Wednesday, April 22, 2009

 

Wormhole camera again...

Just found out Arthur C. Clarke actually had a short story about this concept, it's called "The Light of Other Days". Sounds like a neat read, I might have to find it. But the idea came up because I'm seeing weird stuff. It's either I'm some wierd experiment subject (cue X-files music) or I'm just too sleep deprived. But why or who the hell would want to do wormhole pics of somebody insignificant as myself? (Unless it is myself, but that would still be odd.) I think I'll argue the latter option of sleep deprivation, but I still find the principle of it to be a tad intriguing.

Edit:
Turns out its a whole book, and not just a short story. I'm just wondering why I haven't heard about it earlier. I'm going to have to see if the library has that one. :)

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Tuesday, April 21, 2009

 

Destructive styrofoam rifle?

I was bored and came up with an idea for using NERF-style foam in an air powered equivalent to a standard firearm rifle. And thus call it a compressed air foam sabot (CAFS) rifle. Basically you get the equivalent of a Nerf bullet, cut in half along its length, and put something nasty and metal inside the two halves. Then you load that into a 4ft long rifle with a 100+ PSI pressure tank and triggered by a poppet valve. The foam would do a nice job of maintaining an airtight and snug seal needed to accelerate an air-driven projectile, and would be plenty light to easily separate from the projectile after it clears the barrel. I think the thing could be as dangerous as a regular gun if designed just right, and the materials needed would be really cheap and fairly low-tech. Makes me wonder if anyone has built something like that already. Sounds like a project for some bubba with acres to goof around on and some beer bottles, cinderblocks, old car parts, and watermelons to destroy.

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Friday, April 10, 2009

 

What's up with Somalia again?

I'm wondering where the hold up is. If the U.S. can take out suspect buildings in Pakistan, which is a nuclear armed, and mostly amicable country, and do so despite their protests, then what is preventing the same type of action in Somalia? Note that Somalia isn't nuclear armed, and doesn't have a government with any major resources, U.S. relations, or political importance. If you want to stop the piracy, make some select buildings within the country disappear. We shouldn't be letting thugs armed with AK-47s and rocket launchers be calling the shots and restricting international waters. Also why not put some pressure on neighboring countries to do something about Somalia? It's likely affecting trade to them as well if the seas aren't safe for shipping. Certainly there should be some way of striking a deal that might get Ethiopia or Kenya to stop sitting around on their hands.

Before the point of making an actual strike, I'd suggest making a few dry runs with some carrier aircraft just to show where we can reach. If anybody really wanted to scare the shit out of 'em, put a formation of B-52s low enough to be noticed on a flight over the Somali coast. Make it understood that ransoms, hostages, and looted shipping aren't going to be worth what it may cost in return.

 

Jinxed, blacklist, or something?

Been trying to get through to old friends via email, and no replies. Its almost like how the shit job market has been for the last few years. Makes me wonder WTF is going on. It can't be from some stupid rant on the internet or whatever, could it? A random drawing that I thought was funny or freaky, but perhaps in too poor taste? (Not like I haven't seen worse out there.) Besides I'd suspect I'd get an email or some other message saying something if it's in their opinion that I really f'd up somewhere. I know I'd argue a subject if I saw some recent posting by a pal and I thought it was messed up. Treating somebody like quarantined plague or whatever is not the way to go about it.

At least I tried one friends phone and know the number still works, but the phone was breaking up. Sounded like a lot of busy stuff going on. (Hard to tell with some cell phones though.) Hopefully I'll get a call-back to see if he's just been too busy or if I really f'd up somewhere along the way. I'd like to know.

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Wednesday, April 08, 2009

 

The Cessna Incursion...

I'm sure enough people have heard of the incursion from Canada into the U.S. via a small Cessna aircraft. (It's been in the news alot.) But what I think is silly is how the news pushed the suicidal aspect, and were playing on the "suicide by cop" but with the Air National Guard playing the role of the cop. The way I look at it, if the guy in the aircraft were truly suicidal it would have been remarkably easy for the Cessna to nose dived into something. Instead, it wasn't really a suicide attempt but rather a probing of the state of current U.S. air defenses in regards to small slow moving aircraft. Otherwise there wouldn't have been the nice 3 point landing on a highway when he was done. He wasn't too much a direct threat (unless you count Madison), since for most of the flight he was out in bumfuk-nowhere farm-country. The real threat is the intel garnered by the incursion into U.S. controlled air space and the knowledge of how far one can go in regards to response time.

But now the tricky part is to figure out who's lackey the guy was. The background on the story sounds too fishy and doesn't make much sense otherwise.

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Sunday, April 05, 2009

 

Is this warp drive?

I just had a funny idea hit me when reading some things about FTL travel. I'm still only a layman, but what few things I could put together seem like they'd make some kind of sense.

First is that E=mc^2 equation. You know, the formula that says mass and energy can be considered to some degree to be one and the same. Then you take into account that mass has inertia to it. That is you move a chunk of mass, and it provides an equal and opposite amount of resistance. But is this the case with moving a chunk of energy? Say a photon? (Photons are supposedly massless, right?) You turn on a light or a laser beam, and neither imparts a recoil.

We should know by now that it is possible to convert mass into energy. That's what nuclear science is about, right? So part of this warp propulsion involves converting mass to energy. A particle accelerator should be up to the job.

Now the tricky part is, how do you convert energy back into mass? I'm not sure of the correctness of this, but I recently read somewhere on the internet that a singularity can do this. Supposedly when a photon hits a singularity, it creates a matter and antimatter pairing that re-annihilates back into energy. But what if you had some kind of magnetic separator at the boundary layer that could skim off the animatter half? Then you should be able to re-condense the energy into equivalent mass of matter and antimatter.

Here's how I'd say a warp drive would work, in the very basic explanation. Amazingly enough, it doesn't seem all that far off from the Star Trek version of the thing. (At least in regards to having a lot of high energy plasma around and antimatter.) First you run a plasma stream through a particle accelerator. At the beginning of the accelerator, the plasma is still more mass than energy relavistic to the drive device. So it will impart an inertia impulse upon the device upon acceleration. But at the other end, it's converted to pure energy. Then you redirect the beam back around. Since it's pure energy, it imparts no inertial impulse (it may cause heating, but that's random and doesn't fully oppose the impulse from the acceleration.) Then you circle the energy beam all the way back to the matter condenser. The matter condenser consists of some apparatus that contains a micro-singularity and a magnetic skimmer. So now you should convert the energy into collections of both matter and anti-matter. Then you feed back the matter and anti-matter into the plasma circut, and repeat. (Racetrack style. For all intents and purposes, it should be a closed loop system.)

The way I see it, this looping particle accelerator with a mass-energy-mass conversion is creating a differential. And the differential is with the inertial impulse that ties into the gravitic effects of mass. Energy doesn't have this gravitic effect from what I understand. So in effect, the device is like the gravity equivalent of a heat pump. You're moving gravity to one side of the matter in the device, and imparting an impulse upon mass while expanding it into energy, and taking the energy back in with minimized losses with a mass condenser. The cleverness is that the energy doesn't cause an opposing kick of impulse on the return leg. Instead of heat being pumped around, it's space. Or at least the gravitational effect thereof.

Either what I said doesn't make much sense at all, or it's absolutely brilliant. Still even if it's plausible, it would take some crazy energy and engineering input to make work. Would the resources that could make that happen actually be available?

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