Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Weekly Links


What if the phone company edited your conversations?

Enter the Chinese market, lose your brand name.

18 alarm clocks.

Are humans evolving faster?

Indonesians hiding in Mecca.

Is food becoming dearer?

Reading your mind directly while you view ads.

Banning Scientology.

Free Yale courses.

Nanotechnology to kill anthrax.

Flying humans.

More antarctic dinosaurs.

10 exciting emerging technologies.

Will housing continue to crash?

Mammoths blasted from space.

The 4 things that make a good leader.

The future of robots.

3 comments:

ambisinistral said...

Human Flying Squirrels and clocks all in one thread? Be still my beating heart.

I can't imagine how they would ever slow down enough to be able to land safely. I plane bleeds off speed as it descends by changing its angle of attack until it basically stalls over the runway. That is also abetted by the reduction of drag caused by the ground effect on the wing.

However, lift in a Human Flying Squirrel would be minimal to say the least, so landing would be a whole 'nother process I would imagine.

Somehow they would have to flatten out their glide until they slowed down. It doesn't really seem feasible to me.

MeaninglessHotAir said...

Ambi,

Check out the videos. There's one here. They pop a parachute at the end.

ambisinistral said...

Yea, I know they're currently landing with parachutes.

I was thinking about the part of the article where they were talking about their desire to land unassisted by a parachute.

Unfortunately, they were all keeping mum about their landing schemes (trying to be the first), so there wasn't much detail what they had in mind.

One guy wants to build a Two million dollar special runway (money well spent) and the other talks about coming parallel to a snow slope (so he only has the horizontal motion but cuts out the vertical drop -- what ever that means) and just sliding.

Another guy plans on jumping out of a plane and then gliding back into it after it turns and drops.

It all sounds whacked to me. At best they say they can slow things down to dropping at 30mph and moving forward at 75mph.

I wish 'em luck.