1:36 that's some incredible sound isolation. I wonder if they had a parabolic mic on top of a truck or something.

Quite the agile little plane they've got there!

In the Cessna I flew in with my dad at roughly that age, we were limited to parabolic arc "zero-g dives". But that was quite fun, and I still remember my dad letting me take the yoke and try them out myself (after he climbed to a safe altitude).

Get that girl behind a stick or yoke in a two-seater ASAP!

Indeed the lens does seem a bit spendy. For the specifications of the linked setup article, the mirror (31cm Protected Aluminum) runs about $2550 at Edmund Scientific.

We're faced with the same issue up here in Alaska. Instead of blowing it into trucks though we shoot it on a parabolic trajectory that lands it somewhere in Canada.

>> ^Payback:

>> ^shveddy:
See! See! I knew it! They're making mini black holes that are going to end up in long parabolic orbits through the earth, gobbling up a bit more of the earths mass with each passing until there is nothing left but a hollow shell. Aah, stop playing God!
Obviously I'm joking, but brownie points if anyone can tell me which shit scifi novel I read in high school put the idea of internally orbiting black holes destroying the earth in my mind. I can vividly recall it being a very important plot point to some book I've read, I just can't remember where I got it from.
Love these PHD comics, keep posting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos
The "Big Mistake of '08" would be a black hole that dropped into the earth.


In no way are the Hyperion novels "shit scifi!" I will fight people!

>> ^shveddy:

See! See! I knew it! They're making mini black holes that are going to end up in long parabolic orbits through the earth, gobbling up a bit more of the earths mass with each passing until there is nothing left but a hollow shell. Aah, stop playing God!
Obviously I'm joking, but brownie points if anyone can tell me which shit scifi novel I read in high school put the idea of internally orbiting black holes destroying the earth in my mind. I can vividly recall it being a very important plot point to some book I've read, I just can't remember where I got it from.
Love these PHD comics, keep posting.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos

The "Big Mistake of '08" would be a black hole that dropped into the earth.

See! See! I knew it! They're making mini black holes that are going to end up in long parabolic orbits through the earth, gobbling up a bit more of the earths mass with each passing until there is nothing left but a hollow shell. Aah, stop playing God!

Obviously I'm joking, but brownie points if anyone can tell me which shit scifi novel I read in high school put the idea of internally orbiting black holes destroying the earth in my mind. I can vividly recall it being a very important plot point to some book I've read, I just can't remember where I got it from.

Love these PHD comics, keep posting.

"There's one way on earth to reproduce ... weightlessness ..., and that's in this plane."

Or any other plane (or whatever) that flies a parabolic arc and drops with gravity. My dad has a civilian pilot license and was part owner of a Cessna 172 small plane. When I was quite young, I'd go up in the plane with him and he would do "zero-G dives", even taught me how to do it. Get to a good altitude, pull up to near stall, and then nose over and drop.

In a light plane with limited altitude ceiling you can't get 30 seconds of zero G, but we could get 5-6 quite safely.

There are times when your parabolic orbit around reality comes dangerously close before you swing wide again. You are SOOO CLOSE to getting it, here. There is no free market. Not in our lifetime. Not in any lifetime. Like all utopic visions, it's a fantasy; a fantasy used to manipulate people like you into subservience. Liberty for the rich. Tyranny for rest.

When free market principles are put into place (like lowering taxes for the rich, privatization and deregulation) they yield no positive results. If you haven't been manipulated, then how do you explain your support for policies that fail time and time again? It's not a belief system, it's religion.

In the name of the Market, Ron Paul and the Invisible Hand, amen.

>> ^blankfist:

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:
The free market crowd said that lowering taxes, privatization and deregulation would create jobs and grow the economy. We've done all that and we are now suffering massive income inequality, massive unemployment and recession. How many times do we have to bang our head against the wall before we figure out that free market politics don't work, never have and never will?

What free market is that exactly? I can't see a nurse for my medical needs without paying a doctor. I can't buy the drugs I need without a prescription. I can't cut people's hair without getting a license. I can't shoot a film without the cops shutting me down unless I have the tens of thousands the studios pay for permits. And on and on and on.
And don't blame a free market you and I've never seen in our lifetimes for the ills of the economy. The manipulation of interest rates, wall street bailouts and the housing bubble got us here to begin with, and that was 100% socially engineered. Time to renew your platitudes.

^this should be a top rated comment... Incidentally, I am reminded of a famous quote that explains why the government funds the sciences...

"That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does A Falling Tree in the Forest Make A Sound if There's No one There to Hear It, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles." Terry Pratchett.

Now... if you please. I have to go back to my copper box and do some experiments before my wife (el biólogo) wakes up...

Archimedes of Syracuse was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer. The solar powered heat ray he is credited with inventing is thought by some to be a myth - but it may well have functioned based on the results of several experiments over the years.

Archimedes' heat ray was supposedly used in the Siege of Syracuse to focus sunlight onto approaching Roman ships, causing them to catch fire. Some have theorised that highly polished shields may have been used to focus the sunlight, much in the same way modern solar thermal farms use parabolic collectors.

Parabolic mirrors were described and studied by one of Archimedes' contemporaries, mathematician Diocles in his work "On Burning Mirrors", so their existence and possible application was known in the same time period as the Siege of Syracuse.

Over the ensuing centuries, various parties have attempted to prove or disprove the existence of Archimedes' heat ray using materials Archimedes would have had available to him at the time - and also with more modern materials.

A test in the 1970's by Greek scientist Ioannis Sakkas using 70 mirrors measuring 1.5 metres by 1 metre set fire to a mock wooden ship at a distance of around 50 metres. In 2005, an experiment by students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology using 127 small mirror tiles at a distance of 30 metres from a wooden target resulted in a fire after 10 minutes of perfect conditions. A repeat of this experiment for the Myth Busters television series found Archimedes' solar powered "death ray" was unlikely to have performed as reported and that other weaponry available at the time with the ability to set fire to ships, such as catapults, would have been far more effective and likely used.

More recently, the authors of Green Power Science have demonstrated the solar powered death ray was indeed possible. Using just 27 ordinary flat mirrors of various sizes, they were also able to set fire to a model wooden ship. Under ideal conditions, the mast of the model caught fire in under a minute. They believe Archimedes could have had access to many parabolic mirrors made of highly polished metal that would have provided a more focused reflection than flat glass mirrors; and also the necessary manpower for a substantial manual "solar tracking" system to keep sunlight focused on the ships for long enough to set them ablaze.

http://www.energymatters.com.au/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=1006

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I was surprised how far the crowd noised carried, until I thought that the shape of the stadium probably acts like a parabolic antenna.

The whole point of the pro-life movement is to encourage an increase in Christian(tm) population to counteract the so-called population growth of the 'heathen' religions.

A child is born with zero knowledge of Jesus and other fantastical religious mythologies. They are programmed into it. You'd think a real god would instill an innate (even if basic) knowledge of divine origin within his/her creatures. Makes no sense not to do so. If you are a divine being who feeds on the faith of one's followers and had ultimate power in the universe over absolutely anything and everything... then why the fuck would it create a world as fucked up as this one? Thousands if not more competing religions, people killing each other over petty grievances, disease, suffering, birth defects, short lives, and an astronomically HUGE universe with a single tiny little habitable planet with a bunch of self righteous idiots who all claim to know what the BIG GUY IN THE SKY knows when they haven't heard a single fucking word or phrase from 'the source'. Of course they all claim they do hear, by default making them liars... whether they be ignorantly self-deceiving, or lying outright for twisted personal gain and profit (televangelists anyone?).

All rooted from a multi-version contradictory, violent, intolerant, unrealistic fantasy riddled tome that is more often than not cherry picked for tidbits of supporting commentary that agree with it's readers world view. The bits that disagree are conveniently ignored and dismissed as a vague parabole having some other meaning than in the horrific form it is written.

Yeah. God works in mysterious ways indeed.

If there is any one group of people who ought to be as interested as anyone, if not more interested than anyone in the care of the earth's resources and creatures, it's Christians. The Bible extols the wonders of the earth, the parabolic vastness of the universe, and the complexity and diversity of the creatures. Yet, for all the good theology which speaks to this creation revealing the sublimity of the Creator, so-called "christians" have repeatedly found ways to condone and justify the numbingly senseless rape of the planet.

The rest of the 'christians' stand by with cow-like complacency and believe that the 'Jesus-coming-back-soon' meme abrogates their responsibility to be good stewards of the people, animals and limited natural resources at our disposal. I don't get it. Just because it is eventually going away doesn't mean we have license to treat the place like it's worthless. Hell, we're all going away - we're all temporary - that doesn't make any one of us less worthwhile. Why not extrapolate that to the rest of the living room?

... no parabolic mics? : )