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  • EADD Moderators: Pissed_and_messed | Shinji Ikari

Thoughts on the space station mission?

Four engineering students were arguing about what sort of engineering discipline God would have excelled in.
God must be a mechanical engineer, said the Mech Eng undergraduate. Look at the way the body is constructed -- the muscles and the skeleton!
Ah, that's just hardware, said the Elec Eng student. The brain is such a powerful computer. God must be an electronic engineer!
But the brain is not an electronic computer, the Chemical Engineer pointed out, It is a chemical computer, mediated by chemical reactions as opposed to electrical impulses. So I say Allah is surely a chemical engineer!
No, said the Civil Engineering student, God was most definitely a civil engineer!
The other three looked aghast. How do you work that out? they demanded to know.
Well, who but a civil engineer would run a toxic waste disposal pipeline through the middle of a recreational area?

..... Anyway, the way to survive the maths bit of engineering is simply not to think too hard about it. My answer to most things is numerical approximation, because even though the pure maths crowd hate it, it works. Just write a computer program that simulates integration by repeated addition and differentiation by repeated subtraction over a large number of small steps. Nowadays, even the sort of mobile phone you take to festivals because you wouldn't mind too much if it got stolen or dropped into a portaloo but it can still post on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Bluelight has more computing power than my old university mainframe; so you can afford to do many calculations. All that matters is using more precision in your calculations than any measuring instrument that might be used to verify them in real life ..... Oh, and keep all quantities in fundamental units throughout, however impractical this may seem (e.g. expressing cross-sectional area of wires in square metres, or forces acting on a spacecraft in Newtons) because any alternative is worse. Normalise your answers so all exponents are multiples of three, and therefore coincide with a named prefix. For instance, 5.89e-7 can also be written 589e-9; and if it happens to be a length, that is 589 nanometres.
 
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Into the unknown, the world of engineering bants.

I have an audio engineering diploma. That's probably looked down upon by real engineers.
 
I always had an odd relationship with the disciplines and specialisation thereof - "officially" my label would be that of a biologist but my absolute passion has remained the same since I was but a toddler: the artistry and beauty of chemistry. I don't remember it but my family inform me I was but four years old when I began opting for libraries and museums over parks and arcades and requesting textbooks over toys.
Physics just never pulled at my soul in the same way.
 
Actually economically there's a damn good reason to have a maintained footprint.

asteroid 2012 DA14 will passed within 17,200 miles of Earth. DA14 is about 50 meters wide, and was the closest ever fly-by of a celestial body that astronomers have known about in advance — at a distance of 17,200 miles.

DA14 actually traveled inside the orbit of Earth’s geosynchronous satellites. If that wasn’t thrilling enough, though, celestial mining company Deep Space Industries is saying that the asteroid, if we were to harvest its resources, may contain nearly $200 billion of minerals and water.

Gold, cobalt, Lithium, iron, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhenium, rhodium, ruthenium tungsten and maybe a few new things.

In 2012 the global metals and mining industry currently has a value of around $3 trillion.

That was then - since they have identified asteroids worth well in excess of $100 trillion - of course demand/supply - but so much would, technically be so much cheaper and the world a much less bloody place if we weren't slaughtering on Earth to get hold of things like the $1 trillion mother load of Lithium and Gold in Basra, Afghanistan.
http://www.mining.com/1-trillion-motherlode-of-lithium-and-gold-discovered-in-afghanistan/

And when 70% of the worlds cars are going to run on Lithium cells by 2030 and distributing energy from a centralized, incredibly wasteful 100+ year old system to Micro-smart grids, powering towns is enevitable - lotta of rare earths needed to do that.

reckon its worth a potential $100 trillion industry http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/09/the-potential-100-trillion-market-for-space-mining/

And its great we have the ISS up there because there is a US push to grabber keeper,

but if a policy of spotter, miner, good of humanity all a percentage. Less potential for war. And if aa precedent for international co-operation has been established through the ISS could be best investment ever.

This sites cool - shows what asteroids are near earth, speculates content and current worth and profit after mining. /www.asterank.com/ (imagine one was fulla 3-fpm, I'd empty the fish bowl and fire up the bellows - 'smoke me a kipper skipper, i'll be back for breakfast!')

Singularity is near, we need to break the closed resource loop, we need to completely rebuild the earth.
 
BecomingJulie said:
For instance, 5.89e-7 can also be written 589e-9; and if it happens to be a length, that is 589 nanometres.
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you've lost me.

5.89e-7 is 5.89 * 10^7 which is 58,900,000 or fifty-eight million, nine hundred thousand.

589e-9 is 5.89 * 10^9 which is 5,890,000,000 or five billion, eight hundred and 90 million.

so how can 5.89e-7 also be written 589e-9? - they are two completely different numbers.

alasdair
 
also, how cool is this - the international space station (with the space shuttle endeavour docked) crossing the face of the sun:

iss-endeavor.jpg


alasdair
 
alasdairm said:
you've lost me.

5.89e-7 is 5.89 * 10^7 which is 58,900,000 or fifty-eight million, nine hundred thousand.

589e-9 is 5.89 * 10^9 which is 5,890,000,000 or five billion, eight hundred and 90 million.

so how can 5.89e-7 also be written 589e-9? - they are two completely different numbers.
Click to expand...
No -- you forgot the minus sign in front of the exponent, which means you need to divide by a power of ten as opposed to multiplying. So 5.89e-7 = 5.89 * 10-7 = 5.89 ten-millionths, and 589e-9 = 589 * 10-9 = 589 one-thousand-millionths. Which are the same amount. But there is no prefix for * 10-7; only micro- for * 10-6 or nano- for * 10-9.

(By the way, 589 nm. is the wavelength of light from a sodium vapour lamp.)
 
alasdairm said:
you've lost me.

5.89e-7 is 5.89 * 10^7 which is 58,900,000 or fifty-eight million, nine hundred thousand.

589e-9 is 5.89 * 10^9 which is 5,890,000,000 or five billion, eight hundred and 90 million.

so how can 5.89e-7 also be written 589e-9? - they are two completely different numbers.

alasdair
Click to expand...

Nope, tis correct. The numbers are x10 to the power of -7 and -9 which is a difference of two orders of magnitude which simply shifts the decimal point two places to the right.
 
Don Luigi said:
If we consider that development of the F-35 multirole fighters has so far cost over $1.3 trillion, and the fact that it has not yet proven itself to be more operationally effective than previous generations of fighters (in fact, it's becoming more likely that it's a white elephant that the Pentagon keeps throwing money at), then I think the ISS is a good investment on the scientific return. The building of the ISS did mean that the US had to cancel the construction of the Superconducting Super Collider in 1993, as the budget was not available for both (the Large Hadron Collider was built in Europe to fulfil the same purposes instead), which perhaps has more scientific merit than the ISS. It's all subjective, I guess.

I suppose it depends on what price you put on knowledge and what kind of knowledge you think is worth paying for. Perhaps the equivalent of buying a book instead of a bottle of vodka..or buying an encyclopedia rather than a year's subscription to Hello magazine.

I'm very much looking forward to the James Webb Telescope being launched, hopefully on schedule, in 2018. We have the Juno mission to look forward to this year :)
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Our stupid govt has committed to buying the F35. Cutting billions from our healthcare to buy a jet that does not meet any kind of performance targets. And they keep telling us we are lucky cause we got in on them early...retards
 
As a pacifist (with obvious inherent limits) who leans so far to the left that I make three full rotations for every seventeen inches I walk, my views on such are pretty obvious. However, it shouldn't be forgotten that arms manufacture and engineering employs thousands upon thousands of citizens from all walks of life in countless roles and each minuscule evolution of relevant knowledge and achievable technology advances man as a whole, he must only apply the concept to an alternate ultimate aim.
 
BecomingJulie said:
No -- you forgot the minus sign in front of the exponent, which means you need to divide by a power of ten as opposed to multiplying. So 5.89e-7 = 5.89 * 10-7 = 5.89 ten-millionths, and 589e-9 = 589 * 10-9 = 589 one-thousand-millionths. Which are the same amount.
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you are right - i missed the minus sign but...

5.89e-7 = 5.89 * 10-7 which is 0.000000589

5.89e-9 = 5.89 * 10-9 which is 0.00000000589

in no way are these "the same amount". they are two discrete numbers.
BecomingJulie said:
But there is no prefix for * 10-7; only micro- for * 10-6 or nano- for * 10-9.
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indeed. but that is a separate issue.

alasdair
 
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never mind. i missed the omission of the decimal point in "589e-9".

but, while the coefficient can be any real number, scientific notation rarely uses a whole number in the hundreds as the coefficient. indeed, normalized notation requires that, for a coefficient m: 1 ≤ |m| < 10

so, 5.89e-7 = 589e-9 but nobody would ever use the latter.

alasdair
 
alasdairm said:
never mind. i missed the omission of the decimal point in "589e-9".

but, while the coefficient can be any real number, scientific notation rarely uses a whole number in the hundreds as the coefficient. indeed, normalized notation requires that, for a coefficient m: 1 ≤ |m| < 10

so, 5.89e-7 = 589e-9 but nobody would ever use the latter.

alasdair
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Admit it Al, yer just a thick cunt ;)
 
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