npts2020

Every year America's highways kill 10 times the number of people who died on 9/11, and in every bit as gruesome a manner. The overwhelming cause of this carnage is the fact that a human operator is easily distracted and unpredictable. The obvious solution would be to take the human driver out of the equation and automate the system. My question is what would be the best system of automation? Two possible solutions are to use tracks (like rail, monorail, or overhead systems), which are expensive to build, or imbed an optical or magnetic grid in the road (or beside or above) for onboard sensors to follow and translate for directional purposes. I would appreciate any feedback about the practicality of either system and ideas for other types of control.

If you drove the cars fast enough, you could get away with using one lane everywhere. Basically substituting speed for "bandwidth".

That is the whole purpose of automation. The same roads we use now could easily handle at least several times the current traffic volume.

Instead of hijacking this thread I am going to start one on automation of the highways.

There is no shaft, the center of the wheel levitates

Ok, but how do you get any work out of it without attaching it to something? If you have eliminated the friction between gears, that something becomes the main frictional drag in the system. Levitation is the easy part, using it to do useful work a little harder.

C'mon now its taken many years of tuff negotiating to get the "deal" we now have in America. All those who think American health care doesn't cost too much raise your hands.

It seems to me the "opposition" parties have provided little opposition when it comes to spending our money. The one thing that neither have done is to define an ethics framework for business and by which they themselves are willing to be judged and pass it into law. Just one question, can anyone define a single concept that every single member of one party or the other agrees upon?

Isn't business cycle just a kind term for when the latest business ponzi scheme gets out of control? Before the depression of the 1930's banks were so highly leveraged they couldn't even cover their depositors money, much less any investors. This led to the creation of the Federal Reserve to oversee the banks and insure small depositors. Now we have a similar situation where there is something like $500 trillion in leveraged debt, known as derivatives. Where has all of this money gone? Wellllll, it wasn't ever really there to begin with (only financial instrument to guarantee debt,etc).............the only real question is how far the lever can be extended before breaking? My impression is that the economy is more highly leveraged than it was in the 1920's before the crash. My biggest hope for avoiding a repeat is that todays economy is much more diversified and flexible. My biggest pessimism is that politicians will still find a way to screw it up, the recent Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 looking like a positive sign of it.

Climatology and the realization of how humans and other factors change the environment is my candidate for greatest advancements of the 20th/21st century.

Well... current mag-lev technology has trouble to change lanes. The entire track must physically move. It might be expensive if you need to physically move the road in stead of having a traffic light at each crossroads.

True, but even the smallest useful system will require a monumental amount of construction and engineering. Wouldn,t automation obviate the need for traffic lights (on the system anyway)?

You might significantly reduce friction in gear transfer but then your main source would be from whatever shaft your gear is attached in order to do work. Frictionless gears would be a very useful engineering device, though. Isn't the problem of keeping a mass centered in a magnetic field one of the problems in using fusion power as well?

Some lights take a while to go out totally after you turn them off. I would have thought there where better ways to (capacitise?) light.

Incandescent lights especially will give light for a brief but noticeable period after turning them off. In addition, your eyes continue to "see" an image for up to a few seconds after lights go out. The photons are dispersed faster than you can measure without very precise scientific instruments, even if the walls are covered with mirrors. If this were not true, why not just walk in a room of mirrors flip the light switch on and off quickly, and have that light for as long as you are there?

Interestingly, Obama has SO much money that he's actually purchased half hour tv spots in which he (presumably) is going to explain at length why we should vote for him. No, I'm not joking.

Yep. They even waited to start finishing game 5 of the world series in Philly till afterwards! Only about 15 minutes tho.

That's the kind of thinking I was hearing in 2000 when people said Gore vs. Bush was like paper vs. plastic

I don't know what else anyone would expect when the candidates all come from the same "business" party the only difference is do you want liberal businessmen or conservative businessmen running the country. Scientists don't have a chance. Your average scientist is more interested in making knowledge than making money and will never compete in an arena, where the main requirement for success is the accumulation of money, with businessmen who are basically professional money grubbers. As long as we have moneytics instead of politics, other voices will be shut out of the process. Why is it that nobody seems to know there are many third party candidates in this and every presidential election? If you would take the platform of every candidate running and show them randomly to people to rate from most agreed to least I wonder where Obama and McCain would actually fall?

Problem is that in many cases people are not emigrating to go join a new society, they are looking to take their society somewhere else.

Well I am willing to state here and now that nobody can crush me with typical air filled ballons no matter what they do (suffocation doesnt count) and volunteer as a test subject to try it. I get to watch you blow up all of those ballons tho.

Now if you make the trains car sized, automated, and have millions of them able to go nearly anywhere, you have just designed an entire transportation system for the 21st century that could be used anytime, especially emergencies.

It makes sense for the Dead Sea to increase salt concentration from evaporation and reduction of tributary input since it is fairly isolated, the Red Sea has about a 100k wide connection to the Gulf of Aden arm of the Indian Ocean, which makes me skeptical that evaporation could be the main cause there.

Talk about expanding horizons!

ParanoiA: So does this mean that if everyone in the country works really, really hard we can all be members of the wealthiest class of individuals?

I just wonder how long they can keep cranking up the money machine before it is broken altogether? The only reason I can see for giving a bunch of mismanaged financial entities money to loan out instead of just doing the loans outright is so they can skim even more money from the process before finally giving up the ghost when the mismanagement becomes so great (and apparent) nobody can possibly bail them out. The only problem with it is that the U.S. Treasury is likely to suffer most of the long term consequences. The treasury secretary has been given wide ranging powers by the Emergency Economic Stabiliztion Act of 2008. Corporations like General Electric and General Motors have already asked for money, with the yea or nay resting almost entirely to the secretary's discretion. My question is where does it all end and will oversight make any difference if all of our money is given away first?

Well, I bet I can give you a better description of pseudoscience than you can give me of what a "regular person with a regular job" is.

Imagine you are at the foot of a very high column of balloons. Apart from you, there is nothing to hold them up. If they are heavy enough they will squash you.

That is the real question. Would they be heavy enough before you ran out of gravity to affect them, it all depends on the weight and size of the balloons. If they weigh 1 gram each (most cheap ones weigh less) and you blow them up to 10 cm diameter at a height of 1,000 km, that is still only 100 kg of weight pushing down (ignoring other effects) over the surface area of 1 balloon. Seems to me you would likely initially survive being crushed in a balloon avalanche on earth no matter how many there were.

Fair enough, but so what?, I still don't see how this creates any confusion as to what the differences are between covailent bonds and H-bonds. One being an actualy chemical bond with electron sharing and the other being an electrostatic attraction between 2 molecules with dipolar moments. I think that they are pretty well understood.

I apologize if it seemed like I was saying that little was understood about those topics. I was really only trying to encourage the OP to take enough time to try and understand the subject and point out that research to better understand how to exploit what we know is still ongoing.

Yowsa! Saying the earth doesn't rotate is well outside scientific speculation with todays knowledge of the physical universe. Some of the posters have given good ways to test this with fairly simple methods, even if you can't trust NASA. Calling it pseudoscience or even speculation is putting it kindly.

DrP: It makes perfect sense, it seems to me that balloons would squeeze the air out from in between and be the same as a compartmentalized solid structure. The only way I could see anyone being crushed is if the cylinder allowed air to be squeezed out (like a cage or net), then it all comes down to how heavy the balloon is and whether you can stack enough before piling more on has negligible effect.

Well, two areas of research involving hydrgen bonding I can think of off the top of my head include hydrogen storage batteries and drug delivery systems, I am sure I could come up with more.