Starship Asterisk*

jamessherman88@yahoocom wrote:
WHen I choose to buy a new 52 inch HD television.. I have chosen to allow children to go hungry, medicine to stay in the warehouse, libraries to close or reduce operating hours. Every financical transaction I make, however seemingly insignificant, moves all of us either towards the life and light....or the other direction.

FreeRadical wrote: How about telling us WHERE the picture was taken, ... we know it's on the Earth.

Click to view full size image

This is the largest digging machine (or trencher or rotating shovel) in the world. It was built by Krupp and is shown here crossing a road in Germany on the way to its destination, an open air coal mine. Although at the mine the treads are unnecessary, it was cheaper to make the machine self-propelled than to try and move it with conventional hauling equipment. Some factoids:

• The machine is 95 meters high and 215 meters long (almost 2.5 football fields in length)
• Weight is 45,500 tons (that's equivalent to a bumper to bumper line of jeeps 80 miles long)
• It took 5 years to design and manufacture at a cost of $100 million
• Maximum digging speed is 10 meters per minute
• Can move more than 76,000 cubic meters of coal, rock, and earth per day

whatmeworry wrote:
Batteries not included.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288 wrote:
<<The Bagger 288 (Excavator 288), built by the German company Krupp for the energy and mining firm Rheinbraun, is a bucket-wheel excavator or mobile strip mining machine. When its construction was completed in 1978, Bagger 288 superseded NASA's Crawler-Transporter, used to carry the Space Shuttle and Apollo Saturn V launch vehicle, as the largest tracked vehicle in the world at 13,500 tons. However, the Bagger is powered from an external source and is more correctly described as a mining machine which can be moved, while the crawler-transporter was built as a self-powered, load-carrying vehicle.

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

The Bagger 288 was built for the job of removing overburden prior to coal mining in Tagebau Hambach (stripmine Hambach), Germany. It can excavate 240,000 tons of coal or 240,000 cubic metres of overburden daily – the equivalent of a football field(soccer) dug to 30 m deep. The excavator is up to 220 m long and approximately 96 m high. It can travel 2 to 10 m per minute. The chassis of the main section is 46 m wide and sits on 3 rows of 4 caterpillar track assemblies, each 3.8 m wide. The large surface area of the tracks means the ground pressure of the Bagger 288 is very small (24.8 psi); this allows the excavator to travel over gravel, earth and even grass without leaving a significant track. It has a minimum turning radius of approximately 100 meters, and can climb a maximum gradient of 1:18.

The excavating head itself is 21.6 m in diameter and has 18 buckets each holding 6.6 cubic meters of overburden.

By February 2001, the excavator had completely exposed the coal source at the Tagebau Hambach mine and was no longer needed there. In three weeks it made a 22 kilometer trip to the Garzweiler mine, traveling across Autobahn 61, the river Erft, a railroad line, and several roads. The move cost nearly 150 million German marks and required a team of seventy workers. Rivers were crossed by placing large steel pipes for the water to flow through and providing a smooth surface over the pipes with rocks and gravel. Special grass was seeded to smooth its passage over valuable terrain. Moving Bagger 288 in one piece was more economical than disassembling the excavator and moving it piece by piece.>>

Born2soon wrote:
Machines like the BWE mine the metals to construct the telescopes and spacecraft that generate all the pictures we love.

http://paleocave.sciencesortof.com/2010/08/per-ryans-request-the-coal-powered-rocket/ wrote:
Coal-powered rocket design Assumptions:

[b][color=#FF00FF]Preliminary design of a coal-powered rocket[/color][/b]

---

1. The coal is a “super-coal” that burns extra hot; so hot that an infinite amount of water would never “cool off” the heat exchanger.

2. The water is “super-water” that is mega-dense yet extremely light, so that enough of it can be stored as “fuel” to allow a full flight. It also vaporizes into steam much more violently and with a higher pressure than regular water. I’m calling it “H20-10“.

3. The materials of the heat exchanger and super-coal burner are hereto-unforeseen MEGA-ALLOYS that have no melting point. They can withstand infinite heat without melting, weakening, or creeping.

4. Charlie can shovel coal infinitely fast. This is only barely an assumption…

5. The turbopump is augmented by an external power source to ensure the flow never reverses.

6. The aerodynamic stability of the rocket is handled by either thrust vectoring or fins. The kink in the steam tube will create a pitch-moment
that will need to be corrected for.

7. The heat exchanger is perfectly efficient, so that all of the heat & kinetic energy is removed from the coal smoke and heat source and absorbed by the water.

8. I forgot about Oxygen for Charlie & the coal-room… Sorry Charlie. Assume there’s an infinite amount of oxygen in the coal-room, or that the oxygen bubbles released from the water during vaporization is captured and re-used.

9. Assume the coal-feeder has an infinite amount of super-coal.

Chris Peterson wrote:

K1NS wrote:
But I guess my point was that tiny machines and huge machines still use the same physics.
The article above about the microbot on the Lincoln penny supports my point.

And my point was that they don't! A dado blade cuts, and is dependent on the high velocity of the cutting edge relative to the mechanical strength of the material being cut. The mining machine is dependent on the slow speed of the bucket edge compared to the strength of the material. The processes are very different.

• _____ The Tempest Act 2, Scene 1
  
  ADRIAN: Tunis was never graced before with such a paragon to their queen.
  
  GONZALO: Not since widow Dido's time.
  
  ANTONIO: Widow! a pox o' that! How came that widow in? widow Dido!
  
  SEBASTIAN: What if he had said 'widower AEneas' too? Good Lord, how you take it!
  
  ADRIAN: 'Widow Dido' said you? you make me study of that: she was of Carthage, not of Tunis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dido_%28Queen_of_Carthage%29 wrote:
<<Dido ("Wanderer") was, according to ancient Greek and Roman sources, the founder and first Queen of Carthage (in modern-day Tunisia). She is best known from the account given by the Roman poet Virgil in his Aeneid.

[Dido] and her followers arrived on the coast of North Africa where [Dido] asked the local inhabitants for a small bit of land for a temporary refuge until she could continue her journeying, only as much land as could be encompassed by an oxhide. They agreed. Elissa cut the oxhide into fine strips so that she had enough to encircle an entire nearby hill, which was therefore afterwards named Byrsa "hide". (This event is commemorated in modern mathematics: The "isoperimetric problem" of enclosing the maximum area within a fixed boundary is often called the "Dido Problem" in modern Calculus of variations.) That would become their new home. Many of the locals joined the settlement and both locals and envoys from the nearby Phoenician city of Utica urged the building of a city. In digging the foundations an ox's head was found, indicating a city that would be wealthy but subject to others. Accordingly another area of the hill was dug instead where a horse's head was found, indicating that the city would be powerful in war.>>

K1NS wrote:But I guess my point was that tiny machines and huge machines still use the same physics. The article above about the microbot on the Lincoln penny supports my point.

neufer wrote:

http://tupalo.com/en/amsterdam/puyk wrote:
Share Puyk with your friends

[Puyk] is my favourite restaurant in Amsterdam

owlice wrote:

Extra puyk! I agree. And what a delightful expression. Why don't we use that all over the world these days?

I don't know how "puyk" would be pronounced the world over, but in English, the pronunciation would likely be akin to puke, and "puke" is something I suspect most people wouldn't want extra of!

http://tupalo.com/en/amsterdam/puyk wrote:
Share Puyk with your friends

[Puyk] is my favourite restaurant in Amsterdam - and we've been to a lot. The food is excellent - up-market French-asian, with some interesting options, including green thai curry sorbet - the only thing I didn't like so much, but it's a personal taste issue, they do an amazing pecan pie. The staff are wonderful - they remembered us the second time we went, and it had been a few months in between. The owner, Ms Puyk, runs it, and is often there. She comes up with a lot of the menu from her travels and she's very friendly. Happily gave us the recipe for the most amazing sea food bisque. It's not cheap, but absolutely worth the price and wonderful for a special occasion. They have a Deli around the corner which has cheese and wines and wonderful unfiltered olive oils, and small versions of the menu which you can make at home, or pick up a picnic basket. Highly recommended.

Extra puyk! I agree. And what a delightful expression. Why don't we use that all over the world these days?

Chris Peterson wrote:I don't think so. Blades work by cutting, a process that is different from digging. If you run a blade very slowly, it doesn't cut at all, but can gouge (dig) out material. Unless this excavator spins at a few hundred RPM, it really can't be called a saw blade. Also, material properties don't scale with size; the material behavior of a small piece of wood or metal is nothing like the material behavior of a huge section of earth.

Ann wrote:Hey, Rob! You were the one who pixelated Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell in their guises as Astronomer and Geographer! I didn't notice before. Now I can see that you deserve your distinguished Toroidal Pixelator title even more!

neufer wrote:
<<The provenance of The Astronomer can be traced back to 27 April 1713, when it was sold at the Rotterdam sale of an unknown collector together with The Geographer. The presumed buyer was Hendrik Sorgh, whose estate sale held in Amsterdam on 28 March 1720 included both The Astronomer and The Geographer, which were described as ‘Een Astrologist: door Vermeer van Delft, extra puyk’ (An Astrologist by Vermeer of Delft, topnotch) and ‘Een weerga, van ditto, niet minder’ (Similar by ditto, no less).

rstevenson wrote:And of course an appropriate APOD image is whatever these guys say it is.

Rob

probley1 wrote:
I can't believe APOD can be so irrepsonsible! here we are, in a struggle to preserve what's left of our climate, and you have the gall to post the engine of destruction of said climate, not to mention the environment, by facilitating the removals of vast quantities of coal, clearly the commodity with the biggest carbon footprint of them all.

rstevenson wrote:
And of course an appropriate APOD image is whatever these guys say it is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Astronomer_%28Vermeer%29 wrote:
<<The provenance of The Astronomer can be traced back to 27 April 1713, when it was sold at the Rotterdam sale of an unknown collector together with The Geographer. The presumed buyer was Hendrik Sorgh, whose estate sale held in Amsterdam on 28 March 1720 included both The Astronomer and The Geographer, which were described as ‘Een Astrologist: door Vermeer van Delft, extra puyk’ (An Astrologist by Vermeer of Delft, topnotch) and ‘Een weerga, van ditto, niet minder’ (Similar by ditto, no less).

Between 1881 and 1888 it was sold by the Paris art dealer Léon Gauchez to the banker and art collector Alphonse James de Rothschild, after whose death it was inherited by his son, Édouard Alphonse James de Rothschild. In 1940 is was seized from his hotel in Paris by the Nazi Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg für die Besetzten Gebiete after the German invasion of France. A small swastika was stamped on the back in black ink. The painting was returned to the Rothschilds after the war, and was donated to the Louvre in 1982 by Guy de Rothschild.>>

rdea wrote:
Several people have commented here that this is not an astronomical picture.
True enough, but it's cool anyway.

• Definition of ASTRONOMICAL (Webster's Online Dictionary):
  
  • 1. Relating or belonging to the science of astronomy.[Wordnet]
    
    2. Inconceivably large.[Wordnet]
    
    3. Of or pertaining to astronomy; in accordance with the methods or principles of astronomy.[Websters]
    
    4. Being enormous, gigantic, colossal, immense or huge. [Eve - graph theoretic]
    
    5. Being tremendous, monstrous, monumental, mighty or whopping. [Eve - graph theoretic]
    
    6. Being great, big, considerable, large or massive. [Eve - graph theoretic]
    
    7. Being giant or gargantuan. [Eve - graph theoretic]
    
    8. Being excessive or extreme. [Eve - graph theoretic]
    
    9. Being extraordinary, prodigious or terrific. [Eve - graph theoretic]