I think a practical goal would be to find ways for the US government to shift its military-industrial-complex spending away from weapons and war machines and encourage those companies to develop and sell peacetime technologies that will allow them to keep their technological edge. For example, instead of making fighter planes Lockheed could make rockets and space shuttles. Kind of the opposite of car companies being re-purposed to build tanks in WW2.
I just think that the military industrial complex has too much lobbying power to let itself get cut off from government funding. Some might also argue that we need to maintain the capacity to build weapons in case we ever need them in the future. I think it would be great if we could fund companies that take the sharpest minds and put them to work solving challenging problems for the benefit of mankind. And if war does break out we can take the minds off those problems and put them back to work figuring out the highest-tech way to blow people up.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from noise. I remembered hearing this in school so I searched and found this paper.
As I understand SETI has always been searching for narrowband signals in the past. But our technology is moving toward spread spectrum signals for more efficient use of bandwidth, making our transmissions appear more like noise to anyone who doesn't know the encoding scheme. Aliens could be doing/have done the same. So good luck, scientists!
So the lost signal takes the path Antenna->Human Body->Ground. To model this effect for (ESD evaluation) the test is to touch the contact to a 1.5 kohm resistor in series with a 100pf capacitor to ground. (From http://www.esda.org/documents/FundamentalsPart5.pdf)
This 100pf capacitance is quite a low impedance at 1900 MHz (x=1/2piFC), just -j 0.838 ohms. To increase this impedance, note that capacitors in series decrease the overall capacitance (which increases impedance). So you can create such a capacitor by adding dielectric (any insulator) between the antenna and the hand. The thicker this insulator is the lower the added series capacitance. And the lower the added capacitance, the greater the impedance and the less overall coupling of signal to the human body. The calculation of exactly how much capacitance is created by a layer of clear coat between the metal antenna and the hand is, um, left to the reader.
Also, I believe the antenna is split to two sides because each antenna fulfills a different function in a different RF band. One is 3G and one is wifi. Broadband antennas are difficult, but not impossible to make, so I think this is a case of the keep-it-simple-stupid approach.
I don't. Nobody with any antenna experience would make it so that it could so easily be bridged and artificially lengthened, unless the device were meant for tuning to multiple frequencies.
OK, and would that or would that not be solved by painting over the antenna to add a decent amount of resistance between it and God-knows-what?
Today is a good day for information-gathering. Read someone else's mail file.