Ethanol Powered Aircraft

On Wed, 23 Aug 2006 05:40:13 -0400, Roger
wrote:
And agreed. If we have the cheap power why do we need to generate the
hydrogen to run the cars.

Because battery technology is not sufficient... Hydrogen works out to
be the energy transport / storage mechanism... Existing vehicles can
be converted to work on hydrogen... Unless we can come up with a
battery type that charges significantly quicker than current ones and
holds significantly more energy, I don't see us getting away from some
sort of internal combustion engine... Yeah, fuel cells might be good,
but you still need some sort of fuel that contains hydrogen in it...

(PLEASE don't take this as a political rant. A scientific or engineering
rant perhaps.)

Roger ...

What we need is a national leader with the balls of a Kennedy who said in
1961 that "we will send man to the moon by the end of this decade (the easy
part) and bring him back to earth safely (the hard part).

While that wasn't something that really HELPED the economy, or that gave us
immediate technical gains (teflon and Tang notwithstanding), we did it for
the same reason that Isabella hocked the crown jewels and gave Columbus his
marching orders. It was something that had never been done before ... man's
insatiable desire to know what is over the far hill.

A generation of us who were drifting rudderless all of a sudden had a
pointer. Tens of thousands of us who weren't sure what we would be doing
that August started poring over college catalogs to see what sort of a major
program would put us on-line with our new national goal. Somehow I finagled
a triple major in electronic physics, math, and aerospace studies, which
coupled with my ham ticket and college airline job fixing radars and other
microwave gear put me right down the localizer to have a teeny tiny part in
the Apollo landing radar.

Unpaid overtime wasn't an option, it was expected. We had a deadline. We
beat Kennedy's challenge by five months.

And now are you all telling me that if we had somebody that said that if we
don't solve our energy problem that we are all going to be sitting around
our campfires in the dark in a hundred years that we couldn't solve that
problem?

Are you telling me that a generation of the finest and cleverest amongst our
young couldn't pick up the traces that we dropped almost forty years ago and
pull that wagon across the finish line ahead of schedule?

Are you telling me that if we took all the trillion$ we are ****ing down one
rathole after another and turned it to making the magnetic Klein bottle to
hold the fusion energy genie that we couldn't do it on time and within
budget?

I think not. It takes a single charismatic leader with a vision and a
purpose. I hope (s)he appears before we are too far behind the power curve
to recover.

Jim



Now all we need to do is develop a fusion reactor that works well and
develops useful power, something that has been eluding us for many
decades..

Nice rant. I did one back in March where I sent the wayback machine
to a few years before Kennedy:

http://www.elecdesign.com/Articles/P...rticleID=12217

Don

On Wed, 23 Aug 2006 09:47:12 -0700, "RST Engineering"
wrote:

(PLEASE don't take this as a political rant. A scientific or engineering
rant perhaps.)

Roger ...

What we need is a national leader with the balls of a Kennedy who said in
1961 that "we will send man to the moon by the end of this decade (the easy
part) and bring him back to earth safely (the hard part).

While that wasn't something that really HELPED the economy, or that gave us
immediate technical gains (teflon and Tang notwithstanding), we did it for
the same reason that Isabella hocked the crown jewels and gave Columbus his
marching orders. It was something that had never been done before ... man's
insatiable desire to know what is over the far hill.

A generation of us who were drifting rudderless all of a sudden had a
pointer. Tens of thousands of us who weren't sure what we would be doing
that August started poring over college catalogs to see what sort of a major
program would put us on-line with our new national goal. Somehow I finagled
a triple major in electronic physics, math, and aerospace studies, which
coupled with my ham ticket and college airline job fixing radars and other
microwave gear put me right down the localizer to have a teeny tiny part in
the Apollo landing radar.

Unpaid overtime wasn't an option, it was expected. We had a deadline. We
beat Kennedy's challenge by five months.

And now are you all telling me that if we had somebody that said that if we
don't solve our energy problem that we are all going to be sitting around
our campfires in the dark in a hundred years that we couldn't solve that
problem?

Are you telling me that a generation of the finest and cleverest amongst our
young couldn't pick up the traces that we dropped almost forty years ago and
pull that wagon across the finish line ahead of schedule?

Are you telling me that if we took all the trillion$ we are ****ing down one
rathole after another and turned it to making the magnetic Klein bottle to
hold the fusion energy genie that we couldn't do it on time and within
budget?

I think not. It takes a single charismatic leader with a vision and a
purpose. I hope (s)he appears before we are too far behind the power curve
to recover.

Jim



Now all we need to do is develop a fusion reactor that works well and
develops useful power, something that has been eluding us for many
decades..

Nicely done.

Jim


"Don Tuite" wrote in message
...
Nice rant. I did one back in March where I sent the wayback machine
to a few years before Kennedy:

http://www.elecdesign.com/Articles/P...rticleID=12217

RST Engineering wrote:

Are you telling me that a generation of the finest and cleverest amongst our
young couldn't pick up the traces that we dropped almost forty years ago and
pull that wagon across the finish line ahead of schedule?

Ya know.. I'm not so sure we could do that anymore. It worked back
then because we were still a cohesive nation of largely english
speaking people. Nowadays we are a conglomeration of dozens of
factions/groups all having their own agenda, many with no apparent
love for this country.

The WWII generations was still alive and well back in the 60's,
most of them are dead or dying now and what's left is a bunch of
whining socialists. If you now what finally brought down Rome
you'll understand what's happening to the United States.

"RST Engineering" wrote in message
...
Nicely done.

Jim


"Don Tuite" wrote in message
...
Nice rant. I did one back in March where I sent the wayback machine
to a few years before Kennedy:

http://www.elecdesign.com/Articles/P...rticleID=12217




I read them both, and I have one issue: "the youth of today". I know it is
an old arguement that "today's kids aren't interested", but unfortunately
I've had way too much experience to not believe most of it. In
rec.crafts.metalworking, one of the perennial discussions in the closing
down of school shop classes; some of the stories bring tears to your eyes.
A combination of kids not interested, parents (and teachers) that vow that
"no kid of mine is ever going to work with their hands!", to legal liability
issues. I tried to set up a program where several high tech companies would
donate surplus test equipment to schools, and the schools all told me "We
don't want or need that stuff, none of our kids are interested in subjects
like that". I'm doing my part (in the process of joining CAP), but in this
CAP area, several squadrons have consolidated due to a lack of interest, and
the squadron I'm joining has gone from 30-50 cadets down to 3 in the past
few years. We are going to ramp that back up, but to a large extent, it
isn't just the kids not interested, it is the parents as well.

Nope, sorry, don't buy it. The head of the department had a thick German
accent. THe best analyst was Chinese, barely spoke English, but the
calculations and insights were amazing. Japanese? Koreans? Vietnamese?
Hey, this was a Navy town; we had every nationality you could imagine
working in some aspect of the program.

Yeah, we all had an agenda. Toss the tin whore up there and bring her home.

Jim


Ya know.. I'm not so sure we could do that anymore. It worked back
then because we were still a cohesive nation of largely english
speaking people. Nowadays we are a conglomeration of dozens of
factions/groups all having their own agenda, many with no apparent
love for this country.

"RST Engineering" wrote in message
...
Nope, sorry, don't buy it. The head of the department had a thick German
accent. THe best analyst was Chinese, barely spoke English, but the
calculations and insights were amazing. Japanese? Koreans? Vietnamese?
Hey, this was a Navy town; we had every nationality you could imagine
working in some aspect of the program.

Yeah, we all had an agenda. Toss the tin whore up there and bring her
home.

Jim


Ya know.. I'm not so sure we could do that anymore. It worked back
then because we were still a cohesive nation of largely english
speaking people. Nowadays we are a conglomeration of dozens of
factions/groups all having their own agenda, many with no apparent
love for this country.



I don't think Jay was talking about those working on the program. More the
country as a whole. Today, the special interest groups could get together to
agree the sky is blue or that water is wet.

And political leaders with their pecker caught in the cookie jar to answer
those questions with "it all depends on what you mean by 'blue' and 'wet.'"

(Two particularly apt adjectives for the political leader in question, no?)

Jim



"Gig 601XL Builder" wrDOTgiaconaATcox.net wrote in message
...



agree the sky is blue or that water is wet.

I understand completely. I just participated for the last year (as the
teacher) to try and resurrect a dying vocational electronics program. I've
never put so much effort into a program with so little response. Yeah,
nobody wants to get their hands dirty. The hell of it is, I've got my car
in the Miata shop right now getting a radiator and water pump put in by $30
an hour mechanics and you can't find enough of them that know what they are
doing even at that rate.

Jim



A combination of kids not interested, parents (and teachers) that vow that
"no kid of mine is ever going to work with their hands!", to legal
liability issues. I tried to set up a program where several high tech
companies would donate surplus test equipment to schools, and the schools
all told me "We don't want or need that stuff, none of our kids are
interested in subjects like that".