Posts by imanidiot

azidoazide azide

I'm not even a chemist but since learning of that substance the name still makes the hairs on my neck stand up.

(For anyone that wants to learn more about way too much nitrogen crammed into a single molecule: the ever fantastic Things I won't work with blog

Edit: another one for your careful perusal: <a href='https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane>Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane</a> a compound that can be stabilized by mixing it with TNT!!

Re: "Actually, this is precisely the service you paid for"

At the very least I always go for the "here's what we just discusses, if I misunderstood something then let me know" email. That way they can't blame me if I misunderstood something (or more accurately, it turns out they were talking bollocks) and I have proof of what I was told.

Re: So, Voyager 1 is reaching the end of its useful life

Still operational according to Amsat reports (https://www.amsat.org/status/)

Interestingly it stopped working due to a battery failure (internal short), then started working due to the same battery failing again as the internal short was stressed enough by the continual sunlight power from the solar panels that it went open circuit and the panels could directly power the internal systems.

Re: A repeating pattern of ones and zeroes

While you are technically correct (The best kind of correct) nowadays gingham is nearly universally used to refer to the duotone checked cotton fabric. It's rare to find other patterns advertised as a gingham nowadays.

Re: Not difficult

But that's mostly because it means Deliveroo doesn't have to (pay to) vet (or take responsibility for) the actual workers. It means they can point to the one person they have the contract with and go: "Nope, deal with him". Which makes compliance checking or finding who the jackass was that assaulted a woman when delivering their food extremely difficult.

I also don't see how it would screw them here. Would just mean they have to actually hire people correctly (and know who they are) or make sure their drivers all get no more than 80% of their income from Deliveroo or Amazon. Especially companies like Deliveroo and such could very easily put that in their contracts and ensure that they allow/encourage drivers to work for other companies as well. From what I've seen most drivers are already using multiple delivery gig-worker apps at the same time (something most actually forbade in the past).

Re: Not difficult

The plumber is getting his total income from many more clients than just the one person getting his boiler serviced.

This is for cases where people like delivery drivers get more than 80% of their income from one company (like Deliveroo for example).

That just turns it into a straight up GDPR violation, so I do how someone eventually gets legally bitchslapped over it. Until that time, we'll have to suffer with manually disabling everything. I don't trust the "reject all" button anymore after finding out they decided "legitimate interest" meant "do whatever the frig you want but we'll call it legitimate"...

Re: The British 'Train' System

Most locomotives in the later days would have had a steam driven generator. Carriages could have wheel powered generators (and sometimes batteries, sometimes you'd just have no light when stationary) or in some cases steam generators driven from the steam heating circuit (Though I don't know if BR or it's many predecessors ever used this). Some countries also had electrical connectors to have the whole train powered from the locomotive generator (IIRC Germany did this for instance).

Re: "constructed digital models"

As far as I'm aware a lot of heritage lines (the ones not taken over from BR in more recent times excepted) use older interlock systems that rely on mechanical interlocks and things like telegraph and bell links, not relays, for block control. So it might be hard to test this sort of thing on those lines.

Because that would vaporize a lot of other useful stuff in orbit?

Re: Can't we just send a shuttle....

They are, but we don't currently have a way of actually doing that. Hubble isn't robot serviceable. For one thing the doors aren't made to be opened (and more importantly closed) by robot, requiring muscle power and a ratchet strap on one occasion. We don't have any vehicle or robot system designed for it available either (and designing such would probably cost the same as replacing HST outright), nor do we have a human rated system capable of performing such a service mission. There's been some talk of bringing a SpaceX Dragon up there to do the job, but it's not currently equipped or capable of doing such a mission. All service missions so far have been done by the Space Shuttle.

Re: Can't we just send a shuttle....

But unless they can service Hubble and insert replacement gyros and reaction control wheels it's very likely a boost won't extend the lifetime of hubble all that much. All it's current internals are basically designed to get to the mid 2030s anyway. We might get a bit more observing time out of it before it fails but it won't be much and the question is whether that's worth the expense, given we have JWST for deep field observations and it's expected Nancy Grace Roman space telescope will have been built and launched by that time too. What then is the added scientific benefit of keeping Hubble for maybe a few years longer, other than it's "celebrity status"?

Re: I'm actually on Musk's side on this

"I've been places where unions have done things that both the union members and the non-union members don't want to happen. Militant unions are just as bad for employees as militant employers."

US based I presume? That's a rare thing to happen in the EU. (And unions are losing members and power in general, at least in the Netherlands)

Re: Yeah > £60K to press a button.

You clearly don't understand what a Train driver does or what the job entails, so maybe shut up about it?? For one thing, it's fairly rare for bus drivers to have to get out of their seat to inspect the bloody smear that remains on the front of their bus and along several hundred yards/meters of track/road because someone decided they'd rather face the front end of something very hard going 100 mph than face living.

Re: Preserve the meaning of our personal past

The tricky thing is that it's hard to determine which (if any) of those "worthless" personal snaps and digital records turn out to have some value to a researcher in the far future.

Re: No-one..

There's plenty of "calling out" happening. But for all it's failings, so far SpaceX seems to be doing a better job in Starship/superheavy development than NASA is doing with Orion/SLS.

Re: significantly lower power degradation over time

Yes, there are other ways. The advantage of the RTG is that the Thermo-electric effect it uses means that it's basically a solid-state system. It has no moving parts to generate it's power thus it's pretty much maintenance free, can be highly vibration and impact resistant (handy when you're planning to launch it on a rocket) and can be completely sealed (handy when you plan to land it on extremely dusty places like Mars or the moon).

The downside is that the Seebeck effect is most efficient at certain temperature differentials. Get the hot side too hot and you're not getting any more power/voltage out, get it too cool (or the cool side too hot) and you also lose output below a certain threshold. Even though there may be sufficient heat to use for something.

Other options to generate power from heat could be basically any other form of heat-engine, be it a Stirling cycle or Stirling cycle, organic Rankine cycle, use of thermogalvanic effects or whatever else you can think of. It may be possible to optimise some of these to work over a wider range of temperatures of the plutonium as it decays, producing more power as it is still very hot but also being able to still utilize more of the residual heat as it starts decaying and it's thermal output drops.

Re: Boosting

IIRC they received 2, one of which is currently being converted to the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, but importantly it's being designed as a survey telescope since the NRO mirrors have a shorter focal length and thus a wider field of view so it's not a direct replacement of Hubble and is most useful for slightly different types of astronomy. Hubbles role in deep field observations has largely been supplanted by JWST though.

Re: Conrgatulations due

Prevention/mitigation of water-hammer I suspect