 degree configuration was, I assume chosen for packaging reasons. Normally this configuration would have bad primary balance characteristics, but Britten engineered his to such tight tolerances that the engine ran smoothly right up to redline (12500 rpm) without using a balance shaft.
I'll also point out here that Britten wasn't above using someone else's part if it was better than he could make himself- the gearbox was from a Suzuki superbike, and the cylinder liners and voltage regulator (both of which failed at the Daytona race in '92- the latter costing Britten the win) were from Ducati.

5) Carbon Fibre
- While Carbon Fibre had been around for 2 decades or so at this point, nobody had used it so extensively. Britten used the material for bodywork, wheels, engine parts, suspension girders and the rear swing-arm. There is still no other bike, not even the current Ducati Desmosedici MotoGP bike, that uses so much of this exotic material. The stuff then, as it is now, was hugely expensive and challenging to engineer for different applications. Britten made everything himself, in his garage, figuring it out as he went. This kept the total weight of the bike to a hugely impressive 138 kg.

Keep in mind that he did all of the above in 1991 and 1992, with the help of several neighbors and one part-time machinist, in his backyard shed! He made the bodywork by hand, using a wire frame and hot melt glue, crafting the wind-cheating shape and cooling ducting purely by eye. He cast the aluminum engine parts himself, heat-treating them in his wife's pottery kiln, and cooling the heat-treated parts with water from his swimming pool!

Ducati, Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki... any one of these manufactures could today reproduce and expand on what Britten accomplished almost single-handedly. None of them will- there's too much at stake for them. It's far safer to stick with the tried-and-true, making small evolutionary changes over the years. A true visionary achiever (to coin a term) like Britten comes along only every once in a great while.

I suppose that this is what was really lost when John Britten died... vision, engineering acuity, hands-on knowledge, and pure will. Touched with a little craziness.