Comment Re:Ivy League Schools (Score 1) 106
Bill Burr says it best
Bill Burr says it best
The Ivy League was basically a formal gentleman's agreement (you know, back from the good old days where they banned women and blacks from campus and had strict quotas on Jews) that they would mutually agree to be terrible at sports in order to maintain high academic standards.
Everyone who attends an Ivy League school to play sports is someone who would have been a serious consideration for admission without their athletic ability.
Of course they're going to be terrible at sports. They don't have any black people on their team!
Dude, you're the worst sort of person to argue with. You've demonstrated poor reading comprehension and a willingness to hand-wave away the distinction between similar words if you don't think they are relevant to you or serve your position. You seriously make me wonder why I even bother trying to express myself precisely
I never used the word explosion. I used the word detonation. I contrasted it with the deflagration that occurs in internal combustion engines like we see in cars.
A detonation occurs when the shock wave expanding out of the reaction zone compresses the unburnt fuel ahead of the wave, and the compressive heating raises the temperature in the unburnt fuel above it's autoignition temperature.
10 m/s is well below the threshold. Try 2000 m/s.
Detonation produces a more efficient combustion than deflagration, gives higher yields, and generates more kinetic force relative to the thermal energy released. It's a whole different kettle of fish.
What really should have happened is that all his Monsanto-using neighbors should have gotten in trouble for allowing their seeds to escape. Since they were the ones who were parties to the agreement with Monsanto, they were the ones who broke that agreement.
Of course, Monsanto suing its own customers would be bad for business, so it went after the innocent third-party instead...
I assume that picture was meant to be a German V-1 flying bomb? Those were pulse jet engines, but not pulse detonation engines. They used the expanding gas of repeated combustion reactions, they didn't cause fuel to detonate.
I was apparently mistaken about there not having ever been a PDE powered flight
From France to London in the mid 1940s - get a grip before trying to lecture others who are not entirely keyboard jockeys.
Do you have any more information? I can't find any references to a successful PDE powered flight outside of the work being done by the Air Force Research Laboratory and Innovative Scientific Solutions, Inc.
Sorry, I'm not an engineer. I've worked in a fireworks factory and made my own model rockets, but I'm not a professional.
And no, I was thinking something like Galinstan, and not for propulsion, but for a power station.
Wow, what's your occupation? Even being a software developer, my budget and retirement asset numbers are almost exactly an order of magnitude lower than yours...
How long it takes you to retire is a function of only one variable under your control
You mean 2 variables: savings rate and asset allocation. If you want a 50% savings rate to get you retired in 7-8 years, [most of] that money needs to be in the stock market or a real estate portfolio, not under your mattress.
Loss of a lot in the 401k in 2008
The only people who lost money in 2008 were the people who did something stupid with it (i.e. who pulled out of the market and locked in their losses). Everybody who stayed the course made all their money back a couple of years ago, and is now way ahead.
What does "social security" have to do with anything? I'm a "20-something" and plan on retiring 10-15 years from now on just the assets I save myself. If I eventually get social security, well that's just a bonus.
(The hard part is not the lack of social security; the hard part is the shitty job market. Since my wife and I graduated college 5 years ago, at least one of us has been unemployed at almost any given time. We've learned to live on less than a third of our fully-employed income -- which is coincidentally why we'd be able to retire so quickly if we remain fully employed!)
she gets $1600 before taxes.. After taxes, she is at $1100 a month
Bullshit. Even assuming the worst-case scenario (that all of her income is taxable, which if it's Social Security and a pension then it almost certainly isn't), an Adjusted Gross Income of $1600 * 12 = $19200 means her taxable income would be $19,200 - $6100 (standard deduction) - $3900 (one exemption) = $9200. The federal income tax on $9200 is $930, which means her real after-tax monthly income would be $1522. (And before you say "what about state income tax," remember the example is in Texas where there isn't any.)
As for the rest of it, $1522 - $600 - $400 = $522 for food, telephone and car which (given that she's not racking up a bunch of miles commuting) is plenty.
FYI, it's possible to live well surprisingly cheaply in the US. My average spending over the last year has been ~$1700/month, and that's for 2 people living in a 3-bedroom house in a nice, walkable neighborhood about 3 miles from the center of a major city.
How much do you expect to spend per year in retirement? Take that number and multiply by 20 (assuming you think a 4% safe withdrawal rate is OK; or multiply by 33 for a 3% rate, etc.). Note that the safe withdrawal rate also depends strongly on your asset allocation.
See also: http://www.firecalc.com/, http://earlyretirementextreme.com/, and (my favorite) http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/.
As far as the difference between deflagration and detonation, you may find this helpful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
Why do I say it's hoped that they will replace scramjets? Because aerospace and military engineers are spending millions of dollars working on trying to engineer them as a replacement for scramjets and hoping they succeed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
I was apparently mistaken about there not having ever been a PDE powered flight... looks like researchers flew one for 10 seconds at an altitude of 100 feet with engines that create detonations at a frequency of 80 Hz.
I imagine a power station that could harness the power of nitroglycerin. Nitro is cheap as hell to make and releases incredible power... I'd love to try and build a plant that's buried deep in bracing rock and uses a very dense inert metallic alloy as a hydraulic fluid to harness the incredible power of cheap organic explosives.
Am I missing something here or are you ignoring how diesel engines work? To me at least it looks like a series of small explosions.
You're missing something. Diesel engines are internal combustion engines.
Those who can, do; those who can't, write. Those who can't write work for the Bell Labs Record.
