Posts by David Jones 3

It's all about the numbers

Once you get up above 1 TeV it doesn't matter so much whether or not you collide just matter or matter and anti-matter. The energy in a proton-antiproton collision is 4 GeV, about 1/500 of the kinetic energy of the accelerated particles. On the other hand, you can make millions of times more protons than anti-protons, so the "luminosity" of a proton-proton accelerator is much higher than that of a proton-antiproton collider. That's why the LHC doesn't use antiprotons.

They need the high luminosity to look for the "signal" of the Higgs.

There's a slight advantage in particle-antiparticle collisions in that the collision cancels all the quantum numbers of the particles and you get a cleaner result. If you want to make a particle like a Z boson from a proton-proton collision, you have to contend with all the quark debris, since the collision cannot turn quarks into something else. In an electron-positron collision, the result is pure energy, no residual particles. Proton-antiproton collisions are a bit messier, but still cleaner than proton-proton collisions.

Butter anybody?

"Land O'Lakes" is a brand of butter over here in the USA. Corporate sponsorship gone crazy.

His teeth are probably from "meth mouth"

Why stop there?

Just implant a phone in all newborns and anyone else who comes within reach. Europe invented totalitarianism (it was the Froggies, actually) and never seems far from reverting to type.

When will they learn?

Helicopters are massively expensive to run and lack most of the capabilities wanted. You can get better bang for the buck by tossing you cargo out the back of a C-130 on a parachute. There are even smart parachute systems available with independent navigation capability. Vertical landing OK, vertical takeoff not necessary anyway.

New York State is big! Really big!

You have just no idea how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is!

So when they announce a deal in Buffalo its got about as much to do with NYC as a deal

in Aberdeen has to do with Penzance. As near as we can tell, the Niagara-Mohawk hydro-

power does not directly power NYC, except insofar as everything links up to everything

else on the grid. In any case 15 MW would barely power a few square blocks of downtown

NYC.

Even 125 jobs are welcome up here, and if its our cheap power that got the contract, so

much the better. It certainly isn't the weather....

When they get the size down a bit we'll be able to say....

..behold your new overlords.

Talk about beating your head against a brick wall

Stability isn't the problem. It's power needed for a given payload. Smaller fans need more power than a large helicopter rotor disc. It takes 400hp to fly a small copter like the Cayuse with a 1 tonne payload. This thing might need twice the power, for less payload. So it can get closer to buildings than a copter? So what.