cmsmith

Some confusion here about government research and patents. As a government researcher with patents, I will weigh in with an approximation of our patent criteria:

1. Increases the potential for commercialization of the technology. If you have an invention which will take effort to commercialize, companies are less likely to spend that effort without any patent protection. Offering an exclusive license on the patent can increase the chance of anyone doing anything with it.

2. Fulfill the goals of a collaborative research agreement between the government and a private company.

3. Further US manufacturing. The taxpayers pay us to do research to fuel industry in the USA, not Germany or China.

4. May lead to commercialization license. This is way down on the list, and total patent royalties amount to <0.1% of our budget.

I would guess that the NASA patent set represents cases where the patent did not end up fulfilling one of those goals, and they are releasing it into the wild to see if it does better on its own.

Doesn't every car maintain positive pressure? I've never seen a car that doesn't only have fans on the air inlets.

The other takeaway would be that Musk, unlike all those other billionaires, is working on things that are in the public interest. He generally wasn't the instigator for the govt subsidies, but his interests of "make money while making the world a better place" are pretty well aligned with the governments interests of "spend money in the USA while making the world a better place".

It seems like 'buying first stage engines from Russia' will have a hard time undercutting the 'reuse the first stage entirely' strategy, no?

I guess this means they're taking a "better to ask forgiveness than permission" attitude towards planetary protection? Musk is on the record as not being worried about contaminating Mars with Earth life, and it seems like a 2 year time frame wouldn't give them time to put together a JPL-style clean room operation. Is there anything that NASA could/would do to stop them from landing a 'dirty' Dragon on Mars?

We've been synthesizing one liquid hydrocarbon fuel for thousands of years; ethanol is pretty similar to jet fuel in energy density and combustion. I think the possibility that in the future we'll have cheap solar/wind grid power and use that to produce ethanol, rather than charge batteries, is more likely than people think. Ethanol production isn't terribly efficient, but if your input power is sustainable it doesn't really matter.

The shareholders are paying out of their personal wealth. This was expected and already priced into the stock.

Your link goes on to say, in a paraphrased quote corroborated by the NYT: "we approached them in the past for a similar story, and they didn't want to be involved in such a large collaborative effort, so we didn't bother this time around"

The NYT can't turn up their noses when they were invited to my birthday party last year, then complain when they don't get invited to my much cooler party this year.

Perhaps they had sold >777 by the end of the month, but they happened to send out their press release after their 777th sale.

Reminds me of a couple paragraphs in this [1] story:

>Over and over again, I'd listen to someone's story of how back pain meant they could no longer work, or how a shoulder injury had put them out of a job. Then I would ask: What about a job where you don't have to lift things, or a job where you don't have to use your shoulder, or a job where you can sit down? They would look at me as if I were asking, "How come you didn't consider becoming an astronaut?"

>One woman I met, Ethel Thomas, is on disability for back pain after working many years at the fish plant, and then as a nurse's aide. When I asked her what job she would have in her dream world, she told me she would be the woman at the Social Security office who weeds through disability applications. I figured she said this because she thought she'd be good at weeding out the cheaters. But that wasn't it. She said she wanted this job because it is the only job she's seen where you get to sit all day.

It's easy to denounce things like this as a burden on employers. But I think it's certainly better for society than having a bunch of people not working because in order to work, you need to either have a college degree or be willing to stand for 8 hours straight every day.

[1] http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

>Interestingly, when the clocks are synchronized, the common oscillation frequency decreases, i.e. the clocks become slow and inaccurate.

From the abstract of the referenced paper. Apparently the effort required to keep the clocks synchronized slows them both down, and they collectively keep worse time.

I'm not sure what you mean by outmoded here. Most listeners to public radio programming are listening over the radio, not by podcast. And I would argue that radio is a superior delivery system for most of the programs (everything but the weekly or bi-weekly in-depth shows).

>freshwater lake

Death Valley has no outlets (is endorheic), so it would be a salt water lake (at least after all the surface salt had time to dissolve).

Unless the inflation is caused by the government printing money.

If 10 citizens each have $10, then there are $100 in the money supply. Now the government prints $10. If no actual value was created with that $10, then the value of the dollar has to drop. Now all the citizens have $9.1 (real value) and the government has $9.1 (real value). This is the same as a 10% tax on wealth.

The costs of building and launching small satellites has dropped significantly since the 90s. People are also traveling more and demanding more connectivity, so it seems that Iridium may have just been a bit to early to the game.

>Nothing unexpected, sadly.

It shouldn't be too surprising that the version of the article you made up in your own mind said what you expected it to say.

Surprise - a central banker[1] wants to have more control over how people use our currency. Summers seems to be discounting the value of large denomination bills as a savings vehicle for ordinary citizens in countries with weak currencies. In addition to improving the life of your average (e.g.) Venezuelan, keeping the US Government associated with financial stability seems to be a cheap and effective way to promote pro-Americanism. My guess would be that the positive value of $100s far outweighs the value of inconveniencing criminals, but if it's the other way around then the proposal might be worth considering.

[1] Basically

1. New company comes in with VC funding

2. Uses funding to operate at a loss and undercut and outperform existing players

3. Growth slows because there are only a couple billion internet users out there. Raises prices or decreases value to try to find a profit.

4. See step 1

It's hard to see this as an efficient method for finding the best product in a free market.

My issue with GA is that they are definitely the sexiest/best known evolutionary algorithm in their class, so they get used for a lot of things that they're not really designed for. GA work best if you have lots of discrete parameters that combine in weird ways to determine fitness (you know, like DNA). I'm a structural engineer, and most search problems I run into have a smaller number of continuously valued parameters (like the locations of the joints in the car in the video). GA tends to try to swap parameters between the fittest of the previous generation, instead of looking in the area between those individuals.

The wood technology mentioned in the article isn't particularly new, but has certainly been getting more attention recently in the push towards more sustainable construction practices. In the bay area, most new mid-rise (3-8 story) residential construction goes up as a concrete pedestal parking garage with a wood structure on top - wood has a great strength/weight ratio and so reduces the earthquake forces you have to design for.

The biggest issue in going taller and to other occupancy types is fire. Buildings over a certain height (related to the height of fire truck ladders) are designed to burn out entire floors completely[1] without collapsing[2]. This is easier with steel and concrete, which lose strength at temperature but don't actually add fuel to the fire. What's been found more recently is that if you put the right additives in engineered wood products and make it a stocky enough shape then the wood will burn itself out even in a very large fire. But that information is new, and building codes are necessarily conservative. These things can also get awfully political, considering that there are separate trade organizations for the wood, concrete, and steel industry who all have a vote and want the code to say that their material is the safest.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Meridian_Plaza

[2] http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2015/03/11/san-francisco-mission-ba...

>In response to the charger network concern, Kelly said GM is one of around a dozen automakers committed to the SAE combo connector. Tesla is the maverick with its own standard, and GM has not said it would collaborate on a shared standard, and neither has Tesla in reverse.

I get that Tesla thinks they can out-connector everyone else, but it seems like a shared connector standard would be a huge bonus for all EV companies.

I'm also offering USD denominated insurance against the United States descending into anarchy.

The pressure at the bottom of the ocean is just equal to the weight of water above you. So every 1ft of tides produces about half a psi of pressure change (or 1 meter and 1000 Pa). My guess would be that the water doesn't matter so much, but what they're talking about is tidal bulges in the earth's crust and mantle.

>It turned out that all of those eruptions, from the Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, took place from January to June. The cause, she proposed, is Earth’s slightly elliptical orbit around the sun. That changes the strength of the sun’s gravitational pull on Earth during the year and, as a result, the magnitude of the tides that squeeze the planet.

I felt fairly informed amount about underwater geology, but the idea that the crust down there is so delicate that solar tides can cause eruptions was new to me.

>A hydrazine propulsion system is installed on the spacecraft for orbit adjustment maneuvers and orbit maintenance providing a delta-v budget of more than 100 meters per second for each satellite.

>Because OG2 satellites are launched in groups of several spacecraft, they require propulsion systems to place the satellite into different nodal planes to begin operations.

There's the answer, courtesy Orbcomm.

Maybe there was a secondary thruster somewhere to provide some separation.

I went back and recorded the release speed (km/hr), altitude (km) for each drop:

25960 626

25954 627

25950 628

25944 630

25937 632

25935 632

A circular orbit at that height is about 29000 km around; 25 km/hour of difference between release 1 and 6 would give them a separation of 6 degrees longitude/day, or ~50 days until the faster satellites 'lap' the slowest one.

Not any sort of rocket scientist, but I gather the strategy with these kind of LEO satellites is to just throw a pile of them up there semi-randomly, and count on at least one being in the neighborhood when you want to talk to it.

edit: Last paragraph is wrong. See my comment two levels down for the answer.

I must have missed it, but can anyone explain why Orbcomm wants 11 satellites in the same orbit? The stage 2 engine isn't firing in between letting the satellites go.

As you probably gathered from your references, concrete curing is a continuous process - every time a stray water molecule binds with some cement the concrete will get a little bit stronger. We use 28 days to call the concrete 'cured' because it's a reasonable time on construction schedules (why it's in an even number of weeks) and hits a nice fat part of the exponential strength curve. It's a bit like asking when a pile of plutonium is done decaying. What will happen is that at some point, the strength gains are so marginal that various degradation processes will cause the concrete to start losing overall strength.

But - the idea that the concrete is curing and will be finished in 50 years is fairly goofy. No one is doing high-temperature long-duration concrete curing research, but the idea that you can extrapolate the laws of heat transfer to figure out how long some bubble of superheated wet concrete in the middle of the dam will last isn't very reasonable.

Spain isn't that much farther away than outer space.

With sufficiently networked cars, you can reduce the following distance between cars and significantly reduce the drag coefficient.

(Obviously there are safety issues, but we're playing the 'cars are smart enough to make everything perfectly safe' game)