Recent content by russ_watters

I watched "Sneakers" last night just cuz.

Single axis means they trace one arc across the sky. The sun traces a different arc every day. I'd presume that the optimal arc for maximizing annual energy production is somewhere between maximum summer and maximum winter peak power.

So, am I to understand these are chemicals/reactions that could have been produced by life? On a planet we're physically scouring I don't think I'm going to find that sort of discovery compelling. If anything reduces my hope that we might find alien life in my lifetime. I had been thinking...

That was the first time I noticed a car being marketed to me. It kinda worked (I bought the car). It's fine, not like when I started noticing them pushing mini-vans on me...

Can you do that with sound, or any wave? Sorry, but the idea doesn't really make sense (and light isn't really a wave anyway).

A 17' span is pretty big too. This sounds to me like something that's illegal to do without a licensed structural engineer. So I'm locking this, per our rules.

That assumes all of the energy extracted is for condensing water. You can do something like that with a more complicated cycle/system, but for a standard air conditioning unit, if you start with saturated inlet air you still have about 2/3 sensible cooling and 1/3 latent.

This is relatively easy to calculate by hand. Are you familiar with the psychrometric chart? You can manually look up values in the chart (you should at least get familiar with it) or get them from a website with a form. You need absolute humidity and enthalpy. From incoming air enthalpy...

It's not a "holier than thou attitude", it's a true reality. That's not what I said. I said "near zero". It's certainly possible (not exactly zero) but it is so low as to be a waste of physicists' time searching through thousands of bad papers looking for a good one that may not exist...

There's really no way around the fact that the barrier to entry (being educated in physics) is required for practical reasons. There's near zero chance that someone who isn't fully educated and up to date in the subject has anything meaningful to contribute. It would be like a non-doctor...

We've gotten a bunch of such AI-fueled discoveries here. Only the moderators know about them though, since, you know, we're part of The Conspiracy. 😉

No, a "sled". Also, in case your question wasn't addressed; optimal glide ratio is a function of aerodynamic efficiency only. A heavier "sled" will glide at a higher speed, but the same angle.

Yeah, it's baffling that they didn't see it coming or even test for it.

It's really not, unless someone is over-interpreting the concept of freedom of speech, as I described before: it doesn't exist outside of government, so there's no problem if people/companies want to do censorship. There's nobody to require anybody to be impartial. Except, narrowly, for...

It is frequently misunderstood (in the US anyway) to be both absolute and universal. It's a cultural quirk.