swansont

Just out of idle curiosity, how do they do continuous video with an SLR anyway? Does the mirror just stay put, or is it more of an electronic reproduction of the view through the lens?

I don't think this is an SLR. I haven't seen an SLR that does video (though I haven't really looked very hard)

cos(36) - cos(72) = 0.40347889260888592

No, it's 0.5

36 and 72 degrees. I don't get your answer even in radians, so I don't know where you made your mistake.

If I bought one of those I'd quickly run out of things to break.

Oooh. Maybe the lab needs one. Gotta brainstorm on this.

On a related note: The mother of all telephoto lenses

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/find/newsLetter/Mother-of-All-L-Lenses.jsp

"the ‘official word’ is there are "more than twelve, less than twenty" of them in existence"

So, build two radars. One radar can cover the blind spot of the other, leaving only a very small area near the wind farm blind.

I don't think that solves the whole problem — it's not a gap in the coverage, it's a volume of disturbance, so anything inside that volume would be masked. And radar systems are a tad pricey, I'd guess.

Why don't you guys go work for the military?

What makes you think some of us guys don't?

It reminds me of how conservatives deny global warming without having done any research or critical thinking on the subject...

The discussion might be read as a bit of an indictment of the reporting, which did not go into much technical detail. The discussion reflects some questions we wished the reporters had asked.

Swanson, any idea how to go about hosting a tangled bank?

Drop PZ Myers a note

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/02/tangled_bank_needs_submissions.php

It looks like they got a few more hosts lined up after the above plea.

However I am wondering, could some kind of device be put onto a spacecraft that would make up for these environmental inadequacies that might allow for such a thing?

A fan?

But, as Klaynos has already pointed out, once you have artificial gravity these problems go away. The acceleration of "I can't believe it's not gravity™" is guaranteed to be indistinguishable from the real thing by the Einstein equivalence principle.

Yes, we have. Threads will be merged.

"The present" isn't something that is measured on a clock.

That's what concerns me. There have been farms next to bases that don't have problems (most of them, from what I read). Now the industry is booming, generating more requests for licenses already this year than all of last year. Is the proliferation at fault? It could be, either because the sheer number is producing unprecedented effects or because [WARNING, POSSIBLE PC COMMENT] someone is losing too much energy revenue to these windy pioneers [still unsure why market pressure comments are considered "PC"]

One of the conjectures was that the original legislation was meant to derail the project off of Nantucket. Which would take pressure off of Kennedy, for example, since as a democrat he's supposed to be in favor of green projects. But not if it's ugly and in his field of view, apparently. This legislation gives some cover to that apparent conundrum.

I think we reached a possible conclusion in this thread (scroll down to post #23), which apparently is based on the axiom of choice

I may not be able to make comments either. It doesn't seem to be working... unless swansont's comments require approval or something.

I think the default is that the first comment requires approval and after that you're good to go (unless you link to more than two URLs). But I would have expected an "awaiting moderation" notice to appear; I've seen those in other blogs.

FYI for ecoli and anybody doing science, but especially biology/medicine in their blogs:

Science web carnival, Tangled bank

http://tangledbank.net/

"The subject should be on biology, medicine, or natural history. We will define those categories very broadly, and it's sufficient that you show some passion for the science of the natural world."

You just submit a blog entry by email, and they link to it at somebody's blog. You could even host the Tangled bank, and get lots of traffic going to your own blog.

I submitted No Sweat and it was added for Tangled Bank #98

There is also the skeptic's circle blog carnival for skepticism blogs. http://blogcarnival.com/bc/cprof_19.html

Have you tried surplus outlets?

One of my favorites is American Science & Surplus

http://www.sciplus.com/

I did a search on vial; there were a couple of possible candidates.

Their whole glassware section:

http://www.sciplus.com/category.cfm/subsection/4/category/42

LabX

http://www.labx.com/v2/newad.cfm?catID=116

There may be some more candidates here

http://amasci.com/surplus/scisupl.html

and, of course, ebay

Angry Harry? Sounds like a character that rat created in "Pearls Before Swine"

Maybe a cousin to Angry Bob

I think he's compensating for something.

I just thought of something. If the blades turn because of the wind, how is their turbulence stronger than the wind?

The wind is fairly smooth — comparitively good streamlines. The blades disrupt that, giving you more extreme pressure differences over shorter length scales.

From what I've read, certain metal blades can cause false radar readings. But there are plenty of turbines that don't use metal and plenty of plans to make them "stealthy" and quieter too. I don't know if buildings of a similar size create such interference anyway.

Ah, but it appears that it's also the turbulence that they create that contributes to the false readings. But there are wind farms that don't appear to cause problems. And what early-warning systems do we have in Illinois, anyway? Are we worried about an attack coming from Indiana?

I will often dream of someone I haven't seen in a while and sure enough, I will see them the next day.

I often dream of many monkeys typing, and then there's a new "reality show" on TV.

"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?! You stupid monkey!"

Of course one or the other can be moved.

Not to an arbitrary place they can't. Wind isn't available with the same favorable conditions in all places.

One question I have is this: are the turbines any more of an interference than a building of similar size?

You don't read blogs by mail. You read them on the internet.

Oh, wait ...

Does your head hurt as much as mine right now?

I just had a Pan-Galactic gargle blaster, so ... yes!

Apparently it was a trick theme.

Heh, Heh. The disappearing blog. That never gets old.

I was poking around and discovered that you can already find my latest post if you Google using the blogs tabs. It's been one freaking hour.

Also, if other places link to you, it improves your standing in certain search engines; I've added an "SFN blogs" category to mine and inked to those blogs on the RSS feed that looked like they had progressed past the "yes I can blog" stage. You might consider doing the same when you have the time.

Ah, but time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.

Douglas Adams

Maybe some thin gauze on a wire hoop?

i think this post should be in physics, the gravity

I didn't even notice that it wasn't. Moved.

Yes, I think so. Yours is available at http://blogs.scienceforums.net/swansont/index.php/feed/rss2/ (I think your permalink options screwed up the link on your blog) -- most blogs have a feed at /blogname/feed/rss2/.

 

There's usually a link somewhere, and if you use Firefox you can click the orange RSS icon in the URL bar to get to the feed.

OK, that works, but the link on my page gives a 404-file not found error, and I can't find where I can fix that.

edit: If you want to "advertise" your blog, Pharyngula is having a "Blogroll Amnesty"

Is there an RSS option for individual blogs?

<grunt> Thread reopened.

The thing about the acceleration is that two observers in relative moton won't agree whose clock is right and whose is wrong. Each sees the other's clock as running slow. Accelerations aren't relative — you can tell if you're accelerating — and you know that's the person whose clock has changed.

Thread really closed now.