In case you are wondering how a Wankel engine works, here is an animated GIF.
One of the things that might note is that this engine does not need valves, but you will also note that the combustion are is rather flat, and so has a high surface area, which makes for high thermal losses, and hence lower efficiency.
I had been wondering when someone would combine the fuel economy advantages of a hybrid with the fuel economy benefits of a diesel.
Well it’s Pugeout, whose 3008 Hybrid4 stakes out this ground.
In typical French fashion, their hybrid system is kind of offbeat, the 163 hp turbo-diesel engine drives the front wheels, with a 37 hp electric motor driving the rear wheels, with the road serving to keep the two drives in sync.
I’m not sure how it shapes up efficiency wise, it would appear that regenerative braking applies only to the rear wheels, but it does allow for the car to function in 4 wheel drive mode.
He is accused of stealing Goldman Sachs’ proprietary high frequency trading software, but one of the three counts against him, for unauthorized computer access, has been dismissed.
I’ve always maintained that HFT is actually illegal front-running, or at least it was illegal before Treasury Secretary Robert “Why am I not in jail?” Rubin got his hands on the regulatory regime, and as such, I have always wondered if there was a cover-up of some kind, seeing as how the prosecutors have admitted that this code could be used to manipulate the markets.
A twist in the case that I was unaware of was that Sergey is not the only one the Feds are going after on this, as, “Two months after Aleynikov’s indictment, prosecutors charged former Societe Generale trader Samarth Agrawal with stealing computer code used in high-frequency proprietary trading in the French bank’s New York office.”
I am beginning to think that there is an official policy of allowing “systemically important” banks to skim profits from the markets in order to bolster balance sheets that are far shakier than has been revealed, but they want to keep this technology out of the hands of the small fry, because it would make the flash crash look like a weenie roast if too many people got their hands on this technology.
Background here
You have to credit the Russian aircraft designers, this eleptical fuselage transport aircraft, dubbed ‘EkoJet’, appears to be an interesting way of looking at how to get a large number of people on and off an aircraft.
But man, it is one fugly bird.
The designers claim that the aircraft can carry as many passengers as the Il-86 (around 350 in an all coach configuration), but that it would weigh 80 tons less, or about 40% less than the IL-86’s 217t MTOW, which I simply don’t find credible.
The problems with the Il-86 were always its propulsion, not its structure, and a 40% weight savings seems to violate the laws of physics.
Once again, the Obama administration has gone for a maximalist position on IP, and they are looking at making radio stations start paying license fees to performers, aka a “public performance right”:
The recording industry scored a significant victory today with news that the Obama administration will provide its “strong support” for the Performance Rights Act. The bill would force over-the-air radio stations to start coughing up cash for the music they play; right now, the stations pay songwriters, but not the actual recording artists.
I will say that this is a basically fair, since web broadcasters, satellite radio have to pay these fees, and the status of Radio is a historical artifact dating back something like 70 years.
The record distributors love this, and the radio stations (rather unsurprisingly) hate this law.
This, in and of itself, is neither surprising, nor particularly interesting to me.
What is interesting is that the RIAA is trying to cut a Verizon/Google type deal on this:
Music labels and radio broadcasters can’t agree on much, including whether radio should be forced to turn over hundreds of millions of dollars a year to pay for the music it plays. But the two sides can agree on this: Congress should mandate that FM radio receivers be built into cell phones, PDAs, and other portable electronics.
The Consumer Electronics Association, whose members build the devices that would be affected by such a directive, is incandescent with rage. “The backroom scheme of the [National Association of Broadcasters] and RIAA to have Congress mandate broadcast radios in portable devices, including mobile phones, is the height of absurdity,” thundered CEA president Gary Shapiro. Such a move is “not in our national interest.”
This is really pretty absurd. If you have an MP3 player, you can play the song that you want, and not tune into the repetitive crap that comes out of the increasingly conglomerate dominated commercial FM airwaves, though I could see listening to a sporting event.
On a deeper level though, this is profoundly disturbing, because it shows how blatant the incumbents in various segments of our society have become in divvying up the spoils through as privileged participants in the legislative process.
If people really want to change the tenor of Washington, they should start by taking on this sort of corruption head on, and get to Republicans and Democrats calling each other names later.
Google and Verizon have released the details of their carve up the internet among the big players proposal:
Google Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. on Monday called for equal treatment of most Internet traffic while at the same time saying fast-growing cellular networks and yet-to-be-developed broadband services should be exempt from such restrictions.
Google and Verizon released a proposal arguing that broadband providers shouldn’t be able to discriminate against Internet content providers. Marcelo Prince and Amy Schatz discuss. Also, Dennis Berman discusses why bond investors are giving up on recovery and jobs.
The ideas outlined in the proposal put forth by the Internet search giant and one of the largest broadband providers stand in contrast to the Federal Communications Commission’s recent proposals on “net neutrality” rules, which would prevent companies from giving preferential handling to certain types of online traffic.
In Google’s case, the proposal’s endorsements of two-tier Internet service and a hands-off approach to cellular-based Web services represent a break with many other online companies, which have argued for strict neutrality in how Internet traffic is treated. Google itself previously expressed general support for rules prohibiting discrimination among forms of Web traffic.
This is a direct consequence of the tenor and approach of Barack Obama. It is clear that in internet access, the incumbents have taken billions of government subsidies, and used this money to cement their monopoly positions, rather than improvement access.
It’s why US internet performance and penetration* is the worst in the developed world.
These are not people who you partner with to get the outcome you want, these are people you defeat to get the outcomes you want.
As to the long term consequences, I’ll go with what Atrios says:
I’m one who thinks that ultimately the forces of light will prevail and the repeated attempts to carve out internet walled gardens will, over the long run, fail as killing the internet would… kill the internet. But the long run is a long time and companies will likely screw and gouge us over the not very short run unless the FCC acts.
So not hopey changey, and as I have said before, this sort of craven acquiescence to the incumbent players who screwed everything in the first place appears to be a core philosophy of Barack Obama and His Clueless Minions™, whether it be telecommunications, finance, healthcare, etc.
*That sounds dirty, doesn’t it?
One solution, which I have posted about before, is the swash plate radar (also here), and the Russians are looking at mounting an AESA Radar on a conventional (though likely beefed up) radar actuators, and now we have radar mount that uses two oblique rotary bearings, rather like the 3 bearing nozzle on the STOVL version of the F-35 engine exhaust, to get off axis performance approaching that of conventional planar array radars.
One of the advantages appears to be that it avoids antenna polarization issues, and another advantage would be that conventional connectors for power, signal, and cooling could be used.
The original concept would have required slip rings and rotary fittings, which would likely have been maintenance headaches.
Skylon is claiming that it will have its liquid air engine ready for test in 3-4 years.
Considering the fact that it’s really being run on a shoe string, I simply do not find this a credible timeline.
Additionally (top video) it’s reentry profile appears to be problematic to me. The knife edge canard appears to be in a weak shock on reentry, which means that the surface temperature would much higher than in something like a space capsule, or the relatively blunt edged shuttle wing leading edges, where much of the heating occurs in a strong shock that is some distance from in front of any structures, but I am not an aerodynamicist.
If you look at the bottom video, from a couple of years ago, where Richard Varvill, Technical Director of Reaction Engines Limited talks about a 12+ year development cycle with a demonstration of the heat exchangers in 3 years, that sounds rather more realistic.
The bottom vid is also a nice primer on the basic operation of the Sabre engine.
It’s called the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO),and USAID is spending $30 million dollars to train workers in Sri Lanka in order to outsource IT jobs from the United States:
Under director Rajiv Shah [an Obama political appointee], the United States Agency for International Development will partner with private outsourcers in Sri Lanka to teach workers there advanced IT skills like Enterprise Java (Java EE) programming, as well as skills in business process outsourcing and call center support. USAID will also help the trainees brush up on their English language proficiency.
USAID is contributing about $10 million to the effort, while its private partners are investing roughly $26 million.
“To help fill workforce gaps in BPO and IT, USAID is teaming up with leading BPO and IT/English language training companies to establish professional IT and English skills development training centers,” the U.S. Embassy in Colombo, Sri Lanka, said in a statement posted Friday on its Web site.
“Courses in Business Process Outsourcing, Enterprise Java, and English Language Skills will be offered at no charge to over 3,000 under- and unemployed students who will then participate in on-the-job training schemes with private firms,” the embassy said.
Oh, I forgot to add, they are also doing this in Armenia.
I don’t think that Barack Obama really wants to send your jobs overseas, but I do think that there are people in his administration are “strongly free trade” and they think that being “strongly free trade” means that agencies of the US government have an obligation to move jobs out of the country in this manner, on the theory that one day, eventually, these countries will develop a middle class that will buy the sh%$ that we make.
Still, if this is not on the front page of some right wing blogger in the next 3 days, I would be very surprised.
It betrays a level of political incompetence and arrogance that positively boggles the mind.
I’m going to check and see if it is on Slashdot, and if not, I’ll do some blog whoring with the story.
BAE* has released its proposal for the ground combat vehicle program, it’s a tracked vehicle with hybrid electric propulsion which weighs 53 tons in base configuration, though with bolt on armor, this can get as high as 75 tons, or more than an M-1 tank.
That is more than 10 tons more than a T-80 tank, and about 20 tons more than a Bradley, the vehicle which it is supposed to replace, before you bolt on the extra armor:
The base version is 53 tons. Going into a highly lethal environment? Then commanders may well want their troops to bolt on modular armor and storage pods that bring the weight up to 75 tons. Powering this vehicle that looks an awful lot like a tank, is a hybrid electric drive, technology that worries some in the Army who don’t believe it is sufficiently tried and true yet.
They are promising greater reliability and fuel economy, which is a lie.
The running gear needs to be designed for 75 tons, and the maintenance and fuel needs, even if marginally ameliorated by a hybrid propulsion system are going to be huge.
This is just nuts.
It’s unsupportable, and the logistical trail will be huge.
*Full disclosure, I worked on the Future Recovery and Maintenance Vehicle, FRMV, “wrecker” variant of the FCS–MGV† from 2003-2006 at United Defense (later BAE Systems after the Carlyle Group sold me to buy Dunkin Donuts).
†Future Combat Systems-Manned Ground Vehicle. These are the ones that are the tanks and APCs. As opposed to the various unnmanned vehicles, networking technologies, etc. that form the full FCS along with the MGVs.‡
‡Yes, I have worked everywhere. Maybe I can’t hold down a job, but more likely this has been my role as “technical hit man”, where you are parachuted in to take care of a specific need.
BAE Systems* has developed what it calls a liquid armo(u)r, that is supposed to be proof against bullets:
A liquid armour has been shown to stop bullets in tests carried out by UK scientists at BAE systems in Bristol.
The researchers have combined this “shear-thickening” liquid with Kevlar to create a new bullet-proof material.
The company is keeping the chemical formula of the liquid a secret, but it works by absorbing the force of the bullet strike and responding to it by becoming much thicker and more sticky.
The BAE scientists describe it as “bullet-proof custard”.
In theory, this is fairly simple, it’s a non-Newtonian fluid, and you can see this behavior with silly putty™ or water and corn starch.
Of course in practice, finding the proper characteristics, and my guess is that a lot of this has to do with the peculiarities of the interaction between the Kevlar fibers and the fluid, is the tough part.
Seeing as how a body part won’t be moving at more than about 20 m/s, and a bullet would likely be moving at more than 100 m/s even at the extremes of range, developing a material with the appropriate characteristics is certainly technically possible.
*Full disclosure, I worked on the Future Recovery and Maintenance Vehicle, FRMV, “wrecker” variant of the FCS-MGV† from 2003-2006 at United Defense (later BAE Systems after the Carlyle Group sold me to buy Dunkin Donuts).
†Future Combat Systems-Manned Ground Vehicle. These are the ones that are the tanks and APCs. As opposed to the various unnmanned vehicles, networking technologies, etc. that form the full FCS along with the MGVs.‡
‡Yes, I have worked everywhere. Maybe I can’t hold down a job, but more likely this has been my role as “technical hit man”, where you are parachuted in to take care of a specific need.
The UK has now unveiled its stealthy drone, the Taranis, and rather unsurprisingly, since the electromagnetic spectrum and aerodynamics work the same for the Brits as everyone else, even if they do drive on the wrong side of the road, it looks like just about every other flying wing type stealth drone.
You can see a few more pix here.
The Library of Congress, which has the power to create exemptions to the DMCA, has has made just released very significant carve outs, though to read the New York Times, it’s all about the iPhone.
You see, two of the things that are now allowed under the ruling are software to “jailbreak” the iPhone, both to allow non-Apple™ App Store applications, and to use the iPhone on a non AT&T networks.
Actually, this applies to all cell phones, but this is not a big deal.
What you also have is:
This is stunning. It is consumer friendly, good policy, and common sense.
I would never have expected any of the three things to happen with the US copyright establishment.
I must therefore assume that this was as a result of input from political appointees in the USPTO and Library of Congress, this is fairly radical for career bureaucrats, and as such we need to give the White House credit.
I will note that there is still a work around that Apple™ could use which would make non App Store applications illegal, by using the Sega strategy, which involved using a verification key (the letters S-E-G-A) which would load the banner message, “PRODUCED BY OR UNDER LICENSE FROM SEGA ENTERPRISES LTD,” before the program loaded (thanks for the legal research from DC at SP), which made jail-breaking the console a trademark violation.
I don’t see Apple™ doing this, I think that it would unleash regulatory and customer blow-back, but the legal precedent remains there.
Link to the official anti-circumvention rule-making.
Top Bay Only in Prototype, Production will Have Bottom Bay as Well
Boeing has now successfully flown a demonstrator for its slelent eagle, the F-15E1 demonstrator.
It has both extended and retracted a missile, and made a successful launch of the AIM-120 AMRAAM.
While these are significant, it should be noted that the system is nowhere near combat ready, with the time for opening the door and extending the missile being at least 10 times what you would want in real air to air combat.
Still, the aerodynamics involved, at least when flying straight and level at around 15,000 feet.
More significant might the fact that Boeing has secured an export license of the aircraft to South Korea.
It’s a low cost solution compared to either the F-35 or F-22, which is more of an indicator of just how the costs of combat aircraft have gotten completely out of control, rather than an indication of how inexpensive the F-15 is as platform.
I had to figure out how exactly this worked in 1982, when I borrowed my roomate’s sewing maschine, which he used primarily as a coffee table, and had to thread it and get it to work so that I could make medieval garb for an SCA event.
I thought that it was neat at the time, but I had since forgotten it.
I still think tht it is neat.
Click the pic for a slightly larger image.
[on edit]
H/t Roger Ebert.
That even in the phony metrics commissioned by the US incumbent carriers, the United States is no longer in first place:
The United States has lost the top spot in Nokia Siemens Networks’ annual broadband development index, the Connectivity Scorecard, to Sweden.
The Connectivity Scorecard is, as Stacey Higginbotham reports for GigaOM, a favorite measure of the telecom industry, since it paints the America in a particularly favorable light.
It’s gotten so bad that even when using the bogus metrics favored our the telco incumbents who took billions in government dollars and gave us nothing, we still cannot win.
It’s time to stop bribing the monopolists, and start actually instituting real regulations that require real performance.
The USAF is looking at an air launched missile to intercept ballistic missiles during boost phase. (paid subscription required, but you can find a shorter version here)
Raytheon is pitching something called the Network-Centric Airborne Defense Element (NCADE), a, “two-stage missile with an extended-range Amraam solid-fuel rocket motor as the first stage, a separation joint, and a second stage with a divert attitude control system and guidance-unit electronics and an AIM-9X seeker.”
It’s unclear to me what the range would be, but an AIM-9X (Sidewinder) missile seeker head does give us an idea as to the maximum speed of the missile: about Mach 2.5, about 850 m/s, because of the hemispherical seeker head at the front of the missile. (see picture of AIM-9X forebody courtesy of Wiki)
Beyond that speed, the drag, to say nothing of the heat generated, would be excessive.
It’s why higher speed radar guides missiles have a conical or ogival nose cone.
Well, if we work with the basic information for the launch performance of a Minuteman ICBM, 2 Gs at launch, this gives you 42 seconds until the ICBM is flying faster than the interceptor.
In reality, the time for the ballistic missile to reach mach 2.5 would be less, as acceleration increases as fuel is burnt.
This is not a viable interception time unless you know exactly when and where the launch is occurring, and you are close enough to make the intercept within 30 seconds from launch, about 25 km.
Also note that the Minuteman is an old missile, and newer designs, such as the now retired LGM-118A Peacekeeper, flew out faster, and were ejected from the silos with an expulsion charge at a not insignificant speed, so the interception time is realistically far less than 30 seconds.
This really does not sound to me like a viable platform.
2 weeks ago, we bought a Mazda5 mini-minivan, a 2009 with about 36K miles on it.
On Tuesday, with the temperatures well over 100°, the “Check Engine” light went on.
So, my wife calls the dealer, it’s still under warranty, after all, and is told that they cannot see her until Monday.
Well, I tell her to take it to our mechanic, Marks Motors in Owings Mills, and he puts it on a scanner, and the scan code reads, “loose gas cap,” which was probably created by a juxtaposition of an improperly installed gas cap, screwed up by yours truly, and the heat of the day.
So, this car, which has more electronics on it than all of NORAD did in 1967, has a sensor to detect a loose gas cap.
This is a good thing. A loose gas cap spews pollutants into the atmosphere.
But still I wonder whatever possessed the designers of the car to display this as engine fault, rather than flashing something saying “tighten your gas cap.”
Why send someone on a premature trip to the mechanic for a damn loose gas cap?
It’s a nice car, but this is a truly bone-headed human interface decision.
I still think that the concept has a problem: it’s designed to operate in the shallows, but a grounding incident destroys a career in the US Navy, so it’s going to be an ugly assignment for the CO.
Still, topping 43kts is impressive.
I am also wondering, with the crewing being so low, everyone is doing multiple duty, as is discussed in the video, whether or not it might have problems with damage control in a combat scenario.
H/t Ares.
