Rocket Man

wow, i didn't expect the green-gap to be filled so quickly! very promising

http://www.lackadaisycats.com go to the archive, beautiful pencil work, marvellous expression, hilarious story. (not science related)

yeah, just like these sorts of claims make Isaac Newton and many other scietists spin in their graves, it's probably a contributing factor to global warming. (now just stick a power plant on top and fuel the world on it's own shame)

the force will ramp up suddenly as the magnet moves down, you need to plot the force curve from release to impact. you can measure the force - distance curve with a dissected kitchen scale, it but you'd be better off finding the equation one thing that might messy your results is the magnetic feild induced in the metal as the magnet falls. if you drop a really powerful magnet onto a sheet of good copper, you'll notice it flips before contact. as the force ramps up, electrons in the metal begin to move, these make a magnetic feild that repels the falling magnet so it flips before impact

that's one of the reasons i suggested inductive kickback, low current, ridiculous voltage. suppose the cathode ray was entirely inside the sphere... no, wait, that wouldnt work either.

yeah, charge in culombs, force in volts, i was tired. the electrostatic charge is given by virtual photons (just the same as magnetic feilds) so it does propogate at c the bumping effect is a given when you use the hydraulic analogy and a charge connected suddenly to a length of cable will propogate immeasurably close to c

bernouli principle to do with air craft is based on the assumption that a pocket of air split by the wing re-joins at the back. has been experimentally proven wrong. it's really only the downwash that counts, kinetic energy moves a large mass of air down with enough momentum to counter the mass of the aircraft. since the mass is so great the energy required is low. (both sides of the wing produce downwash, the underside compresses air while the top-rear creates a low pressure zone pulling air down behind the wing) the bernouli principle expliains the venturi effect.

umm, libraries, 2nd hand book stores, dedicated refrence bookstores... why download? are you an entity stuck on the aether of the internet?

energy = force x distance. so what you do is get the equation for force, (or measure it) and plot that against the distance traveled on a graph (labeled in newtons and metres). the area under the curve is equal to the number of joules.

electrostatic charge, properly known as electromotive force. like if you have a pipe full of water, you can push water in one end, the pressure builds and some comes out the other end. if you shove electrons into a wire, the wire gets an electrostatic charge. if you then give the electrons a way out, they will go there. the electrostatic charge propogates down the wire at the speed of light. this can also be explained in terms of the hydraulics, if you shove more water into the pipe, the pressure propogates at the speed of sound in water. except that the speed of sound in the case of electrons is C

we understand how the machine is supposed to work, the water maintains rpm as it moves out the water pressure forces it up the pipes only to be put back in the middle where it further assists the engine wont work. answer these: what's to decellerate the water when it reaches the baffle? otherwise it wont move back to the centre, the same centripetal force that pushed it upwards will continue to push it outward against the baffle preventing it from moving inwards to be recollected. what accellerates the water when it re-enters the system? rpm is different to velocity. get on a chair that can spin just to illustrate my point. spin with your arms in, then move your arms out, and back in. you go slower when your arms are out and faster when your arms are in. this is one of the problems with your machine. you assume that the water will maintain a constant rpm as it moves outward, it wont. the water will maintain it's velocity as it moves out, an increase in radius means the water takes longer to make one revolution reducing rpm. the real world is a very boring place; you cant get lunch from nothing.

the term is "ohmic heating" the filament is designed to get white hot, hence the tungsten. metals have "delocalised electrons" these are responsible for holding the filament together via electrostatic charge. the voltage causes a few to leave from one end and be replaced at the other. if you move the electrons, the metal ions will move because the structure shifts slightly. the electrons do not move in straight lines rather they bounce around interacting with the metal atoms' feilds causing them to move in a random fashion. in kinetic theory, this is called heat. when you heat something up, eventually, the kinetic energy finds it's way into the electron orbitals and is released in the form of a photon when the electron orbital moves back to the ground state.

sorry, i thought you meant 20cm max radius, a square has a max width of ~28cm, so the optimum would be to concentrate the mass at the corners of a square of side length 20cm. try to get as close as possible to the 1kg, the more the mass is concentrated, the less the mass of the spindle effects the descent. if you had a winding arrangement with a pin such that it moves down a distance, then back up over and over again, unavoidable natural losses can be utilised. a counter weight can be used to lock a gearing system to vertical, the spindle turns relative to the counter weight, transferring the torque through the gears to spin the yoyo X times faster than normal dividing the descent rate by the gearing ratio.

it all depends on the voltage you run the cathode ray at, inductive kick back from mains ought to do something, keep one side of the coil grounded and you'll pump a fair few electrons.

i've got the algorythms working so far, with red/green glasses you actually perceive depth. it's basically a right triangle using the z and x axes to place a dot where the hypotenuse intersects the screen. taken from two vantage points, depth perception becomes childs play. it's not a mobile perspective, you can't move around in the frame. i'll take a look at openGL, sounds interesting.

does the yoyo need to come back up? i think you're getting stuck on linear inertia, radial intertia is more along the lines of levers. if the mass is concentrated around the rim and the spindle is 1 cm radius, the mass will need to travel 20x faster than the centre of the yoyo. so you then divide G by 20 to get your final acceleration, roughly 0.5 m/s. if the mass were closer in, the ratio is proportionally less so the mass needn't accelerate as much so the yoyo accelerates faster. mechanical dampenning is out... how about electrical dampenning... use an inductive load on a counter-rotating wheel. kinetic energy is turned into heat via ohmic heating so it's not "mechanical friction"

i mean perspective, like when you look down a tunnel and the back end appears smaller. stereoscopics basically means projecting the image differently for each eye so you actually look into the screen, much the same as 3d movies, i'm working on the algorythm now. i'll try to go with just looking down the z axis then maybe allow the user to look in different directions.

how about a dedicated cathode ray emmitter, much easier (and less suspicious than masses and masses of radioactive material). a negatively charged spike at the bottom of a low pressure insulating tube and an anode ring near the middle and the dome at the top. electrons are stripped from the cathode, miss the anode and charge the dome.

hmm, so it's the uncertainty principle all over again... i like it. i just programmed this in vb6, i used a fudge factor added to the distance, if the two objects are actually superimposing it reads force as if the distance were equal to the fudge factor. the only extra code is " + factor" on the end of the calculation for the distance we havent really answered the questions on this thread, "can you do one equation to map the gravity gradient?" the answer is yes BUT it's a 4 dimesional equation and must be recalculated for each position and rewritten for each interval. it is the sum of the forces applied by each other particle felt differently in all locations. i'm thinking about doing this 3d, any tips on simple foreshortenning or stereoscopics?

DIY-preamp + headset adaptor pulgged straight into the amp itself. all the others really depend on the quality of the encoder/decoder device in the mobile and stereo. fm is a live feed between the two and can be very clear BUT you get the same interference as any other station. the tape deck adaptor might actually be very good, the magnetic connection is a live feed, the audio resloution in a tape deck is roughly that of an mp3 file (8 bit, 22100hz), little or no interference but it really hinges on your mobile's side of the adaptor, mobiles have notoriously lousy headphone jacks. bluetooth is probably going to be the best, the mobile/mp3 is going to send the whole file no glitches or distortion, the stereo will decode the file in the same way the mp3 player does and puts it straight through to the amps so theres no transfer loss at all

you can optimise the program down to the point where you do (n^2 + n)/2 iterations per interval. where n=the number of significant feilds it's basically the "handshake problem" how many handshakes if everyone in a room were to shake hands. it'll end up as triangular numbers. you can cut a few more lines out by writing distance (d) = root(x^2+y^2+z^2) force(x) = x/(distance^3) because you're essentailly writing x component of the unit vector = x/d force = 1/(d^2) x component of force = force * x component of unit vector so it follows that 1/(d^2) * x/d = x/(d^3) what do you do to prevent the objects superimposing? i often get readings like d=0 so i get undefined values for force. should i add 1 to the distance before i determine the force?

try using an estes rocket with 4 photodiodes in the nose cone controlling electromagnets at the top of the fins, use wire through the fuselage and down the fins with a small kink inside the body which the magents move, rotating the fins a few degrees. fins on oppoisite sides share the same motion through the wire. the photodiodes would have filters on them so that they only see the frequency given by the target, each one facing forward with a shroud so they see different areas. the rocket spining wont be a problem because the fins will change as the diodes see different things and parabolic motion is taken out of the equation because of the way the rocket flies. you'll inflict huge amounts of damage with a hit because of the amount the batteries weigh. this gets rid of costly processors and replaces them with simple hardware. a note of warning, a battery on the end of a rocket engine is very dangerous as is launching more than 30 degrees from vertical that's why both are illegal.

the chemicals in a battery are a fairly viscous paste, hitting the remote is unlikely to mix the chemicals enough to get a dramatic increase in performance, i'd say it's more a case of moving the batteries onto a cleaner spot on the contacts. less resistance means more current that gets to the LED.

you have to specify at least two axis values for the other to fall into place. if you specify one, you end up with an ellipse of possible solutions. i think substitution is the way to go, im not sure how far you can take it, but i've taken it down to v = f(x,y) potentially you could make a 3d graph and find the maximum value for the volume by taking lots of x,y combinations. a little programming wouldn't go astray.

nice! hydrogen makes a decent acoustic, focussed slightly by the jug would make a hole in almost anyhting at point blanc. the main thing to consider in this case is that hydrogen explodes differently to any other flamable gas, the initail shockwave is very powerful but does not fill the area with more moles of gas than previous to combustion. petrol explosions make huge amounts of gas so the pressure lingers even after the gas has cooled via radiation, hydrogen dissapates it's heat fairly quickly and and the pressure remains roughly constant instead of throwing large objects around. i still think that the pneumatic explosion from the cylinder is more dangerous than hydrogen combustion