Thursday - July 03, 2008

The internet: Not just for pr0n, it’s also a learning tool

It’s been happening all my life. People ask me “How do you know so much stuff?” Beats me, doesn’t everybody? No, I guess they don’t. I think I should blame my parents for it though. Most parents, when faced with a 2 year old who asks “why?” about everything, sooner or later (usually sooner!) give up trying to provide real answers and fall back on things like “because I said so” and “that’s how God made it”. And this works, because half the kid’s pestering questions are just a bid to get attention. And the dead end answers eventually make the little darling shut up. And learn to control his curiosity. Or kill it entirely. Not for me. “Daddy, why is the sky blue?” got me a lecture on spectral diffraction. This is what happens when your parents are scientists. And all your relatives are engineers. Yikes. So I guess I never learned to stop asking questions and showing interest in new things. The downside to that is that it’s difficult for me to stay narrowly focused, especially when faced with something new and complex. And I tend to remember things better than other people, but I have no idea why.

That’s why my earlier post about Fwance and what looks to be a silly trial took me nearly two hours. Because it was about the Concord, the only partially successful supersonic passenger plane ever. But SSTs were all the rage when I was a kid, and I remembered that Boeing nearly had one at one point. So out to Google I went. Linkity link, and I found a page on the history of that airplane. But one of the comments there went on and on about how it was politics that killed the project, not environmentalism, and if it had been kept at we’d have SSTs everywhere today, and they’d be far more fuel efficient and quiet due to advances in electronically induced shockwave reduction. Well, that caused the big red light to start blinking in my head for sure. And that lead to some page on UFO technology that explained how such a thing is actually possible and has been proven to work in water using an electromagnetic Lorentz force field. Awesome! Geeks rule! But way down at the bottom of the page it mentioned Henri Coanda, who built the first jet plane. In 1910. Holy cow! Wiki him up - it’s true! The thing crashed on testing because Coanda wasn’t a pilot, and his jet engine provided way more thrust than he figured it would. But part of that “test flight” enabled him to observe the “Coanda effect” which is actually a rather basic part of airflow dynamics ... therefore flight related ... that’s hardly been used much at all. For airplanes. But it’s used all the time for such diverse tasks as improving the efficiency of air conditioners and keeping the fish out of the turbines at hydroelectric generators. And there have been a couple of flying craft that made use of it; the NOTAR helicopter design which is very quiet (another bit of knowledge: most of the noise and vibration in a helicopter is caused by the interaction of end thrusted air between the main rotor and the tail rotor. Air striking air, out in the air, makes the helicopter shake and creates that loud whump-whump noise), and some super neato experimental airplane that could have replaced the C-130 transport if politics hadn’t killed it. It carried more, flew faster, higher, and further, and could take off and land in half the distance. That would be the Boeing YC-14:

So I learned a bit of unusual science, found out about an inventor who was decades ahead of his time, and found out about a couple of cool airplanes I never even knew existed. And none of that had a thing to do with the original post. But if somebody ever asks me about those funny looking helicopters with airplane tails on them, I can probably speak for 5 solid minutes. And then be asked “How do you know so much stuff?”

Posted by Drew458     on 07/03/2008 at 09:18 AM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
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