SCRAMSPACE scramjet

The USA's X-51A WaveRider has got some competition from Australia. Unlike the crap we get from NASA about New York to London in 15 seconds, these guys are talking about a space launch vehicle. The glib narrator wants his super-sonic airliner, but nobody else mentions it.
       They are planning a September launch from the Andøya Rocket Range in Norway, 200 miles North of the Arctic Circle, and 500 miles from Kristiansund, site of younger son's oil field adventure. There is also an airbase in Andøya. Back in 1982 an SR-71 had to divert there.

Resources

Found a couple of interesting things on the web:

• Wikipedia:Reference desk/Science If you can't find what you want on your own, you can ask a question, and if you are one of the faithful, the godz may deign to answer. Presumably there are reference desks for other topics as well. They list all the questions they have answered recently, along with the answers.
• PMC - PubMed Central A zillion articles on medicine. I dunno how useful it will be. I was looking at an article about sleep and I was quickly overwhelmed. The cool part is the way they display the articles. They fit the display to your screen, adjust the number of columns to suit, and the page down button takes you to the next page! All the web based text displays I have encountered do a real sloppy job of paging down, leaving you searching to find the place where you left off. 'Bout time someone got their act together on this. They also have a different method of displaying drawings. They will put up a thumbnail and if you mouse-over it, it will pop up the full image. It seemed to work okay for the few drawings I looked at, but I'm not sure it is the be-all and end-all of techniques. I've had bad experiences with mouse-over ads, so I'm a little skittish.

Pierre Borghi: How I gave the Taliban the slip

French aid worker and amateur photographer Pierre Borghi spent four months in shackles, imprisoned by the Taliban in a hole in the ground. But an opportunity to escape eventually came his way, thanks in part to the weight he had lost on the "Taliban diet".

Unusual story from Afghanistan: this one has a happy ending.

Ornette - Crazy

I don't think you could call this rock & roll. Jazz, maybe? In any case I like her voice. Kind of reminds me of The Girl from Ipanema singer. I don't think there is a bad tune on the entire album.
    This picture though, is a little disturbing. I mean there's basically nothing wrong with it, somebody's having some fun with a little face paint, but for some reason I find the resulting image just a little off putting, like whoever that is, really is crazy. Love can do that to people.

Social Security

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Social Security Act, on 14 August 1935. Found on The Contemporary Condition.

Social Security came up at lunch yesterday. I guess the new curmudgeons are getting old. Somebody mentioned that you can start drawing Social Security when you are 62. I didn't pay that little factoid any mind until I realized that I am going to be 62 in less than a week! OMG! Horrors! The world is coming to an end! We're all gonna die!

    Whatever, dude. You can choose when you want to start drawing Social Security. The longer you wait, the larger your monthly check, so the first thing you want to do is look at your life expectancy. If you are facing your imminent demise then it doesn't make much sense to wait. If all your ancestors lived to a ripe old age, you may want to wait a few years.

    There is a crossover point where the total payout from the larger payments overtakes the amount you would collect from the smaller payments, but started earlier. Somebody at lunch mentioned 82. My calculations show it to be about 78. In any case, it's basically the average age retired Americans live to.

     But simple addition does not take into account inflation or possible investment income. So if you have a retirement fund in addition to Social Security, any money you get from Social Security can reduce the amount you draw from your retirement fund, so that investment can continue to earn money. So I set up a spreadsheet to compare two examples, and depending on how much you think your retirement fund will make. From this I found the break even points:

• 0% age 78
• 1% age 79
• 2% age 80
• 3% age 82
• 4% age 84
• 5% age 87
• 6% age 94

As you can see, the greater the return on investment the longer it takes to reach the break even point. This spreadsheet does not consider whether Social Security will make cost-of-living adjustments to your payments.

Coherent 40 Watt CO2 Laser

Not the laser we were working on, but a very similar one.

Dennis & Glenn have a desktop size, CNC laser cutting machine with a busted laser. Epilog, the maker of the machine wants $1500 for a rebuilt laser. That's a lot of scratch for a couple of guys fooling around in the garage. Let's take a look and see what we can find. What we find is a Coherent 40 Watt CO2 laser that is put together with about a hundred screws. I think the precision mind set that is needed to make a laser work got carried over into everything they did, so don't use one screw when 10 will do. The laser itself is a chunk of aluminum about 18 inches long and four inches square. Most of it is heat sink fins. Lasers are not very efficient, maybe 10% of the input gets converted to output. This laser produces 40 Watts of infrared radiation but consumes something over 500 Watts. All that other energy gets turned into heat.
    We were thinking that if we took it apart enough we would eventually get to the glass cylinder in the center, but 75 screws later all we had removed was the RF circuit board and it's solid aluminum case. We were down to an aluminum block with one electrical contact point in the top center, one sealed tube where the air was pumped out and CO2 pumped in, and one hole where the beam comes out. We stopped at the end caps.
    The end caps (see picture) are kind of odd. It looks like there are two small cylinders about a half an inch in diameter in two holes. There is an 1/8 inch gap between the cylinders and the holes all the way around. There are three screws arranged perpendicular to the center axis of the cylinders. This looks like the mirror adjustment. Looking at the end caps it occurs to me that the cylinders are not separate pieces but are integral parts of the end caps. The gap between the walls of the hole and the cylinder appears to have been machined out leaving just a thin piece connecting the plug in the center to rest of the cap. Adjusting those three screws will essentially bend the inner surface of end cap. Since the amount of adjustment needed is minuscule this could work. I'm thinking if we opened the end caps all we would have found would have been the RF antennae inside an empty box.
    To get it working, I think all that would need to be done would be to pump in some new gas.

Arn & The Dowry, Part 2

Battle of Hattin

We finished watching Arn: The Knight Templar mini-series on Netflix last night, and I had another glorious economic insight. The whole deal about weddings and keeping women as chattel instead of giving them equal rights is all because women get pregnant and men don't. This might seem facile, obvious or sexist, but it's actually basic economics. Both men and women have strong sexual drives. For men there are no economic consequences of having sex unless they are legally bound by the chains of law. Women are very likely to be saddled with a child, a wonderful thing, unless you are on your own. Then it can be a bit of a struggle. Problem is people get swept away on a tide of emotion, think love will conquer all, but the world is a hard place, full of hard people, people who are more interested in their comfort than they are in your survival.

P.S. I kept seeing bits and pieces I remembered, but it wasn't until we got to the big battle at the end that I was sure I had seen this before. The movie portrays it as the Swedish version of Agincourt (ah-jin-koor), i.e. Swedish archers devastated the invading Danish army.
    The series also covers the battle at The Horns of Hattin in 1187 where Saladin crushed the Crusaders.