"Your goals should be to effect positive change in the world."
Should it? Why? What makes positive change a more valid goal than making more mans? (http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2481) And in turn, what's so morally bankrupt about the pursuit of fun? With a focus on the individual, it would seem to value human life more than simply measuring the size of the shadow you cast.
On the other hand, you've disregarded the possibility of continuing to browse after doing three things (or stopping prior to three things). If browsing is an endless stream, then facebook has to be followed by one of the other two, which is the angle he was working from. Depends how you frame the question and what assumptions you make; it's ill-defined right now.
Edit: On another note, in his place I would have sanitized my own history; a screenshot showing redtube and tube8 in the "visited" style is tacky, to say the least.
It's a bit misleading to flatly cite the 100km Karman line as if there was no room to debate "where does space begin?" The boundary could be lower: NASA gives out astronaut wings at 50 miles (264000 feet). Or maybe it should be higher: Orbits decay pretty quickly under atmospheric drag at that altitude, and drag is a factor even at ISS altitude, requiring a bit of fuel now and again to replace energy lost to drag. The point at which reasonable flying speed equals orbital speed (~100 km) is just one demarcation, chosen by convention from many possibilities.
>In tracking the sensors on each of the phones, we observed that the GPS in Nexus S could function up to altitudes of about 60,000 ft. and would actually start working again on the balloon’s descent. ... Maximum Speed: 139 mph
The unit shut itself off passing 600 at low speed, which is more restrictive than required. The rule is receivers that work above 60,000ft and 1000kt require export licenses as munitions (http://www.armscontrol.org/documents/mtcr), but there's no reason a phone's civilian-grade (unrestricted) receiver shouldn't work up high at that low forward speed. I suppose the most conservative possible interpretation keeps companies safe.
>"an angle" refers to any angle other than the angle directly from the sun.
So do these conceptual glasses have a way to find the direction of the sun, and adjust the moire patterns in real time? Based on the description, it sounded like it would always block rays normal to the plane of the lens, while allowing rays to pass through at any other angle. Rays from the sun will only rarely be normal to the lens, and so they will only rarely be blocked, without an active adjustment to change the "rejection angle." Short of that, I don't follow how the glasses can "tell" sunlight from ambient light, and I don't think it can be done without active logic.
That still won't work the way I think you intend. This will block light that enters perpendicularly, while passing some of the light that enters at an angle. The problem is that light entering at an angle is not aimed at your pupils. Allowing ambient light to pass at an angle only lights up your eye socket, while blocking everything (sun and ambient) that was bound to fall anywhere you could detect it.
I don't think that will work the way you intend. Direct sunlight is (on average) unpolarized. Polarized lenses only block glare off, for example, the surface of a body of water, because reflection affects polarization. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specular_reflection). If the design blocks direct sunlight via polarization, it must necessarily block ambient light to a similar degree.
Depends on how you look at it. Yeah, they're "worth" $100 apiece because they can be exchanged for goods and services "worth" $100. (Let the chicken and egg lie.) So it's $110 billion worth of cash that can't circulate. Good or bad thing? That's over my head.
On the other hand, they don't cost that much to print, only 12 cents. But there's 1.1 billion of them. So that's $132 million of work that's not doing any good right now. Still a good-sized problem, without considering the time and expense of sorting and replacing bad notes.
Well, 94% mortality and 6% for which there is insufficient data to draw a conclusion. We'll have to wait a while to be sure if any of them are immortal.
>The B-1 and B-52 also have low observability characteristics
I'd challenge the B-52 bit. The airframe had pretty well reached its final form by 1950. Radar was still in its infancy, let alone radar countermeasures. The plane is all radar-inviting angles (like the giant vertical stab), and there wasn't even an attempt to shield the engine exhausts from IR sensors, as IR homing weapons didn't exist at the time. I'd go so far as to say the B-52 is about as high-observable as an airplane gets.
Being predictable isn't easy to avoid. We put so much hardware in the sky, and quickly neutralize so many of the surface-to-air threats, that aircraft are far more likely to have a close call with another friendly aircraft than to be deliberately targeted. (Not true for rotary wing aircraft.) So they're predictable, because that's the easiest way to keep two airplanes from occupying the same piece of sky, because midair collision is the greater threat. There are other ways to deconflict traffic, since so little use is made of the real capabilities of modern electronics, but being predictable also allows military air traffic to fit into the civilian air traffic control system. It's a tradeoff, and following predictable procedures resolves it while simultaneously covering a lot of asses.
Of course, as soon as one sortie aborts for a SAM threat, a concerted effort should be put into finding the source (and redoubled if it isn't found but reports keep coming in). You can be as predictable as you like if you really do own the sky.
>Where in the Bill of Rights are you guaranteed the right to air travel?
Right here in the ninth amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
The ninth probably should have come first, because that worldview is far more important than any list of specific rights. A free man does as he pleases.
I either don't agree with your point, or don't understand it. Why is it a bad thing (and who is it bad for) to make money hard to track? I'm also pretty sure payment is difficult for far more reasons than just tracking.
Yeah, but I also didn't account for any sort of inefficiency in the electric drivetrain. 90% conversion efficiency is a good rule of thumb, and there's one step from house panel to storage, another from house storage to car storage, and one more step from car storage to motors, so you'd only get about 75% out of each joule that comes out of the solar panel. Even adjusting gasoline efficiency down to 20% on average, that's less than a factor of 2 off my first set of numbers. We're in the ballpark, close enough to know it can't fit on a car, and impractically large for a house.
Sure, the assumption that I need a full tank every day is pushing it, but that's partially balanced by the fact that I used a fuel-efficient car for a baseline. Someone who drives 100 miles a day with the electrical equivalent of 15-20 mpg would need significantly more. My point is that a fully-capable vehicle is an aggressive target for solar energy. Our houses use much less, so let's start by aiming there.
I stand by the approximation. 300 m^2 is about 17.3m on a side, 17.3 m in feet is a touch under 57 ft. Rounded to one sig fig because I'm not carrying any sort of precision through these estimates.
Edit: Or are you talking about the "60 feet square" bit? I don't mean 60 square feet, I mean 60 feet on a side. I suppose I could have picked a clearer idiom.
While I agree with you about decentralization, onboard solar cells won't ever do the trick. Even for a home-sized array, I'm not sure it can be made practical. Here are some back-of-the-envelope figures:
To really replace a gasoline-powered vehicle, an electric car needs a similar amount of energy at its disposal. My car (a 92 Accord) holds about 16 gallons of gas. Figure it's about 50% efficient, and gasoline holds about 45 MJ/kg, and that's about 1 gigajoule of usable energy in a full tank. So to charge my car (without running the house at all) I have to collect and store 1e9 joules during the daylight hours. That's about 12 kW, if it could run 24 hours a day. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cells), a solar system can produce about 20% of its peak rating, so I need a system rated for about 60 kW at noon, in order to average 12 kW through the night. Assuming a reasonable conversion efficiency of 20%, that means I need to actually intercept 300 kW of sunlight. Wikipedia uses a figure of 1000 W/m^2 in that article, so I'd need a 300 square meter panel. In units familiar to me, that's pushing 60 feet square. Large for a house, never will fit the car.
Such a large system just to charge a car seems impractical to me. We can tweak parameters and dramatically shrink that size, since after all I would hardly ever need to charge the car from an empty battery, but someone who drives a larger vehicle over a longer commute might realistically have such high demand. (We could also argue about the size of the vehicles, but this is America: Suburbans aren't going away in my lifetime.)
That said, charging the car overnight would use vastly more energy than my house does on a daily basis. Solarizing the house is getting more practical, especially since the grid's always connected.
The resemblance is entirely coincidental. The two words have unrelated etymologies. We might as well advise people to avoid words like "luck" and "truck," which are not technically profane, but obviously sound very close to a very bad word.
Should it? Why? What makes positive change a more valid goal than making more mans? (http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2481) And in turn, what's so morally bankrupt about the pursuit of fun? With a focus on the individual, it would seem to value human life more than simply measuring the size of the shadow you cast.