'Can you hear me now? Oh Peeple, you're so mean *sad face*. It's a leftist agenda!' This week we remembered Seymour Cray, memorialised BlackBerry 10 and got a peek at Elon Musk's new baby. So let's take a look at some of the best quotes from the past seven days. It's been a shitty couple of weeks for Volkswagen, thanks to the ballooning emissions scandal. But don't worry, the German car giant's board of …
It may be apocryphal, but the story was that Lord Weinstock destroyed the TV operation of GEC by demanding that they make sets with "fewer valves" as these were the most expensive parts. In the same way VW may have demanded that their engines meet the emission specifications in the US without increasing the cost; and perhaps some genius discovered a special test mode in the Bosch software and had a bright idea. It is possible that the Board really did not know, just as Weinstock didn't understand that valves were elsewhere being replaced by transistors. But in both cases, it was impossible demands from above that led to the problems. (As I recall in the GEC case they tried to put multiple valves in one envelope, and use the same valve as an LF and an HF amplifier at the same time. But the answer, as for the IC engine, was ultimately going to be to find something better.)
It is a version of something I have noticed in the interaction between engineers and economists (used broadly here). Engineers tend to not have any agenda when doing calculations or presenting possibilities, but while in the economists world every thing has. So when an engineer provides and estimate, or presents any other kind of work, to an economist, the economist thinks it is something that can be negotiated. Not of course realizing that he or she is trying to negotiate with the laws of physics. "No, I can't both make this solid steel and float."
This of course works the other way. When doing their calculations engineers take data presented to them as fact, even though they come from economists. Not realizing that when they calculate that something will be too expensive the supplier had added 200% on the prize on all building cost to have some room for negotiating. This of course screws both parties as it won't be built, cheating the engineer of the contract and the supplier of supplying the goods needed.
"I have a solid steel welded hull ChrisCraft Connie 55',"
However, Jake, you still seem unable to parse a sentence which uses the words "solid steel". Solid in normal use means that the material is continuous through the volume. Your boat is hollow; in fact if you scale it down to a foot or so the hull will be as thin as paper. Not what most people mean by solid. I have never heard anybody other than you describe a thin steel section as "solid steel".
Also, oh no you can't. You can make use of surface tension to prevent a steel needle from being wetted, so that it stays on the surface. That is not floating. Let me add a tiny quantity of detergent and your steel needle will suddenly sink.
Why don't you get one of your hundreds of physicists and engineers to explain these things to you before posting?
1) I once shared an office with a gent who in his younger days had designed such a televison for "Mad Man Muntz". One valve (possibly one section of a multi-section one, but none of that fancy Compactron stuff, too expensive), was used as RF, IF, and Audio amplification. Ask your Grandpa, or imagine three loads in series from B+ to plate. That set also featured nearly no adjustments. Decade boxes were used on the assembly line, then the appropriate fixed-value components soldered in. Labor in the U.S. was a good deal cheaper then. Of course, as things "aged in", they were a bear to repair...
2) "Will nobody rid me of this troublesome priest?"
A mechanic friend opinioned that it's going to be found over the next year that most if not all of the major companies are cheating on these tests.
He based this on the fact that certain 1L engines that are operated to the maximum extent of their performance envelope perform virtually identically to other companies 2.5L engines as far as emissions are concerned during tests with identical aftermarket cats fitted.
Which to be fair does sound a bit dodgy.
1L engines that are operated to the maximum extent of their performance envelope perform virtually identically to other companies 2.5L engines
Not so surprising. Engines, and in particular indirect injection gasoline engines operate most efficiently on full load and also have an emission minimum there. In hybrid vehicles this is used to lower the fuel consumption by artificially adding load over charging the battery. This is one of the reasons hybrid vehicles often sound "struggling", even under normal driving conditions.
Now, if you need durability, you might be better off with the 2.5l engine. Horses for courses.
Well, my Hybrid simply sends power from the Battery to the leccy motors when needed. such as climbing hills. There is a nice little display that shows there the power from the battery and engine is being directed.
If my experience of US 2.5L engines is anything to go by, is that they are gutless beyond belief. Their Auto Transmissions seem to make everything just soft and slow and well... crap.
I drove an Chevy Equinox and a Nissan Sentra last week. The Nissan was far more responsive and returned better road MPG. both had 2.5L engines.
What gives eh?
" Engines, and in particular indirect injection gasoline engines operate most efficiently on full load and also have an emission minimum there."
Not only that but two engines with the same output would be expected to have exhausts and catalytic converters of the same size, because they produce the same amount of gas.
(Incidentally there is no reason, cf. above, why a 1l engine should be in principle less durable than a 2.5l one, if it is designed properly. Wear is mostly caused by metal to metal contact and with modern oils this is much less of a problem than in the past. Because linear dimensions scale as the cube root of the volume, the stroke of the smaller engine is only a quarter less than that of the larger one, so at the same piston velocity the boost pressure only needs to be about 0.9 bar compared to a normally aspirated engine. One the other hand the reduced weight means that superior materials can be used at lower overall cost. Higher combustion pressures give better thermal efficiency, warm up is faster with a small engine, so less risk of acid build up in the oil, and the surface to volume ratio of the combustion chamber is bigger making even heat extraction easier and reducing differential thermal stress. In a world of CAD and FEA, where detonation can be controlled, the smaller the engine the better.)
> A mechanic friend opinioned that it's going to be found over the next year that most if not all of the major companies are cheating on these tests.
I'm inclined to think, at some point, we'll likely also find that various Petrol engines are also cheating (albeit a different set of tests...). If they're willing to do it on diesel, there's little reason they wouldn't also do it with petrol, so long as it leads to lower costs for them.
The logic is impeccable.
NASA is effectively a government department.
Everyone in the government is by definition a leftist since if they were not, they would leave for the private sector.
NASA is trying to get people interested in its work.
This will make more people want to work for NASA
This will make more people work for the government
Therefore, more leftists.
Now if NASA had discovered a big sign on Mars reading "Unless you believe in the smallest possible government do not attempt to land here", that would be different.
Here's the deal, folks. Any engine that burns more fuel produces more pollution--of all types. Engines that burn less fuel are better for two reasons: they cost less to operate and they pollute less. Any government imposed standards that forces engines to burn more fuel, for whatever reason, make the engines pollute more while making them less economical to operate.
This is fact. It is not all that complicated.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
