Nit-picking

mike weber wrote:
> On Tue, 31 Jul 2007 07:33:43 -0700, Offbreed
> <offbreed_106 RemoveThis @hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> mike weber wrote:
>>
>>> [1] If you've ever heard the song "Legend of the Bandit" from "Smokey
>>> and the Bandit", it doesn't exaggerate the way the the Monteagle Grade
>>> (I-24 between Chattanooga and Nashville_) is regarded by those who
>>> know it,.
>>>
>> If it's anything at all like the Grapevine above Bakersfield, I want
>> nothing to do with it.
>
> Six miles down hill at 7% on the easy grade.
>
It wasn't always.
 >> Stay informed about: Nit-picking 

On Wed, 01 Aug 2007 06:46:39 -0700, Offbreed
<offbreed_106 DeleteThis @hotmail.com> wrote:

>mike weber wrote:
>> On Tue, 31 Jul 2007 07:33:43 -0700, Offbreed
>> <offbreed_106 DeleteThis @hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> mike weber wrote:
>>>
>>>> [1] If you've ever heard the song "Legend of the Bandit" from "Smokey
>>>> and the Bandit", it doesn't exaggerate the way the the Monteagle Grade
>>>> (I-24 between Chattanooga and Nashville_) is regarded by those who
>>>> know it,.
>>>>
>>> If it's anything at all like the Grapevine above Bakersfield, I want
>>> nothing to do with it.
>>
>> Six miles down hill at 7% on the easy grade.
>>
>It wasn't always.

I know.

That's the Nashville-bound grade. The one down the other (toward
Chattanooga/Atlanta) way is the old alignment, and it's A Lot Of
Fun...

Just after 9/11 there was a story about some crazy who slashed a
Greyhound driver's throat (non-fatally, luckily) as the bus was
rolling east (south) bound past Manchester. Bus ran off the road - i
believe it may have hit a bridge piling - and no-one was killed.

Imagine if he'd waited about five or ten minutes, and did it as the
bus was just past the brake inspection station on the hard down
grade...

(The eastbound [or southbound; sine it's I-24 it technicaly runs
east/west] grade at Monteagle - the one with the runaway ramps - has a
mandatory stop for all trucks for a video inspection of their brake
rigging before they're allowed to start down the grade.)

--
mike weber (fairportfan@gmail.com)
============================
My Website: http://electronictiger.com
===================================
No use looking for the answers when the questions are in doubt - Fred leBlanc, "The Love of My Life"
 >> Stay informed about: Nit-picking 

On Wed, 01 Aug 2007 03:25:02 -0400, mike weber <fairportfan DeleteThis @gmail.com>
wrote:

>On Tue, 31 Jul 2007 07:33:43 -0700, Offbreed
><offbreed_106 DeleteThis @hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>>mike weber wrote:
>>
>>> [1] If you've ever heard the song "Legend of the Bandit" from "Smokey
>>> and the Bandit", it doesn't exaggerate the way the the Monteagle Grade
>>> (I-24 between Chattanooga and Nashville_) is regarded by those who
>>> know it,.
>>>
>>If it's anything at all like the Grapevine above Bakersfield, I want
>>nothing to do with it.
>
>Of course, there's the grade on US 23 in North Carolina (which used to
>be a route used by truckers before the Interstates) - i forget if it's
>one or two miles downhill at 8%... ending at a stoplight in the middle
>of a small town right next to two churches.

drive the yellowhead highway in bc sometime. old road with nice steep
drops and climbs. oh and when the sign says to reduce speed for god's
sake believe it. a number of the drops have a hairpin turn at the
bottom. i just about didn't make it round the first one i came to and
it's a nice long drop to consider the error of your ways.
 >> Stay informed about: Nit-picking 

On Wed, 01 Aug 2007 23:47:53 GMT, Brian McDonald
<Brian_knowspam.McDonald.RemoveThis@shaw.ca> wrote:

>drive the yellowhead highway in bc sometime. old road with nice steep
>drops and climbs. oh and when the sign says to reduce speed for god's
>sake believe it. a number of the drops have a hairpin turn at the
>bottom. i just about didn't make it round the first one i came to and
>it's a nice long drop to consider the error of your ways.

The Cemetery Ridge[1] turn heading into Chattanooga on I-24 from the
direction of Atlanta is a broad left-hand sweeper with a good look out
- and *down* at the southern outskirts of Chattanooga *quite* a ways
below you. My absolute least favourite part of the drive from Atlanta
to Chattanooga, Nashville, Louisville or Chicago.

[1] I think it's Cemetery Ridge; one of those Civil War ridges, anyway

--
mike weber (fairportfan@gmail.com)
============================
My Website: http://electronictiger.com
===================================
No use looking for the answers when the questions are in doubt - Fred leBlanc, "The Love of My Life"
 >> Stay informed about: Nit-picking 

Loren Pechtel wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Jul 2007 08:22:49 -0500, BillGill <billnews2.RemoveThis@cox.net>
> wrote:
..
> >I have been rereading _The Apocalypse Troll_ and have a
> >few nits I have noticed in it.
..
> >Milla explains her extra strength by the fact that she
> >is from a planet where the gravity is about 20% higher
> >than Earth's. Then later she says that one attraction
> >for tourists is that her planets bugs don't bite humans.
..
> > I'm not sure how many tourists you are going to get to
> >a planet with higher gravity. I suppose you can get
> >some of the macho types that want to show they can take it.
..
> As long as you aren't engaging in sports the +20%g probably isn't that
> big a deal.
..
And there are even *some* physical recreational activities not
impacted by gravity. One could go to the beach and engage in swimming!

So if other candidate planets have more serious problems - say, air
that is only barely breathable, an overly hot or cold temperature - so
that here is a beautiful, nearly Earthlike planet with a gentle
equable climate - and no pesky mosquitoes, blackflies, or their worse
alien equivalents as well, it might indeed be a nice tourist spot.

John Savard
 >> Stay informed about: Nit-picking 

BillGill wrote:
> When they go to repair Milla's suit they just hook it up
> to a reactor's output and let it go. They tend to gloss
> over the technical details of the hook up. We are
> talking about the output of a nuclear reactor. I did a
> quick check and there are some units that put out about
> 1 Gigawatt. Assuming we are talking about transmission
> line voltages then cross country lines here in the US
> run up to about 800,000 volts. Rounding that up to 1
> Megavolt we would then be talking about 1000 amps. This
> is not going to be a simple walk up and plug it in kind
> of a connection. There are some severe technical
> problems in connecting that kind of service to a wire
> that can be coiled up in a boot heel.

Well, this isn't as bad a problem as you migh think.

1) Some nuclear reactors may provide one gigawatt of power. But the
reactor they connected her space suit to might have been a smaller
one.

2) If they connected the space suit to an output terminal with a
voltage of 1000 volts, there is no reason that the space suit would
need to take 1,000,000 amperes of current from it, even if the output
terminal could provide that much current without a drop in voltage.
That depends on the impedance of whatever is in the space suit that is
being charged.

This is why we use fuses. You can plug a heater into the wall that
takes a full 15 amps, or you can plug in the charger for a pocket
calculator that takes only a few milliamps from the wall. A short
circuit could take much *more* than 15 amps - so the fuses prevent
that.

If being connected to a nuclear reactor meant that you had to consume
its entire output, cities whose electrical power came from nuclear
reactors would have had problems.

John Savard
 >> Stay informed about: Nit-picking 

mike weber wrote:
> Ships and aircraft tend to use 400Hz power because transformers can be
> smaller and lighter than for 60Hz...

Yes, and most of the old mainframe computers also used motor
generators to convert to 400 Hz as well so they could use smaller,
distributed power supplies. (Minis, of course, had no need to bother.)

John Savard
 >> Stay informed about: Nit-picking 

Loren Pechtel wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Jul 2007 15:02:31 -0400, mike weber <fairportfan.TakeThisOut@gmail.com>
> wrote:
..
> >Copper losses - losses due to line resistance - vary directly as the
> >square of the current, which in turn varies inversely as the voltage
> >for the same power - power dissipated due to resistance is equal to
> >resistance times the square of current. SO if you tried to send a
> >megawatt at, say 200V, current would have to be 5000 amps.
..
> Square?!?!
..
What happens is this:

By Ohm's law, voltage is equal to current times resistance: E=IR.

Let's say that I want to get 1000 watts of power from here to there.

I can try and do it at 100 volts, so that means 10 amperes.

Let's say my wire has 5 ohms of resistance.

10 amperes times 5 ohms equals 50 volts, so I lose 500 watts.

If I do it at 1000 volts instead, I only need 1 ampere.

With 5 ohms of resistance, that's 5 volts.

1 ampere times 5 volts is 5 watts - 100 times less.

So, yes, it varies as the square, because a higher voltage decreases
*both* the current *and* the voltage drop across the wire, by the same
factor. And they multiply together to make the power loss.

John Savard
 >> Stay informed about: Nit-picking