6 ms·
Close Encounter with a Gigantic Jet
- mewvn 7y agoYou can already do that with your own manually controlled drones(surprisingly, no one has done this yet). There is no need to hack the airports drones. https://mew.vn/cho-husky-siberian/ https://mew.vn/cho-husky-siberian/
- booleandilemma 7y agoYour link is to a vietnamese site about dogs. I don’t get it...
- teraflop 7y agoIt's a spambot that reposted this comment from a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17709028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17709028
- jquery 7y agoI see [flagged][dead] next to the comment. How do you flag spam posts? Do you need a certain amount of karma, karma/comment, or does one need to have their account mod-blessed?
- PhasmaFelis 7y agoYou have to link to the specific comment (by clicking on the date), then the "flag" option should appear. (If it doesn't, it's probably gated behind a certain amount of karma, like downvoting is.)
- jquery 7y agoThank you, much appreciated.
- dredmorbius 7y ago500 points as I recall. @jquery should see the 'flag' link when opening the comment directly.
- hos234 7y agoI hope someday we learn to make controllable mini-storms. All kinds of interesting things to study thanks to the energy levels. From wikipedia - "Scientists estimate that a tropical cyclone releases heat energy at the rate of 50 to 200 exajoules (10^18 J) per day, equivalent to about 1 PW (10^15 watt). This rate of energy release is equivalent to 70 times the world energy consumption of humans and 200 times the worldwide electrical generating capacity, or to exploding a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclone
- Joakal 7y agoEnergy has to come from somewhere. It's not like a nuclear reactor where it starts in place. With hurricanes, we're talking about the energy in area of the entire ocean being concentrated. Better off creating hurricane-proof windmills.
- pjc50 7y agoYup. That's really the only way to take energy out of the ocean. If we could somehow fill the surface of the Atlantic with turbines and wave-energy machines, perhaps we could end destructive tropical storms. But the amount of energy involved is astonishing and difficult to reason about.
- saagarjha 7y agoAt that scale, you're looking at something in the vicinity of a Kardashev Type-I civilization.
- kuu 7y agoFunny because yesterday I read about these jets captured by a high speed camera for the first time in Nature magazine: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12261-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12261-y
- eddd 7y agoWhere is the aliens comment thread I came here for?
- Angostura 7y agoOn Reddit somewhere. You'll like it there.
- new_here 7y agoTwo weeks ago I was on a flight into London. While we were coming down through some clouds I was looking out of the window for a clearing when I saw an almost blinding purple flash which was followed by a loud crack. I looked forward with pure panic in my eyes at the airhost who was smiling, he calmly informed me that we had just been struck by lighting. Apparently, it's not uncommon and planes are designed to withstand it. I learnt something new that day.
- mkl 7y agoThe sound followed the flash? How much of a gap was there between them? I would have thought they'd be basically simultaneous if you're inside the lightning bolt.
- kortilla 7y agoRemember, the sound isn’t really coming from the tip of the bolt. The majority of it is coming from the super-heated air around the bolt along the whole path.
- mkl 7y agoYes, so the sound should last a while as bits of it from far up the bolt reach you, but I don't understand why the start of the sound would be delayed.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoHuman memory isn't perfect, to be fair.
- kortilla 7y agoThe start was likely quiet enough to not be audible through the airplane walls.
- taneq 7y agoThe start of the sound is basically instantaneous. Source: Have been quite close (tens of meters) to a lightning strike and there was no perceptible lag between lightning and thunder. We were close enough that handheld electronics glitched when it happened.
- deepGem 7y agoThis is one of those images that elicits 'wow' even on a small screen. Can't imagine how it must have felt to experience this in person. I clicked on the video and it downloaded straight. Such a rarity these days. Not sure about the copyrights but am keeping this video for a really long time :).
- gelo 7y agoEvery time I look at fork lightning of any kind, it keeps reminding me of natures version of a depth first search algorithm. If you ever watch a high speed capture of a fork lightning youll see it spray out and as soon as it gets a link to ground, the energy backtracks up that path.
- dredmorbius 7y agoI picture neurons creating new connective paths as similar to this.
- neotek 7y agoThe one time in my life I actually want a news article to embed a video, and they make it a download-only .mov link.
- JoBrad 7y agoWhich my iPhone refuses to open because it’s “not on a secure server”
- pavel_lishin 7y agoThe video is not as good as the isolated frames.
- athenot 7y agoThis seems like a major obstacle in the way of space elevators. I would imagine running what amounts to a short-circuit wire from the ionosphere to the ground might be a bit tricky…
- netcraft 7y agoCould it be used to collect that electricity though I wonder?
- ryanmercer 7y agoThe common proposed solution there is putting it in a specific bit of ocean in the western equatorial Pacific where there are far fewer chances (now, with climate change who knows) of hurricanes and other storms. I imagine if we ever have the means to actually construct one though we'll probably also have good super conductors and crazy super capacitors and could probably just build superconductor lightning rods up and down the length of it that dump into super caps which then power the climbers and HVAC.
- dredmorbius 7y agoI've speculated on this before. @carapace was kind enough to provide a reference showing that exactly this happened on an experiment utilising a 20km space tether deployed from the Space Shuttle. The line literally fried itself due to charge build-up and induced currents. https://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/wtether.html https://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/wtether.html Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20898725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20898725
- drfrank 7y agoIs this the phenomena described in Neal Stephenson's _Atmosphaera Incognita_?