Man Machine Interface

Stu Savory makes some good points about control design.

Picasa & Planetary Gears

Eric Haines created this drawing and posted it on the web some ten years ago. I came across it while looking for a drawing to illustrate a post on my regular blog. I passed this one by because the original was too dark. Turns out I had the tool at hand to correct that problem. Eric clued me in: Picasa. Click on Auto-Contrast and presto! You get the image you see here.

Rhenium

I've been putting together a spreadsheet of the elements, and I came across this little tidbit in Wikipedia:

(Rhenium) is among the ten most expensive metals on Earth, at times exceeding US$ 11,000 per kilogram. About 35 kilograms of Rhenium are required in the construction of a commercial jet engine.

$385,000 worth of Rhenium to build a single jet engine!?!? Well, that would go a long way towards explaining why the things are so bleeding expensive. I would think that this would make their scrap value much higher than it is.

From The Expert Network:

Analysis: Rhenium is a critical metal, one without which it would be impossible to produce modern military jet engines, the most efficient jet engines for civilian aircraft, and rocket engines for military use and space exploration.

This is because when it is used in concentrations of 2 to 6% to make superalloys those alloys can be used to make jet and rocket engine components to contain and direct the superheated exhaust of jet and rocket engines without melting or losing their strength.

The higher the temperature at which a jet or rocket engine operates the more efficient and powerful it is.

Sorry about the picture. I got tired of looking at poor quality, fuzzy, smeared black and whites, and settled for this diagram of a Kawasaki gas turbine.

Cuthbert Lift

I am poking around on the internet using some clues I found on my Dad's old computer, and I stumble across this guy who is trying to build a better elevator. He is using some of my ideas. Actually he probably thought of it all on his own, like many other people, but this Cuthbert guy has actually built a prototype of an elevator that might actually work. Here's a longish video:

Recorded Music

This is the second time I have heard complaints about the way the sound is processed before being recorded on a CD. Via Dustbury.com.

http://www.dustbury.com/backlog/2008/06/not_a_petty_issue.html