Posts by mwk
34 posts • joined Thursday 18th June 2009 12:33 GMT
Right, let's speculate!
You go up with the balloon, then want to use the gas for fuel. This will require several things. We need a balloon that can be deflated on command (plausible) , a controlled burn gaseous hydrogen rocket (difficult) and a main capsule that can control its orientation in the upper atmosphere.
Initial thoughts would be to launch the balloon up to a certain height, then force deflate it, compressing the gas internally within the main capsule. During this stage the craft will be in freefall, so the gas needs to be compressed as quickly as possible to minimise altitude loss. Problem: Heat from compressing the gas could lead to explosion, need study to find out how likely this is.
Once the hydrogen is compressed, we dump the balloon (with a parachute for recovery, balloons ain't cheap) align the main capsule and hit the burn button. This ignites our carefully released hydrogen fuel (some form of pulse rocket? Need to think about that.) and we burn for LEO. Do the rules specify what they're considering "space" to be? Anyway, once up, we release the satellite (Electronics chappies can probably do something with 20g) and hope it's somewhere vaguely stable for the next ~12 hours.
Recovery of the main capsule is a non-trivial problem left to the reader.
Posted in Amazon.co.uk takes on Tesco
It's a nice selection
but a bit pricey.
And so many are individual bottles! I want deliveries by the crate at least.
Posted in England versus Germany: Quaff real ale
The weather should be nice
so everyone should be relaxing in their summer suits with a nice G&T or a glass of Pimms.
What
no link?
Posted in LibCons bin £2bn of late Labour projects
SAR choppers
Was it another plan to save the British helicopter industry by spending three times as much as they would buying from abroad and just paying the key skilled workers wages for 5 years? If so, scrapping it might not be a bad idea.
God help you
if you're trying to find something that's deliberately misspelt.
Posted in Tories ask: Why BBC3, BBC4?
I don't know why BBC4 would be expensive
It only operates in the evenings, and STILL manages to show the same programme twice a day.
Posted in Hubble peers closely at Pluto
It's tiny, it's far away
and it's also cold. It's emitting fuck all radiation for Hubble to work with, so almost everything it has to go on is reflected. Again, it's tiny, and far away, so there's really not a lot of that.
You can only work with the radiation that's available.
To be fair
I don't think they've ever actually called that anything other than an alpha.
It wouldn't surprise me
if they managed to work in a bit about how you've bought a license to use the software only if it's installed from the specific disks you purchased.
Posted in IFPI wants another stab at OiNK
Holy fuck, that counts as an official report?
It looks and reads like a fucking media students coursework.
Except that a student would probably be marked down for the biased language and unreferenced blanket statements.
I'm guessing that those shuttle engines
have some fairly hefty export limitations on them.
With a permanent "war cabinet"
does that mean they can have permanent "extraordinary executive powers"?
Also, and rather bizarrely, I agree with amanfromMars. I'm not sure that's healthy.
They'll end up foreign built whatever.
Even with the cost of transportation and whatever other import cost bollockry they can come up with, it's just significantly cheaper to import from abroad than it is to build anything here.
You could probably make money by setting up a British company, taking whatever government cash is available and then importing all the turbines and staff anyway. Then once it's built, you sell the whole thing to a French energy company, pay off your loans and have a croissant and a glass of white wine.
Because otherwise they'll never learn how to?
They need controlled landings to put things on the ground where all the interesting stuff is. Boulders, craters and crevices do not make for good bounce-landing sites, but they're where a lot of the science is. That method looks obscene, but it allows for better placement and site selection, stops the rover being impeded by the landing gear or trapped on a landing platform and the rover's own suspension can handle any small surface irregularities.
Posted in Paramount prepares to scale Dune
Hmm,
suspiciously middle-eastern men fighting a guerrilla holy war against the people who have come to their desert in order to seize a valuable resource.
I'm sure that'll go down well in some quarters.
Shoot all the camels
Have a big barbecue.
I tried beta 4
Didn't actually intend to (apparently the Fedora team occasionally confuse "leading edge" and "unstable test version") and really didn't like it. I eventually replaced it after a week or so because the UI was annoying the hell out of me.
Posted in Intel: 3D Web to save HPC
@is this serious
It'll be serious once I exploit this "metaverse" to upload a deadly linguistic virus into the users brains.
Posted in Sony Reader PRS-300 Pocket Edition
That's all very nice,
but how long does it take to "turn" a page?
So, if I chip in a fiver
does that mean I get a cut of the advertising revenue?
Sounds like a way to get the public to pay for your billboards to me.
Posted in Brown declines to resign
The number of people is irrelevent.
If you get a million people to protest against the government, they will be a vocal minority who don't represent the views of the whole population.
If you get 10,000 people to stand up and agree with the government, it will be a clear display of the strong support present among the general public.
They use all of it
because if they didn't, someone would notice and they'd never get the funding for the next round of upgrades.
The optimal state for the modern physicist is always having just a bit more data than you have time to analyse.
It will just be easier
to wait for an environmental collapse, let a huge swathe of the population die off and then reconstruct a new society better adapted to the world that remains.
Chemistry is on the decline
because chemistry departments are on the decline.
Specialist fields (organic-chem, chem-eng, comp-chem, forensics etc) get siphoned off into other, larger, "more appropriately equipped" depts, or get split off into their own separate group, and they take most of the industrial funding with them. Fundamental chemistry is left to huddle in the corner, poor and unloved.
And if it can't make money, the university heads will kill it.
Posted in Nokia sues Apple over iPhone
@Lionel Baden
While the cynicism is traditional, and possibly true (this recession is a bit harsh, who can we sue to balance the books?), there's no reason this couldn't be the result of a breakdown in negotiations.
This section of their press release:
"Nokia has already successfully entered into license agreements ... including virtually all the leading mobile device vendors ..."
implies to me that they've convinced everyone else to hand over some wedge, but talks with Apple have broken down, so they're heading to the courts.
I was about to go apoplectic
but that was only because I read the title and thought Charlie Brown was involved.
@AC I don't remember...
12 years ago you weren't required to pay tuition fees at the start of the year, and universities hadn't started charging ~£3-4k for 31 weeks accommodation.
nana nana nana nana
BAT-MAN!
More like a giant iPod Touch
though the idea of someone walking along holding a 10 inch screen to their ear is appealing.
@ evilbob
It's not an ESA satellite?
It's not even an ESA launcher. Arianespace is its own commercial company that pays to use the ESA launch site.
Body Volume Index measurements
look like they'd make more sense, scanning the body in three dimensions to map the location of the mass as well, but the need for a big scanner cabinet will probably make it just too expensive.
The NUS is just shit
and writing stories about them only encourages them.
