Recent content by spacester

I remember hearing once that if you measure lifespan in heartbeats instead of years, most animals (or was it just mammals?) come in at about the same number, about 2*10^6 or something.

Generally, the "zero degree" point on an ellipse is taken as the periapse, which is the point on the ellipse closest to one of the two focus points. The angular position is then generally referred to as the "True Anomaly", which is the angle between two lines, the first being from the focus to...

Earthworms (order Haplotaxida, suborder Lumbricina) have a crop, gizzard and intestine. Food is stored in the crop, passed to the gizzard where it is ground up and enzymes are added, and the intestine actually extracts the nutrition. The intestine runs most of the length of the body, it has...

Is this the proper forum to make a complaint? Or are complaints against the rules?

Nice post. I do not particularly like your scale however. It seems designed to support a Red position. There are a lot of options in the neighborhood of 3 and 4. Terraforming need not be presented as nearly the same as xenocide. The reds will lose (yes, I read the KMS trilogy). They are in...

A question was asked, I assumed it was cool to answer it. Silly me. It would have been better to start a new thread?

Just this for now. My favorite first payload to begin development of the lunar industrial park: http://www.higp.hawaii.edu/srr/SRR-VI-presentations/Joyner-Rod-Power_lander_SRR6.pdf A power lander to establish a local grid with 250 KWe at 400 hz 3 phase delta, pick your voltage and 750...

Oh like wow man deja vu to the max dude I worked on a similar project in 1979/80! It was a Jimmy Carter solar energy technology development grant looking at phase change materials in a hybrid (active & passive) solar energy device. It was canceled by Reagan along with all the other solar...

The beauty of Von Mises stress is that in the real world "everything" fails by shear. That's why it has emerged as the favorite failure theory. Having said that, the world of material failure is highly stochastic - subject to statistical variation. So as good as the theory is, you still need...

I'm not at all sure, but I believe the Chevy Volt does just what you describe. I'll let you google it to verify.

w is for lower case omega, the angular velocity, in radians per second. When working with your homework problems, you will often be working with revolutions per minute. Showing how to convert to radians might be illustrative here. One revolution is 2*pi radians. Radians are said to be...

I'll be back later with some engineering stuff then.

I was not aware I was preaching. And you're not? No fury like orthodoxy challenged, eh? Forgive me for instigating an interesting thread. There seemed a shortage of such, but I'm sure that's just me. Major projects are not developed in a social vacuum. They need social context and a social...

Yes I was missing that step, but I left it to you to fill the gap and so you did. IOW I agree. Feel free to slap me if you truly think I am straying into SF territory. But I am very cautious not to, so I do ask that you consider that charge well before making it. I was delighted that this...

Hi sophie, thanks for being such a good sport. I read more SF than you did, so there. I was also fortunate enough to read a stern lecture from Harlan Ellison early in my reading career (this would be the mid to late 60's). Modern media has adulterated the nature of Science Fiction (the...